the up side of exoticism

[keryx]

I've talked before about my discomfort at playing to the exotic/erotic thing that people seem to respond to about bellydance, right. The godawful flirting with a veil, sitting on random dudes' laps at restaurants, the "please please put a tip in my bra" shimmy, that kind of thing - ew.

But there's another aspect of the exotic in the dance and drum form that I've been pondering - it's this notion that it's all about some kind of primal feminine beauty, that it represents this other culture (well, the tribal stuff doesn't, but the audience doesn't always get that), that it's inherently sexy because... you know, women moving their hips. Egads.

There are some advantages to that. Being a bellydancer makes you automatically beautiful because of this exoticism - and that's pretty cool when you're dancing in front of another woman who looks like you and didn't realize that humans can accept the whole range of body variation as gorgeous. [Sidenote: wow, lately I have been so aware of this - 99% of people I meet are insanely hot, I swear. The other 1% would be if they weren't so busy being asshats.] I imagine in a tiny way it saves every little girl who looks like she's having some kind of religious experience watching us - that is, she gets to see the dramatic range of bodies in the tribe as all these possible variants on pretty.

Of course, my inner feminist is all but what if that's all she thinks it's important to be now? - because everyone thinks they can just shake it (next time we go out to dance on the street, I'm totally taking a tip jar & demanding that people pay me to watch them drunkenly dance), they don't look at a dancer and think strong, they think pretty. We're both, yo. I want people to respond to the strength, too - not just playing with pointy things and setting things on fire, but the pure strength of dancing like we dance.

Buuuuut. The truth is the dancing is sexy, and audiences respond to that. It looks sexy, partly because we just don't see people move like that when they're not trying to be sexy most of the time - we know correlation when we see it (though of course, because people not projecting "Please Love Me" are compelling, the hottest dancers are the ones who could give a fuck if you thought they were hot). But it also feels sexy - it's inhabiting all of your body at once, particularly when the drums are really on, which I know I at least get off on more than I generally cop to(your mileage may vary). [EFC (edited for clarity) - I don't mean that the only reason I do it, or even a particularly important one - just that it is one & I want to own up to that.]

Puts the dancer in a really odd space, then. Here I am dancing in part because I think it's hot as hell (and, you know, art!), but I don't want an audience to just see this external "ooh, sexy dancing" shit. I don't want them to respond to it as just another female body for consumption. I want them to see the full depth of the athleticism involved, to respond to the community we are, to have their minds poked at least a little, to feel transformed a bit (spiritually, emotionally, however). Sure, they can still think it's hot, but in a feminist utopian way.

Not that audiences are controllable that way. You can't make them see anything your way - because you can't make people do that, period.

Comments

[luna-littleone.livejournal.com]

For me dance is not just 'sexy'.
It's spiritual.
It's why that opening part to our dance means alot to me. It's a prayer.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Of course. The sexy is one part of it; I just only talked about that significantly in this post because that's the idea I was dwelling on.

[jane-ire.livejournal.com]

It's sad that belly dance has been fetishized in the way that is has been. It is sexy, but as a celebration of womanhood/life, etc. I say enjoy it and to hell with the idiots who don't get it! :)

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Indeed! And that's pretty much what I do. At the same time, I wonder whether I'm making the world better (which is, basically, what I want out of life) or worse by participating in something that so many people respond to as exotically, stereotypically sexy. At least I participate in a way that I believe draws attention to community, spirit, strength & the other things I care most about.

[fierceawakening.livejournal.com]

I sometimes feel vaguely similarly about SM. It's so easy for people to see "oh, she must be really hypersexualized" and not so easy for people to see some of the feminist reasons I have for liking (or for criticizing!) the community (many spaces often feel a lot more accepting of women expressing their sexuality not on stereotypical terms, and safer for women to do that), etc.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

That's a really good point on the BDSM side - I think there are a lot of similarities, actually, in the way women's sexuality is perceived (generally by outsiders) on both fronts.

It comes down to (for me) that it's something I love and I am in fact bringing one corner closer to the world I like just by being there & approaching it from my perspective. As I think you do (or at least you have for the corner of feminism intersecting with BDSM that I've learned from you in).

[fierceawakening.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that. :)

[libskrat]

Honey, you gotta figure out which hill you're gonna die on. :)

If you want to die on the "expand beauty to everyone" hill, then stick with the bellydance.

If you want to die on the "sexy isn't the only game in town" hill, then yeah, you probably need to pick another dance form that doesn't have the heavy audience expectation of sexiness. (Me, I've always wanted to learn various varieties of Mexican folkdance. YMMV.)

Until you pick your poison, you're just going to keep confusing yourself.

Me, I think "more power to you" either way.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Ehn, but this is a folk dance I love. It's an american folk dance - the tribal stuff is, at least, and it's also grounded itself in feminist thought.

I do think to a certain degree one can expand the audience's expectations, if not change them. The sexy is not, to my mind, inherently problematic. It's the shallowness of the sexy, if that makes sense.

There are many other aspects I didn't talk about in today's post (I could talk about the little sub-thoughts of my view of dance for days, and have actually spent a couple of days trying to narrow this post down a bit - I think it'll need to feed something longer eventually). Like the audience interpretation of sexy, the grunch effect of that - not participating because of that seems in some ways akin to assuming women shouldn't wear short skirts because it might "provoke" unwanted male comments (or even as is often applied attack). Which makes me want to keep doing it more, ya know?

[libskrat]

Yes, that makes sense.

The question becomes, then, how to expand and change audience expectations -- how to make them see a little more of what you want them to see.

I dunno. You're the dancer, not me. How? :)

[kazoogrrl.livejournal.com]

I think for me, the problem is not that bellydance is sexual or sensual. It's that we live in a world that perceives sexy and sensual as bad. Why is dance devoid of these things "high" art, and admirable, while dance that is imbued with these qualities is "low" art (or not even considered an art) and is not admired?

I mean, the human body is fucking amazing! And it's sexy - it is sexy all the damn time! I think people should realize this - human bodies are inherently sexy, and sensual, and beautiful. When cooking, when working, when sleeping, when dancing, when walking down the steet, when a person is being sexy on purpose and when a person is not thinking of sex at all. We should get over the idea that sexy is bad. /end idealistic rant

[keryx.livejournal.com]

I'm not arguing that sexy is bad - I'm just continually struck by how women's sexiness (and really, everyone's) is treated as mostly consumable. I think a world that had less stigma attached to sexy would be able to get past that, though. At least I hope it would.

[libskrat]

Because I, for one, don't want to be perceived as sexy all the damn time. Folks' mileage varies on this one, a lot. Me, personally, what I want people to see when they see me is totally orthogonal to "sexy."

If that's how you want to be seen, okay. I just want to be left alone in my own little corner, where "sexy" or not doesn't even come up (so to speak).

[kazoogrrl.livejournal.com]

I'm not thinking of sexy in the realm of sex. Sexy probably isn't the right word, sensual might work better. But I think that people are sexy/sensual/pick your word at all times, not just when they are purposely exhibiting sexiness or are engaged in activities that are linked to sex (or that people think should be linked to sex, i.e. dance). I don't feel that sexy/etc. things need to be viewed with lust, they can be viewed just for being.

[libskrat]

Fair enough, and that far I'll agree with you. Part of my problem (and keryx knows I'm a huge curmudgeon about this) is that having one's beauty and sexuality measured is so often imposed, even unwantedly, and can be so bloody hard to escape.

But appreciating beauty where it exists, everywhere it exists, without having to run it through the sex filter? Hell yeah. Rock on.

[cutegaychick.livejournal.com]

*shrug* Belly dancers are hot. The males and females. Dancers in general tend to be hot because dancing is often sexy, regardless of whatever else it is. I get off on dancing and on drumming and on watching the dancers and being part of the groove. The sex energy coming off a group of dancers is incredible sometimes. But I refuse to be responsible for the audience perception. If they look at me and see me as nothing more than a dancing sex toy, that's a shame for them but that's not really my problem. And if my fellow dancers see themselves as nothing more than dancing sex toys, that's also a shame for them but still not really my problem.

[firecat]

Only 1% of the people you know are asshats? I'm moving there.

I started to say that I think most people do see the "full depth" of dancers and don't only see them as shallow 'consumable' hip-wiggling. But actually I don't know.

I distinguish between "sexy" and "alive" - to me all dancers are expressing "aliveness" very fully, and the ones who also want me to stick a dollar bill in their cleavage (e.g., Big Burlesque) are also expressing "sexy". I think that people acting "alive" are very hot, but hot is beyond sexy for me.

Ghod, I get so inarticulate when I try to talk about this stuff.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Not inarticulate at all. I actually really like the distinction between "alive" and "sexy". It's the "alive" that I get from it more than anything else. Does the culture really differentiate between the two, though? Maybe that's part of the issue. Yes, there is the "bellydancing = sex" thing left over from the 70s when it was last trendy in the US, but there may also be the issue that people respond to "alive" like it's "sexy", too.

I'm kindof thinking as alive here as hot-with-depth, a primeval human thing, right? As opposed to sexy, which is more strictly evocative of sexuality/availability? I might be reading you wrong.

[firecat]

I'm probably the wrong person to ask what "the culture" tries to do with these felt-sense things. But I do think belly dancing is associated in the US with sexy. I think stuff like ballet is less associated with sexy and more with alive.

Alive = vital (not a very helpful definition, sorry)
Sexy = deliberately attempting to create sexual interest, flirtatious

Alive is not only relevant to humans to me - a playful friendly pet animal also reads as alive to me. So does some art, although since that's created by humans it's still relevant to humans.