Mrs Crowhill and I like to dance. Mostly variations of swing, but some other styles as well. These are partner dances, in which people actually touch and interact with each other, rather than standing a couple feet apart, pretending they suffer from epileptic fits.
In partner dances, you usually have a leader and a follower. Or, in more ancient tongue, a man and a woman.
The idea that the man leads doesn’t fit well with modern sensibilities, so in almost every dance class, the instructor goes to embarrassing and painful lengths to make politically correct exclamations.
“In this dance, and in no other circumstance in life, the man leads,” etc.
It’s annoying.
It’s not the most annoying thing in a dance lesson. People who interrupt the instructor with idiotic comments, people showing off (acting like the sort of people who joined the theater club in high school), and people who can’t follow simple instructions …. Those are all more annoying. But the social gymnastics over men leading are in the top 5, I would say.
It certainly causes me to lose substantial sleep.
If you lived an hour or so to the west, you could take lessons from my daughter in Berryville, and be spared that nonsense. Some of the other nonsense would still be there, of course, unless you ponied up for private lessons. 😉
I hope I run into her one of these days. 🙂
Is there something ideological going on here?
Hmm. Interesting question. Is it ideology, or is it the echo of ideology in the culture?
There are clearly some ideologies that relate to these comments. E.g., feminism, equality of the sexes, etc. But then there’s also the repudiation of an ideology — that men are the leaders in a family, etc.
If somebody started saying “from each according to his means to each according to his needs” at the lunch table, would that be ideology?
It seems to me that the repudiation of an (echo of) ideology is also an (echo of) ideology. Someone expresses a longing for the days when men were men and women were women is being no less ideological than someone who expresses the longing for the opposite.
*Someone who expresses