WHY WE MEN HATE DANCING

My roommate just got pulled out of bed (midway through his law school assignment) by his girlfriend, and got dragged to her new swing dance session. Now, I love this woman; she's adorable and all that, but the guy can't dance if his life depended on it (by his own admission), and its 9:30 pm on a cold windy rainy winter day. I just saw them trot out the door - well, she trotted out and he shuffled out into the cold, looking like a broken man in his pajamas and slippers who just wanted to lay in bed and write his law school thesis...

So I feel compelled to sit down and write this post on behalf of all of my fellow brothers who absolutely HATE dancing but still go, because, well, we're awesome (and we're hoping you'll be um, nice afterward). Well, as usual, here it is in list form.

WHY WE MEN HATE DANCING.

5. Women come in all shapes and sizes. This might look like it's stating the obvious, but nowhere is the difference in height and girth between you and a random woman more apparent than when that random woman is your dancing partner. Its bad enough having to try to twirl our woman around without send her crashing into someone else. But when we're up against a woman who's 6'7" and 320lbs (4'6" and 92lbs is equally bad), it sucks balls. I've had to twirl a really tall woman, and it nearly broke her neck and made me look like a poodle reaching up for a dog treat. I also had a tough time finding another plus-sized lady's hip. She finally had to put my hand in the general area, but I could tell she was all miffed. Too bad, woman. It would've helped if you have ONE concave curve somewhere.

4. Women come in varying skill levels. Its OK if she's worse than us, because then we can do little tricks and make her think she's opposite Fred Astaire. This is good for our ego, which we like. But this doesn't happen often, given that all women seem to have had at least 500 hours of intensive dance training under their belt at birth. So instead we get a woman who's just danced with the instructor and is all pissed off because she's now stuck with the lousy Indian dude who is trying, but still sucks. You know how sometimes you go on a crappy date and you just want it to end asap? Well, that's how these women act. You can tell they would rather swallow rusty nails than dance with you. Well, screw you woman; I wanted to be at home and watch football. And all that dancing with the instructor isn't going to get you shit. He was checking out my ass all this while.

3. Women outnumber men 10 to 1 at these events. Obviously, I thought that swimming in this sea of estrogen would be awesome. And initially, it was fun mingling with multiple women. But very soon it dawned on me that this also meant that I would NEVER get a break from dancing. I would just have finished five minutes of unpleasantness with the girl with unshaved underarms, and there would be ten others staring at me wide-eyed and transmitting massive "pick-me-for-the-next-dance" vibes. So I'd have to go with someone, and then someone else, and then someone else, and half hour later, I'm all worn out and bruised up, and sure enough, there's hairy girl again, looking at me beseechingly...

2. We hate leading. Hate. Hate. Hate leading. Listen, you're the ones all about dancing, why don't you make up some bullshit moves and lead me along? I don't care. You're all about women's lib and equality and all that anyway, so why don't you go ahead and take over the reins on this one? We genuinely won't mind, I can assure you. Instead, we have to think of something smart every seven seconds so that you don't get bored. And all you do is play along and stay mildly amused until we think up of the next trick. Its this neverending battle to come up with neat dance moves (which we men will always lose anyway, since the gay instructor dude will always pull some bullshit trick out of his ass which will make everyone ooh and ahh) that tires me out more than anything else. First, I get dragged out to waste time when I should've been on my couch watching the game, and then I have to bear the responsibility of keeping you (and your stupid dance crazy friends) amused? Go adopt a kitten or something.

1. But the number one reason men hate dancing is: WE JUST DON'T GET THE POINT. Listen. We don't enjoy this shit. Its a big fucking waste of time. We hate the music, because its usually gay shit that they should outlaw outside of old age homes and English-as-a-second-language barbecue parties. We hate the overenthusiastic women who swoon over the instructors. We hate that there's only water and no beer to rehydrate. We hate the excuse of "well, its a good workout!", because we do bench presses, bicep curls and 10k runs if we want to work out, thankyouverymuch. We hate the "you can be close but not too close to the other girls" rules that you make up before dance class. If the woman's hot, I'm copping a feel. But most of all, we hate it because we're wired differently. The only reason we dance is so that we can sleep with one of the dance-crazy-yet-coordination-challenged women who think we're awesome, or, if we're dating a dance-crazy woman, so that we can sleep with her after we get home. For most of us, all the sex we get is purely out of pity, so even though its incredibly demeaning, sort of like throwing us a dog treat, we do it. Because, as much as we hate dancing, we like sex even more.

So ladies, go ahead and abuse us. Insult us, drag us out at unearthly hours, embarrass us in front of gay instructors, critique our technique, make us dance with random women, but please, please, remember why we're doing it. And give us a little pity.