Ready for the big dance? Sign here first.
For many young people, the first time they sign a substantive contract comes when they first buy a car, or undertake a student loan. Now, many high schools are seeing that the experience comes a little earlier: Students are now being forced to sign contracts in which they promise not to dance suggestively come homecoming.
According to the Los Angeles Times, many Southern California high schools are drafting contracts where students must agree to conditions such as “no touching breasts, buttocks or genitals. No straddling each others’ legs. Both feet on the floor” or “When dancing back to front, all dancers must remain upright — no sexual bending is allowed i.e. no hands on knees and no hands on the dance floor with your buttocks touching your dance partner.”
Some schools try to take a humorous approach – one insists on turning the lights up and switching the music to Burt Bacharach if administrators catch anyone dancing inappropriately.
But the stepped-up hysteria over teens’ dancing doesn’t seem to jibe with the risky behavior that parents and school officials think it will inevitably lead to. Karen Sternheimer, a USC sociologist, pointed out to the Times that the height of the “freak-dancing” craze happened at the same time teens’ sexual activity, pregnancies and rape were in sharp decline.
No matter how suggestively teens may dance, I doubt anything could stop them from realizing that they’re at school. If administrators keep cracking down, they’re only giving kids more reason to skip school-sponsored events in favor of places where they’re not being kept under a magnifying glass.
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These “contracts” probably eliminate the dance moves of at least 50% of all high school students today. Additionally, songs like Flo Rida’s “Low” and timeless new classics like Juvenile’s “Back That Ass Up” and Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” will have been demoted from “Party Anthem” to a spot on the banned song list.
What happened to the days of “pregaming” in the parking lot? The joys of finding that girl that you’ve always had a crush on in the mass of student bodies for some rhythmic gyrating on the dance floor that changed your social status forever? What is happening to America when our country’s most popular dance move (girls dancing “back to front” on guys with their “buttocks touching their dance partner” with tons of sexual bending while guys stagger back and forth offbeat and occasionally lift their hands up and exclaim, “OHHH!!!” when a good song comes on) has been banned in the very hallways that it was invented??
If schools are going to tell students how to dance, they need to offer dance lessons. While iconic teen dance movies make us believe that utopian, G-rated dances like these can happen, the reality is that the majority of kids today would not be capable of dancing if these vital elements of dance today were removed. Soon, the “school dance” will become a place for girls to just jump up and down and make out with one another, while the guys are left as wallflowers, except for the couple forward thinking guys who took dance lessons before Homecoming.