On having an adult discussion in the lindy hop community- which I think we are.

This is a followup post to the conversation in Lindy Shopper's original post "Assaulted by Breasts," my post "My breasts don't assault you by just sitting here, actually," other, responses including by Aries, and Lindy Shopper's response to the ensuing blogstorm at "On Having a Reasonable Discussion in the Lindy Hop Community."

I titled this post "On having an adult discussion in the lindy hop community- which I think we are." because the criticism that most stung me personally was that the discussion we are having right now is somehow immature, unreasonable, or childish.  Lindy Shopper has clarified that she did not intend to imply those things about my post.

I think some of the comments across the many platforms have been all of those things.  But on the whole, I think this IS a good, productive, and yes, "adult" discussion of some issues that both me and Lindy Shopper hold pretty dearly, and I'm glad it's happening.  

I messaged Lindy Shopper (LS) last night after her followup post, and we've been having a private conversation. While we have different personal speech and writing styles, I think we ultimately agree nearly entirely on these issues. She has been gracious to engage with me respectfully in response to what was, at times, a viciously sarcastic post.

LS is kind of horrified and more than a little saddened at the messages that we read from her original post, which she says in her followup. And I believe at this point that they were not her intent.  But text can stand alone, and without personal knowledge of someone's character, it is impossible to divine someone's intent, so she understands why the post was read the way it was.

In her response post, she brings up the "slut shaming" phrase, and quotes the definition from the wikipedia article (which I linked).  In response to that she says this:

This kind of phenomenon pervades in our society and it is one of the most terrible atrocities of perception that we live with in our society. As someone who is, first and foremost, a woman who is both educated and liberal, and secondarily, a lawyer who has studied a body of rape case law spanning the past two centuries and who represents women who are victims of domestic violence, I understand, fully, the implications of this phrase, from a social, psychological, and legal standpoint. As a person, [...] I disagree with “slut shaming” and everything that it stands for (and stands against) as to women.

That is a strong and articulate statement, and I wanted to share it here.

I think this discussion was and is valuable, and am glad it occurred. I think it was easy to read those messages in LS original post because I think some of that sentiment certainly floats around in our community, and definitely is prevalent in our society.  I am also glad that LS and I were able to have a conversation and come to understand one another better.

I also agree that re-reading, trying to think about multiple sides, not jumping to conclusions, being respectful, and referencing the post you're responding to are all good things when making a response.  So in a lot of the specifics, in addition to the general sense, I agree with her followup.

My breasts don't assault you by just sitting here, actually

So, over at Lindy Shopper, there is a post that went up a few weeks ago, but that I only just recently saw.  It's titled "Assaulted by Breasts."

I thought it was going to be an article on safety-pinning buttonholes or something, fashion tips on how to keep your boobs from popping out when you don't want them to.

It is actually a rant about what women wear at dances, and how they should cover up more lest they provoke men into being "distracted by so much cleavage or full boobage that it becomes ogling and/or pushes them into creepy territory," or scar children for life.  The rant is prompted by her husband having seen someone's boob that popped out of her dress on NYE; Lindy Shopper ends the post stating that she doesn't want to come home and hear stories about the breasts he saw, so we should all really cover up already.

(sorry for the quote so early in the piece, but it's just... I suspect I would be accused of hyperbole if I simply told you that Lindy Shopper thinks what women wear is responsible for how men act.)

re: swing culture by WonderWomanProject

Hellooooo.  Lindy Focus trip report coming soon, but in the mean time, I typed a lot of thoughts in response to a facebook post about a blog post, by my enchanting friend Aries, so I figured I'd go ahead and toss it up here.  

Solo dance performance: once as a girl and once as a boy

Earlier this year, I gave myself some dance goals for 2012.  One of them was "Choreo a solo blues routine and perform it in front of actual people."

First weekend in November, in Washington, DC, I was afforded the opportunity to perform a piece* I've been working on since mid-August at Bambloozled, which is put on every year by the fantastic folks at Capitol Blues.

I think it went pretty well:


Spoonful from David Mudre on Vimeo. Dancing and choreography by Christina Austin.



The second half of this performance was at Snowbound Blues in Rochester, NY.



The second time, I'm dressed as a boy.  Weird.  I won't lie to you, this post is gonna be long.

re: Lindy hop as "challenge" (now with more Venn diagrams!)

So this post is a response to the thread of an idea that's been batted back and forth between Rebecca Brightly and Bobby White, as well as a couple other people.

The first posts is "31 Signs you're not an advanced dancer yet" (Brightly). It is an interesting article by itself, but my response is only to a very small part of it, a nearly-parenthetical aside toward the end of the piece.

"We don’t start lindy hopping because we want easy popularity. We take the journey to becoming lindy hoppers because we crave challenge."

This is a very inclusive "we" statement, as BW points out, positing motivation for basically all lindy hoppers.  Is it true?

[long post after the jump]

Declining a dance (a thing that you, Yes, You! are allowed to do.)

So a friend of mine was recently co-teaching a drop-in beginner lesson before a night of dancing; I was watching the door and listening. To conclude the lesson, he said that there were only two rules for swing dancing. Following the obligatory Fight Club joke, he stated that the first rule, was the leads had to ask some follows to dance at some point tonight (and that it would be sad to leave all the lovely ladies waiting). Second, he stated that if someone asked you to dance, you had to say yes.

And then I threw up in my mouth a little.

Can I deconstruct that response for y'all a bit? Why that made me sick even though my personal philosophy still leads to basically same result-- I will virtually never say "no" to getting asked to dance.* I swear to god that I am aware that there will be people who think I'm more than a little "Stop the penis party" with this, but hey, this is my blog and my opinion and you don't have to read any of it that you don't want to.

Trust is a complicated thing. (Bambloozled class and current dance ruminations. Also... words are hard.)

So yeah. Trust.  It's a thing you need to have with someone you're dancing with... only sometimes you don't have it.

It's a thing you have to have with yourself to dance with, only sometimes you don't have it.


There are a few emotional/meta themes that I have been chewing on in my brain for a while now (my brain chews, apparently? yes, it does.), as they relate to my dancing.  One of them (obviously from the opening of this post) is trust.  Another could be called "confidence."  This post is going to be some of my thoughts, as best as I can articulate them, about trust in partnership and connection, and manifestations of that, physically, with respect to attitude and posture and counterbalance.

I'm going to start by attempting to describe some things about the classes last weekend at Bambloozled, especially picking out the things that I really want to dig into, and circle back around with some things that I have been working on in my lindy, both long-term and more recently.

Mechanism of beauty accumulation at high skill levels in partner dancing communities by marginal selective advantage among new dancers*.

Bugs Question of the Day post again!  I feel like it's sort of inappropriate for me to post many-multi-paragraph responses to the QOTD (or my new favorite abbreviation that I just saw on the page, "?/day", when I have my own personal blog for that sort of thing. So since this is my own space, here is my really long answer to today's ?/day.  


First, the question:

@gregory Dyke asks: "A tongue in-cheek question to balance out the overly serious nature of the past few discussions. Is the theory set forward in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqmd75VsVFU @1.30 correct? Beauty and good dancing in women are linked because men do the asking, are shallow and therefore invite the beautiful women, thus affording them more opportunity to dance and become good?"

And here is my initial response:

Holy long response that I just typed out and have decided would be a better blog post. Short answer: as an evolutionary biologist, this theory (as in, prettier girls have more OPPORTUNITY to become better dancers because they'll get asked more often at the beginning) is totally plausible and would not require a large bias at all. A very small (or unconscious bias) would be plenty sufficient. As a follow whose default look is butch and scruffy but who can clean up to what might be described as glamour tomboy, I can say that when I make more effort to look more attractive, I get more dances, hands down.

But here is my slightly more complete response....

Being a leader is hard...

at Laflx 2010, my very first exchange. Photo by Bret Langham

I'm going back to DC this weekend for Bambloozled.  I have been to DC 4 times in the last year, if you count last year's Bambloozled,  (bblzld, dclx, red hot blues ad bbq, ILHC) and it has been a fantastic experience every time.  DC really knows how to organize an event and throw a party.  DC also knows how to draw in some good dancers.  I always go home from DC on a cloud from both the absolute number as well as the percentage of dances that I've had that are just phenomenal.

Which sort of brings me to a funny story.  "A funny thing happened on the way to ILHC," as it were.  

Veteran's Day

So, my fb status for today:

Right before I parked my car this morning, there was a country song on the radio with the line, "where I come from/ there's an old flyboy out turning up dirt," which (I'm such a sap, y'all) had me fighting tears all the way from my car to my building. From the old WWII vets who watched us swing dance with tears in their eyes to the music that reminded them of home during the war (last year at Pittstop), to my close family and dear friends and high school classmates that have served more recently and in the more recent wars... thanks. And Happy Veterans day.

By "fighting tears," what I really meant was crying, but fighting sobs.  I leaked tears all the

Necessary and Sufficient

Hey, y'all... welcome to my new blog. To kick things off, I'm going to repost an essay that I wrote this summer (July 2011), after I attended Stompology in Rochester, NY.  "Repost," because this essay originally appear on my friends' blog, All the Cats Join In.  


I am planning on posting a ULHS trip report soon! but I decided that it would be the impetus for just setting up a blog already, and I wanted to put this out there, since it's something I've very glad I wrote, and benefit from rereading and reminding myself of, occasionally. 

My greatest flaw as a dancer is probably my tendency to let my social anxiety strangle me.

My fear of screwing up on the dance floor manifests in frequent "thinking face" when I'm being led, even by familiar leads, through new or complex patterns, and in my tendency to choke when I ask a ‘high-status’ leader for a dance. My favorite definition of "choke" is from the book Deep Survival: a reversion to the state of being a beginner, wherein you consciously think about what you're doing, as opposed to the more advanced state of performance where "muscle memory" largely controls the specifics of movement. To choke is to lose one's flow.  The mechanics of this for me personally usually looks like bad posture and too much tension in my arms and body, which hinders my ability to follow sensitively. In either case, the process is too much thinking and the product is less than sublime dancing.

Which is a shame, because my favorite part of dancing, the high that I am always chasing that keeps me coming back, is found in the moments when I am not in my head but in my body, fully with the music and my partner.  There is a thrilling physicality to just letting go and dancing.