News

It's almost the weekend, and soon teens across the country will hit the dance floor at clubs and house parties, their bodies pressed up against each other, grinding.

To many observers, this is a scenario of graphic sexual foreplay set to the pulsing beat of Rihanna's latest Top 40 hit.

But a growing body of research has found that sexually explicit styles of dancing do not lead to casual sex. To those who study human sexuality, modern dance club culture is actually more indicative of an evolution in courtship.

"I thought there would be a clear transition that kids who dance very heavily would end up having sex," said Miguel Munoz-Laboy, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University. "But that's not the case, at all."

Dr. Munoz-Laboy and his team of researchers spent three years watching teenagers dance in New York clubs and found that grinding, while commonplace, is not viewed by the majority of its participants as a precursor to sex, or even as a sexual dance.

His research comes at a time when schools across Canada and the United States have been cracking down on provocative dancing, instructing students that they must maintain a specific distance or refrain from grinding and "freaking," in which the male partner is behind the female, simulating penetration.

And while it is not surprising that older generations would see such movements as shocking, Dr. Munoz-Laboy found otherwise.

Participants in these dances are actually bound by "an elaborate set of cultural rules - a veritable etiquette of gendered scripts for appropriate male and female conduct."

In a study published this month in the journal Culture, Health & Sexuality, Dr. Munoz-Laboy wrote that, "young women are the gatekeepers of dancing boundaries in the hip-hop scene. Even though most dances in hip-hop clubs involve grinding ... there are levels of physical closeness that men cannot cross."

And those boundaries seem to remain as young dancers enter university and their 20s.

Earlier this year, Kingston physician Jonathan Huber, 32, published a report called Sexually Overt Approaches in Singles Bars in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality. In it, he states that grinding is simply part of a new script for twentysomething flirting and picking up.

"It's the new 'Can I buy you a drink?' " he said in an interview.

Dr. Huber became interested in dance floor behaviour while pursuing a master's degree in human sexuality. The professional literature he read was filled with courtship behaviours that he had never seen in "the real world" - outdated rituals from a time when physical touching involved little more than an introductory handshake.

"This is a complete reversal," he said of the behaviour he observed in bars in Ottawa and Guelph, Ont., while doing his research. "The touching happens at the beginning and only do the other things flow after that. It's sexually overt on paper, but the intent is not sexually overt."

In his research paper, Dr. Huber describes several scenarios that would quite likely cause older generations to flush.

"A female wearing black, fitted pants and a black, fitted tank top approached one of three passing men at the edge of the dance floor," he writes. "She grinded pelvis to pelvis with him. The man smiled and continued to dance with her, until she discontinued to approach the second man. This continued through five songs and each of the three men. When the first slow song played, she left the bar with her female friend."

Dr. Huber said how people interpret this kind of nonchalant sexuality depends on their age.

Anyone under the age of 40, he said, likely sees grinding as a completely natural form of dancing. Anyone older is scandalized.

"To them, it's completely shocking," he said. "The way people used to pick each other up had no touching involved in it whatsoever."

Dr. Munoz-Laboy believes grinding allows young men and women to experiment with flirting and sexual control, and is a healthy extension of sexual liberation.

"This is not simply a space where boys will try and take advantage of girls and will try to grab them," he said. "It also becomes a space where boys prove their masculinity more vividly than anywhere else, because of the performance of dancing."

For women, it is a way to experiment with their power over men, initiating close contact and then breaking it off, and punishing dance partners for any perceived overstepping of boundaries.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, both Dr. Huber and Dr. Munoz-Laboy found that alcohol and drug use was more directly responsible for risky sexual behaviour than grinding. The dance itself is as harmless as any other form of dance, Dr. Munoz-Laboy believes, from moshing to swing.

"It's a very sexualized dance in a way, people are putting their genitals and butts very close together and rubbing against each other - but there's a lot of self control," he said. "But adults don't get it."