I have known several people in my life who saw dancing as a “vertical representation of what you do lying down.” First of all, I love that description. There is something truly magical about the euphemism (for those of you who didn’t understand what the quote meant, it is about sex). The best part about this euphemism is that the people who are using it and the people who are hearing it generally know what the person is talking about. Which means there is no need for the euphemism, right? It would be much easier to say that dancing is just sex standing up. But that isn’t what would be said either, because the euphemism calls it a representation of the horizontal act. So, if we were to eliminate the euphemism and still keep true to the meaning of that euphemism, we would say that dancing represents sex. It isn’t sex, mind you. And you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would say it is. (From my own knowledge of all things adult, I have heard from a friend of a friend’s mother’s therapist’s college-age son that sex consists of a specific number of very specific acts. I only have a vague understanding of those acts myself, but I hope that with the birth of my first child in the next two months and his subsequent growth into adulthood, that I can get a firmer grasp on what these acts are.)
So, let’s just say dancing represents sex. Okay, that is kind of a weird thing. I know of a few dances that are the beginning stages of sex. Young people dance these in the clubs, but if dancing represents sex, does that mean that all people who dance are seeking sex with their dance partner? We know this isn’t true, because not every person who dances wants to have sex with their dance partner. Dancing with grandma at your wedding would get really odd if this were the case. Now, some people are seeking sex when they dance. If we, as the great poet R. Kelly said, engage in that little bump and grind, we are probably looking for sex, but when we are dancing pretty much any other dance, we are generally dancing to dance. Maybe we chose to do this dancing ourselves; maybe we were dragged out onto the dance floor.
If I wanted to, I could probably take any dance and make it sexual (Robot, Cupid Shuffle, The Bernie, here I come), but to say dancing represents sex, means that you are having representational sex with the person you are dancing, which means…Hell, I don’t know what it means. All I know is that dancing by yourself becomes really weird. And the chicken dance becomes even stranger. And music itself becomes something we never thought music was before. Because music leads to foot-tapping. Music leads to movement, and that movement turns into dancing. So, not only is dancing representational of sex (which doesn’t mean a damn thing), but music is also representational of sex. And since rhythm is so embedded into music, that also must be the same, and since rhythm is a part of walking, walking is also representational of the sexual act, as well as talking, breathing, and pumping blood, etc.
Maybe that is how Freud got his start. His family was a little religious. His mother was a bit of a wild girl in her younger days. She went out dancing a lot. She knew all those girls who went out dancing only wanted one thing. And she knew that those girls who went out dancing would stop at nothing to get that one thing. And she knew, if she let her little Freud go out dancing, those girls would get one look at his thin little academic body and they would be howling like she-wolves. So, she told Freud that he wasn’t allowed to go dancing because it was promiscuous. She told him dancing was representational of sex. Freud wasn’t sure what this meant, so, since he was an academic, he puzzled over the question for a long time. After careful thought over the course of many years, he came to the same conclusions that took us about five seconds to reason out, and since rhythm itself is representational of sex (whatever the hell that still means), almost everything is connected to sex because almost everything has a rhythm. You hear that pulsar thumping hundreds of light-years from the earth? Sex. You are in mirror manufacturing? Sex. Your car has been engineered to have a specific pattern of pistons compressing? Sex.
Many of the choices we make are probably connected to the ability to have children and that act that produces those children. I see a lot of women get into their thirties, buy a cat, and give up on life. If it wasn’t such a sad situation, it would be funny. But I know what is going on. Women’s bodies seem to call out for babies. Their minds certainly do, and by getting a cat, they are have something to take care of. And if men are honest with themselves and have enough time to think about it, they want children as well. Women want fat little people who stare up at you, smile, spit up, smell good somehow, eat, and poop. Men seem to want their children to grow up. When I look at myself, I would much rather have a child I can talk to and mentor than one I can nurse (though I have heard if you stimulate the chest of men in a specific way, they can breastfeed as well).
To a certain degree, Freud is probably right. The world revolves around sex, but sex revolves around something else, and that something else is not power. That something else is babies. The world revolves around making tiny little fat people who have big eyes and blow bubbles. The world revolves around little people with squeaky voices. It revolves around girls in seventh-grade who are twice as tall as boys with cracking voices. It revolves around kids going off to college and walking your daughter down the church aisle at her wedding. Why? I don’t think it is only to fill the earth with people. I think it goes beyond that. Just filling the earth with people seems pointless. Having babies gives people purpose. It pulls back a curtain on life and shows them that there was so much more to life than the little picture they had painted before.
What is the meaning that parents find? I sure as heck don’t know, but I think it has something to do with dancing.