Dancing Tells All

UPDATE by a psychologist! – UPDATE–A reader writes: “Your article entitled ‘Dancing Tells All’ is wrong! I have found that women do not care about how a man dances, only that he does dance (to play along with the crowd, hence showing community participation). Anything beyond that, like ‘smooth moves & such,’ are poison to most women. Most are fearful of attracting attention.

Being a psychology major I conducted an informal, sociological experiment. For several years–in my late forties, early fifties–I purposely learned, via formal lessons, to dance all the social ballroom styles. Then I observed the female reactions to same. I concluded that I had wasted my time & money thinking that being able to dance properly (within socially accepted norms) would get me the girl. In short, it backfired! Women do not seem to care whether you can dance or not, period! They seem to be looking for other qualities when ‘husband hunting.’ I am NOT a klutz, NOR a ‘bad looker’–In fact I ‘get lucky’ more than most. However, I definitely concluded that being able to dance did not ‘get me the girl.’ In fact, my dancing ability turned out to be a determinate rather than an aid. Scientists are not always correct!” THE ORIGINAL STORY–Gals: Think your boyfriend or husband can’t dance? Scientists have done the first analysis of dance moves to find out which ones make men attractive to women.

This attraction take place on a subconscious level, but it’s real, because how a man moves to music may be a key to his ability to procreate successfully.

In BBC News, Pallab Ghosh quotes psychologist Nick Neave as saying, “When you go out to clubs people have an intuitive understanding of what makes a good and bad dancer. What we’ve done for the very first time is put those things together with a biometric analysis so we can actually calculate very precisely the kinds of movements people focus on and associate them with women’s ratings of male dancers.”

Neave asked young men who were not professional dancers to dance in a laboratory to a very basic drum rhythm as their movements were captured with 12 cameras, then converted into a computer-generated avatar, which women then rated on a scale of one to seven. He says, “We thought that people’s arms and legs would be really important. The kind of expressive gestures the hands [make], for example. But in fact this was not the case. We found that (women paid more attention to) the core body region: the torso, the neck, the head. It was not just the speed of the movements, it was also the variability of the movement [like] someone who is twisting, bending, moving, nodding.” Women DIDN’T like movements that were twitchy and repetitive (take note of this, all you male dancers out there).

He also took blood samples from the volunteers which revealed that, just like the male birds with the brightest feathers, the better dancers were also more healthy (and thus will help make better kids).

When it comes to this wonderful website of ours, we’re dancing as fast as we can, but we’re not sure we can keep up this pace much longer, which is why we need YOU to subscribe today!

Art credit: Dreamstime.com

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