Well put. More than that, there's always a tension about rocking the boat when you care about what is, ultimately, a fragile and ephemeral activity; insisting that other participants join you in the 21st century (to put it slightly unkindly) runs the risk of alienating them, or creating a rift that the group can't recover from. I think it's worth making note of which anachronisms raise hackles and which don't (boys dancing together, yes; Twittering on a cell phone, no), and looking for the submerged social assumptions that might be responsible, but I suspect progressive Regency dancers are way ahead of me there.
I do dance almost exclusively as a man at RSCDS, but that is because I confuse easily, and would otherwise never be able to keep my corners straight. (So to speak.) I do sometimes dance with another boy to fill a set, and while people make noises about splitting us up when that happens (because we obviously wouldn't have chosen to dance together), nobody gives us the stink-eye about it.
I feel like ortsorfragments has posted about attending fancy-dress gender-free balls, but they would be in San Francisco, and perhaps of lesser utility.
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ninetydegrees
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on 2009-10-20 05:39 am (UTC)I do dance almost exclusively as a man at RSCDS, but that is because I confuse easily, and would otherwise never be able to keep my corners straight. (So to speak.) I do sometimes dance with another boy to fill a set, and while people make noises about splitting us up when that happens (because we obviously wouldn't have chosen to dance together), nobody gives us the stink-eye about it.
I feel like