What is it women find so appealing about dancing? Why are men often less thrilled about moving on the dancefloor?

[CuriousMoonFox]

[mandyfire98]

I can tell you being a dance instructor that I've asked guys before, because my classes are pretty much 99 percent women and girls, why they don't dance or take dance lessons. There answers are all the same. "That's for women or it's gay"

That's the response I've always heard. So the simplest answer is, they think other men will call them gay or feminine. Which is truly unfortunate. Because dancing is a amazing.

[CuriousMoonFox]

You could tell them that they can skip the hip and shoulder action 😉

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

Dancing is incredibly physically intimate, but not sexually intimate. Men struggle to understand intimacy outside of sexual intimacy, they don’t know physical intimacy as well, or believe the two are the same. Dancing also requires a measure of vulnerability, which they also struggle with (in fairness many do, but men much more so than women on average).

[CuriousMoonFox]

So there is a desire for physical intimacy that isn't sexual... That's like waving at a grizzly bear with a honey covered salmon he isn't allowed to eat 😂 Who knows? He might dance in the hopes of getting a piece of it 😉 My exwife swears that all the guys on the dancefloor are just there to get lucky so they only dance with the ladies of a certain type: Young, blonde, slim.

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

I can’t say I enjoy the comparison of physical intimacy with a woman to a bear eating meat. Men continually do exactly what you’re talking about, which is emotionally exhausting for the woman because it’s a form of sexual objectification and no one enjoys being objectified.

[CuriousMoonFox]

Though you don't enjoy the comparison, it more or less accurately describes the degree of temptation men experience when being physically close to women they are attracted to. Same goes for women, it's just that most women feel less attracted to most men than the other way round. No amount of highlighting womens' discomfort will ever change that since no man decided to experience sexual desire for women. They just do.

There are many reasons why I personally struggle to empathize with womens' complaints about objectification.
One has to do with what is probably called masculine communication that orbits around the literal meaning of words. I don't know what it feels like to be an object i. e. an inanimate thing and I doubt there is a single person who does. Which is why I cannot put myself in the shoes of a woman who claims to feel like being an inanimate object when being stared at by men.

If the word objectification is to be taken metaphorically I think it is missing its target as it doesn't help to make me feel what women feel: negative emotions when the male focus is narrowed down to their sexuality.

Which leads me to the second reason why I struggle to empathize: Yes, the guy with the brains and thick glasses is tired that the girls are only interested in him when there are math assignments. Then again, is that a catastrophy? Emotional exhaustion? That's a luxury problem! One that most men would kill to have. The math nerd would love to be "objectified" for his sexuality. Yes, he would probably change his mind if he was a woman. But the fact of the matter is, he isn't.

I appreciate that constant unwanted sexual attention must be exhausting. But most of the time it just sounds like millionaires complaining that the poor only care about how to extract money from them.

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

Adding complexities to one’s attraction doesn’t take away from the attractive qualities. If anything, just wanting sex is very two-dimensional and objectifying

[CuriousMoonFox]

I had hoped to have a little conversation about the semantics of the word objectification and a qualifying examination of the subjective stress the word implies. But I get it, nobody wants to read and write so called walls of text so I'll try to keep this one short.

Men are looking for sex. Not exclusively but primarily and continuously. That is a difference (albeit one that probably doesn't make any difference to those feeling "objectified"). What men are not looking for is making women feel bad about being the target (to avoid the word object) of their desires. The dilemma is that the former (looking for sex) seems to inevitably lead to the latter (feeling bad) more often than not.

So men do not see women as objects. They just have terrible tunnel vision. When women feel bad about it, men feel bad about it too. But they can't help being interested just as women can't help being not interested.

Anyway, have a nice day without being objectified :-)

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

Calling it nature over nurture is ignorant logic. It’s a choice, and you know it.

[CuriousMoonFox]

:-) Nature or nurture. Regardless of which one turns out to be the decisive factor, one thing is for sure: Your preference.

My experience: Whenever it matters, whenever it truly counts, whenever humans can prove they can overwrite their basic programming, they fail. Nurture fails. Choice is an illusion.

I agree with your preference. The world would be better place if we could transcend but that is not what history tells us about homo sapiens and not what I see in the present.

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

You are the perfect example of why women say “If he wanted to, he would.”

[CuriousMoonFox]

I wonder whether words like these are expressions of authentic conviction or desperate hope in the face of the ugly truth. In my experience humanity is best described as wanting but unable. Able but unwilling sounds more like delusions of grandeur but I guess humans do tend to overestimate their capabilites. Especially when they haven't been tested or tested enough. And since men and women face different tests when it comes to sexuality they are by design very ill-equipped to be able to sufficiently relate to the experience of the other side.

I try to be forgiving with the weaknesses of others after I have experienced and accepted my own. I assume you are unwilling or unable to do the same?

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

I’d rather just agree to disagree with pessimists

[CuriousMoonFox]

Not the worst way to deal with reality as long as you know when to switch the lens.