Here in latin america, either you dance salsa or you don’t even show up on women’s radar. Well, unless you look like Ricky Martin, but it’s definitely not my case.

Watching people dancing salsa is addictive. You think they come from another planet where they know how to live the real meaning of life while you are basically struggling to find enough water in the desert to survive. Yeah, it’s that humiliating.

A well, first of all, Salsa is danced in couples. One leads (the man) and the other follows (the women). Radical femminists would perceive it as intrinsically sexist, but here women love the feeling of being guided. Much of being a good salsa dancer, for men, is to be able to lead, firmly yet gently, understanding women’s pace and rhythm: it tends to become a really sexy thing as well. The sexual energy emanated by good salsa dancers around them is really mind blowing. But it also amazes me how much they can be incredibly good dancers, transmit that sexual energy around them and yet don’t feel anything from one another (many of them just partner up for one song and still they have incredibly nice coordination).

It seems to me, after having taken a few lessons and having watched a bunch of people, that good salsa dancers simply have a kind of sense of understanding body movements of the partner which is really above the average we western people are used to. I wonder if this makes them better sexual lovers as well, hmmm, I bet it’s the case.

Now, I like to dance. During my geeky adolescence, I hated it, but now that I came to appreciate myself as a human being, I came to appreciate the ass-shaking part of life as well. Normally, I dance house music but, boy, all kind of modern style dancing is really solitary. Yeah, there are those groups of girls and boys dancing together in circles, but in the hard-core dance clubs, people simply dance alone. Most of the time with their eyes closed (personally, I do it a lot), to avoid eye contact… like those girls who love to dance and to do that they go to gay clubs to avoid having tons of wallpaper guys x-raying their asses as they walk by.

Compare our alienation dances with salsa and I feel that, as a generation, we face the risk of cultural extinction and we probably deserve it.

Take those european-style dance clubs: volume is so loud that you need ear-plugs just to be able to hear something the next day, talking is impossible, lights are designed to make you look decent even if you are ugly as hell (this works for both sexes), people just shake their ass, best coordinated activity is la macarena, style and creativity means “if you think you are cool and you just don’t care to look like an idiotic monkey bouncing around, then others will think you are cool too and will try to imitate you”. Probably it’s a behavior that really comes from monkeys.

Since talking is impossible, everything is done thru eye contact or dance floor homesteading. Again, self confidence is key: if you think you are cool, girls will think that too. They love self confident people, there are not many around. Then, it’s dancing closer and closer, kissing, petting, get out, get laid, get out of here (hoping to avoid the end of the ugly coyote: when you wake up in the morning, you look at your partner in bed and you’d rather chew your arm off than waking her up)

Question: how did we reach this point? while the rest of the world is having so much fun, girls dancing supersexy movements all around you and you guiding them at your pleasure and they loving it? we didn’t miss just a few episodes, people, we are missing the entire movie here.

But hey, there is a good thing: if I grew up here in south america, now I would probably be a good salsa dancer and it would feel totally normal. Yeah, I would feel sad for those techno freaks that jump around with no style in their loud and dark caves, but I wouldn’t appreciate what I have. Having grown up as a techno caveman gives me the possibility to explore this new planet of dancing with style and appreciate even more what I can get out of it.

Meanwhile, the salsa lessons continue: we’ll see if they lead me out of my usual techno caves or my blatant western lack of body movement style will push me even deeper into them to hide from the shame.