ABSTRACT
W hat happens on the dance fl oor at a college party? Maybe you don’t see the patterns at fi rst, but think about it for a minute. What do women do? What do men do? How do people approach each other? An undergraduate sociology student conducted and published a study of heterosexual dancing at college parties. She found that there is a clear script that women and men follow. 1 Women do not directly initiate dancing with men. Remaining with their groups of female friends, women may dance provocatively, encouraging men’s attention, but they wait for men to approach them. Men approach women. But they usually do not ask a woman to dance. Instead, a man just starts to dance with a woman, often grinding from behind her. It is hard to imagine this behavior in any other context-in a classroom, in line for coff ee, or at the post offi ce. But on a dance fl oor, it is normal, common, and expected. A woman accepts the invitation to dance from a man by dancing more actively with him. She rejects the invitation by dancing uninterestedly or bringing in her friends to dance with them, before eventually returning to dancing with her friends without the man.
