Disrespect on the Dancefloor

I’ve run completely out of patience. Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve never been patient, but I’m at a point in my life where I’m completely over the bullshit. Let me tell you (and by tell you, I mean rant about) what happened a couple of weeks ago.

As you may or may not know, I picked up dancing about a year ago. I started with salsa, and ventured into bachata and later kizomba from there. So whenever I go out, I tend to go to dedicated salsa/bachata/kizomba parties. Now for some reason, most of these parties are usually pretty dignified in the sense that people come there to dance. There’s always a couple of people that are there just to try and grab some ass, but those are usually easy to weed out.

However, I was recently at a party where the atmosphere was completely different. The comments, the wandering hands, the drunkenness, all of it. A few anecdotes from the night:

  • Last time I was there I danced with a guy who at some point made me feel uncomfortable. By now I’m a bit more experienced in the dance and thus know how to signal that and leave more distance between me and my dance partner. This guy however, was not having it. He kept trying to push his lower body up against mine, which is the first thing they teach you not to do in kizomba. This is why the dance is misunderstood. Anyway when he figures that it isn’t working he decides to slide his hand down to the side of my hip, where again, it has no business being. I place his hand back, at which point he decides to leave me on the dancefloor. Which was cool, because if you can’t behave yourself, you have no business on the dancefloor anyway.
  • I was talking to a friend. The party was pretty crowded and there was a couple directly next to us leaning against the bar talking. The guy was holding his drink crookedly and kept spilling on my friend. At one point she tilted the cup back upright and turned to the guy to tell him that he had been spilling on her, upon which the girl he was talking to decides that my friend deserves to have said drink thrown in her face, showering my friend, me and some innocent bystanders with cheap alcohol. Why is that necessary?!?
  • A guy at least twice my age walks up to me and tells me that I “look delicious” and if it’s “OK to say that?” I rolled my eyes at him and said that he really can and should phrase that differently. Again, why is that necessary?!? Ain’t nobody asked you. Just shut the f*ck up and dance.

By this time I was ready to leave. The worst part of this all is that I’m actually getting extremely fed up with this type of behavior up to the point where I don’t even feel like going dancing anymore. This is just another way in which there’s one group that ruins it for everybody else.

Anyway so now I’m trying to move past that and not let this whole mess be too much of a killjoy, but honestly, how hard is it to just behave yourself on the dancefloor? Ugh.