At any swing club, women don heels and skirts, and the men wear suits and ties. And often, the more svelte the gal and brawnier the lad, the more popular dance partners they are. We are returning to traditional gender roles and feeling all the sexier for it. I suggest a tasteful blend of all three. Instead of marking this up to another retro-inspired fad, this resurgence of couples dancing offers us insight into how we relate as men and women.
Dance is the human mating ritual.
The sensual wonders of the rhythmic body so threatened our puritanical forefathers that the activity was banned. Most of our colonial nation got over the horrors of touching to the sound of fiddles and pianos and took up the waltz and other barn dancing. In recent history alone, our grandparents around the nation danced to the radio broadcasts of big band sounds. But even then, the couples were drifting apart, across the dance floor from each other and across the boundaries of marriage and directly into divorce court. The beginning of our generation marked the beginning of the modern feminist movement, the beginning of no-fault divorce and the dawn of the contemporary dysfunctional family.