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Captain Obvious article in The Star ...Grinding: 'Simulated sex' or 'just a dance'?
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Freaking out the teacher
TheStar.com - News - Freaking out the teacher
'Simulated sex' or 'just a dance'? Teachers and teens disagree about latest craze on the dance floor
April 23, 2007
Tess Kalinowski
It's called freaking, grinding, the nut and butt or just plain vertical sex.
Teenagers don't flinch talking about it and they don't think twice about doing it even though the sexually explicit dance has been banned in schools from California to Hamilton.
Freaking, which typically involves a female shimmying her backside against the grinding hips of her male partner, simply isn't decent to some school officials trying to keep a lid on simmering hormones.
But as the prom season moves into high gear, young adults and cultural observers say objections to grinding are just the typical overreaction to this generation's version of the twist.
"Current music and current dance are always going to be critiqued by generations before. My teachers' parents didn't like them listening to Elvis. (Grinding) is an explicit dance. It is, at the same time, just a dance," said North Toronto Collegiate Grade 12 student Nick Kennedy, who admits his own attempts have earned him at least one warning from a teacher.
"It's not a dance that takes much to nail down. It's a pretty human response. Just about anyone can do it," Kennedy said. He's even been at dances where teachers have poked students with sticks as a warning to stop.
Kennedy's reaction is typical of students, says Tim Yawney, vice-principal at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Secondary School in Brampton.
Although he's not always comfortable with the way students dance in their "contemporary, urban style," Yawney says he will usually wait for a break before approaching and remarking on their "interesting" moves. To make it too big an issue would pretty much shut down the dance, which Yawney says has value in terms of developing community spirit at his school.
"(Students) don't consider it any different than how we would dance face to face when we were kids. They see it as just part of how they dance.
"It's what they see on TV, it's what they view on music videos, and they all copy each other," said Yawney.
Grinding isn't a problem at Chinguacousy Secondary School in Brampton because dances aren't very popular there, said principal Carol Speers, who cancelled two last year due to poor ticket sales.
But she's worked in other high schools where she would make an announcement warning students against the suggestive dance before the music started.
"We'd be on grinding patrol. I called it simulated sex on the dance floor," said the straight-talking Speers.
"I won't let them stand at the wall and neck. Why would I let them do this? I've got to see some air between them," she said.
On some level dance has always been about sex, says Charlie Keil, director of cinema studies at the University of Toronto.
"As soon as there was contact dancing, there was anxiety about what it meant."
You only have to look back to the 1930s and '40s, said Keil.
"If you look at people jitterbugging, it's incredibly wild. There's a lot of bodily display. The woman often has a skirt, which will flip up, but also that movement back and forth through the body.
"The question is whether the dancers are feeling what's being represented. If you were to ask most strippers what they're feeling doing a pole dance, they'd probably say they're waiting to clock out.
"I can't imagine how dancing suggestively is going to trigger sex any more than other teen contact would. At the very least, as a parent you know that while they're doing that in public they're not doing it in private."
Toronto public school superintendent Michael Smith is as dismayed as many parents and teachers by the way society sexualizes children.
But he says school dances are still "as much about what hasn't changed as what has changed."
"What's important is that there is a set of standards that meet the community's needs where no one is embarrassed or ashamed of what's going on. It's a very difficult line to draw."
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Discuss, or...
When was your first time grinding? Do you gring to any other music?
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Short time TA, Long time Guver, Good time giver.
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