I’ve often wondered what happened to structured couple dancing why we don’t do cool things like swing and lindy hop any more. Just 50 years ago, a high school dance involved actual moves and patterns. At a sock hop, kids actually had to know how to dance. Certain ways of moving could be considered “right” or “wrong,” or at least could be judged as “working” or “not working” based on the parameters of the relationship between the two dancers that made up the “couple.”

Now, just about anything goes. Individuals choreograph their own patterns that have no relationship to “right” or “wrong” because they are not dependent upon the patterns that others are creating.

Since I happen to be one of the weirdos who still has an antiquarian interest in the lost art of structured dancing, I spent part of my four-day at the 53rd Annual Richland Folk Dance Festival. The Norwegian-American professional folk dance instructor, Lee Ottorholt, unexpectedly gave me an insight into why we 21st century folk do free-form shaking and grinding instead of the structured kinds of dances he was teaching. It has even more to do with our political/cultural system than I would have thought.

European agricultural societies, he explained, tended to practice circle dances in which large groups of people linked together and traveled around the room following a circular path. One theory about this, he noted, is that agricultural societies were intimately connected with the cyclical patterns of winter and summer, planting and harvesting.

The dances also tended to have similar roles for men and women, which reflected the relative equality of the genders in terms of the tasks they were expected to complete as part of the agricultural system. The strong group mentality that was central to the survival of the farming village was reflected in the dances’ use of many homogenous individuals to make up a moving whole.

The industrial age brought on a drastic change in social dance trends. Especially in Western Europe, people stopped dancing in large groups and began dancing as male-female couples. Ottorholt suggested that this was because of the change to regarding the nuclear family instead of the village as the essential unit of society. He described the new dance form as conveying the idea “it’s just you and me, baby.”

In our post-industrial age, Ottorholt argues, we have discarded even the couple as the unit of society. In order to reinforce our extreme focus on the individual, we have adopted a new form of dance that leaves the individual free to do whatever he or she pleases. The dancer has no necessary relationship with those around her and need not follow any pattern or work within any prescribed framework. Thus, the single person, entirely free from the constraints of society or even couplehood, seems to be the basis of our modern society.

Once I started using our current dance form as a sort of mirror of the core values of our socioeconomic and sexual culture, other insights began to come to me. Women and men seem to have fairly equal roles on the post-industrial dance floor, neither of them fulfilling a significantly different role or being expected to do different movements. This corresponds well with the relatively equal employment rate between men and women and the attitude that men and women can do the same jobs, including firefighting and taking care of children.

As recently as 50 years ago, when the sock hops were taking place in high school gyms, women were expected to stay at home and keep house. These unequal or at least highly differentiated gender dynamics were reflected in the gendered roles involved in swing dance; men were the active leaders and women the passive followers on the dance floor.

I also began to think about the implications of the interactions that do take place on the post-industrial dance floor. Most of the time, I find that people are in their own little worlds, and I often try to seek out peoples’ eyes without any luck. However, people sometimes do seem to interact.

A large percentage of the times that a member of the opposite sex has actually approached me on the dance floor have involved an attempt at “grinding.” This might seem like quite an intimate interaction, but I have noticed that the people initiating it will not even establish eye contact. Perhaps grinding is just another manifestation of our post-industrial obsession with the individual. For these people, grinding is not about dancing with someone else; it is about a gratification of the self. I can hear the post-industrial mass of Whitties shouting, as they blindly grind their genitals together, “It’s all about me, baby!”