Monday 24 March 2014

Dad dancing – 'like an apple going brown'

While it's on the BBC iPlayer, you have to listen to the feature on BBC Woman's Hour about 'Dad dancing'. It starts at 12:15.

'They call it Dad Dancing,' says the presenter. 'It's when a man jerks and jiggles to the music and his children shriek at him to stop because it's embarrassing. Dads… seem to feel they are not the greatest dancers, so they hang back or just shuffle a bit.'

This, the presenter goes on, is despite research from Goldsmiths which shows that more men than women can recognise a beat accurately, so men should be better dancers than women. Guest on the show, the wonderful Dr Peter Lovatt, says that 'data tells us that men are born to dance', and as they get older they tend not to because they are self-conscious, they feel they haven't got any motor co-ordination, they feel they don't know what to do.


I wouldn't disagree with that, having been in an audience of hundreds at one of Peter's talk where I was literally the only person not joining in (the rest were students). I'm sure there are, as he says, social and psychological reasons why men don't dance. But I do have a few points to make.

Firstly, although I do tend to have prohibitively dodgy knees when it comes to a conference Ceilidh or some line dancing at a wedding, give me Andy Weatherall in the DJ booth or a 90's indie disco and I may well be tempted out of retirement. As the salsa teacher on Woman's Hour said, 'when they relax after a few classes' – I heard 'glasses'.

Secondly, I'm not so convinced 'Mum Dancing' is that different. 'Show your wrists' anyone?

Thirdly, I had to laugh when Peter came to the possible evolutionary psychology explanation. 'If dancing is part of the human mate selection process, like an apple going brown is meant to put people off eating it, perhaps middle-aged men dancing in this uncoordinated way might be signalling to women that they are not the right people to mate with.'

I don't need dance to send that signal! I'm well aware that I'm now past it... if I was labouring under any illusions they were shattered on a 'Dads night out' in the Peak District a couple of years ago. Freed from parenting duties by our other halves, we had a great pub crawl round Castleton, ending in a lock-in where we found ourselves chatting to some younger women – pretty much as equals, we thought. We would never, of course, have dreamt of performing any mating rituals, but I suspect some of us thought that in a parallel universe it might have been an option. Until, that is, one of the young ladies in question uttered the immortal line 'You know, you've really restored my faith in the older generation.'

So I think most 'Dad dancing' isn't about sending unconscious messages from some primordial past... we know we're the brown apple, and we're celebrating by dancing like nobody's watching. Because nobody is.

As with all evolutionary psychology though, this should lead to testable predictions. Peter, what of it? Do Dads dance worse than married non-fathers, and worse still than single men of the same age? Do they know they do? Do they in fact dance their worst when their kids are watching, because embarrassing them is fun? Do married men with two kids and a vasectomy dance worse than anyone else? It would be nice to have an excuse that's backed by science…

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