silence

The other night I went dancing. The scene is still small and I'm pretty much always there, so I generally recognise most people I see when I enter a venue. People I know well, people I know by face but not by name, people I love to dance with, people who are in massive demand that I have to fight to dance with. Then there are the people I will not dance with again under any circumstances.

This dance shitlist is small and not based on dance quality. I can easily dance with someone who's not very good. To get on the shitlist you either have to dance in a way that's physically painful to your partner, or be seriously creepy. For example, my shitlist contains the following names:

Ass Groper: guy spent most of the dance just shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, then suddenly reached out and started rubbing my ass.

Spine Trumpet: whose idea of leading is to hold me uncomfortably tightly and poke me in the back and/or hands, leaving me in some pain and also once with a bruise on my wrist.

Crotch Lead: WORST DANCE EVER OH MY GOD I WILL NEVER GET OVER IT.

This time I saw the most recent addition to my Do Not Dance list: the Skirtlifter. When I danced with him a couple of months ago, he held my hand quite low against my leg, and then using my hand as a sort of cover he physically lifted up my skirt and started stroking my thigh. I went Eek and tensed up my hand to force him away, he said, "Mmmm, just as good as I remember," and I fought back the urge to throw up on his shoulder. There will be no more dances with this guy.

I told people about him. There is a creepy guy, he did a creepy thing, would recommend you avoid. And said people, after going, "Ew," would say, "Did you say anything?" or "I hope you smacked him."

Well, no, I didn't. I froze up and tried to work out how I could get out of this with the least amount of fuss.

We are socialised to believe that nothing is a problem until someone draws attention to it, and therefore that the act of stating the problem out loud is what creates it. So when people complain about something that's made them uncomfortable, they're making a scene, creating drama, forcing everyone else to be aware of something unpleasant when they were quite happy in their ignorance, thanks. So we are tacitly encouraged to keep quiet, try and make the problem go away as politely and diplomatically as possible, without letting anyone know the problem was ever there, including and perhaps especially the perpetrator (because they can't have meant it, they were probably trying to be nice, it was only a joke, it didn't actually hurt you, now, did it? Which leads to that lovely and familiar pattern where you're overreacting because it didn't hurt you, right up until you do get hurt, at which point you really ought to have done something about that, you know).

The idea that we aren't to upset Creepy Guy, that it's not nice to set boundaries with Creepy Guy or get him banned from places where he's been persistently creepy, is so ingrained at this point that it's very hard to fight against in the moment. I'm a lot stronger about boundaries than I used to be, but my instinctive reaction to being unexpectedly felt up was Oh God hand on thigh get it off very politely and then finish the dance and say thank you and walk away and never come back. Reprogramming myself not to do this is going to be pretty tough.

In the latter days of Crotch Lead's reign of doom and terror, I told several people that I'd had enough of hiding on the other side of the room and letting him take over my night. I told them that the next time he asked me to dance, I would say no, and also tell him why I was saying no. Most people, including the ones who'd said they'd just kick him in the nuts if he tried it or that he "wouldn't dare" dance with them like that, looked completely taken aback. "No thank you, the way you dance makes me really uncomfortable" shouldn't be such a radical statement, but there is something about a person (particularly a woman) openly and bluntly refusing to do something she's not comfortable with that feels almost transgressive. In the end I didn't say anything, mostly because he never did ask me again. But that, in turn, was mostly because I never really did stop hiding from him.

Dance-wise, I am absolutely secure in my limits. I don't question whether I should be enjoying something more than I am or whether I'm overreacting to a certain hand placement. I am completely comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, as it were, and I won't subject myself to it again just to be nice or to seem more likable. But actually saying something directly, even to someone who clearly knows he's doing something inappropriate, still feels like it's beyond me, and I don't quite know why that is. It would be better for the scene if we spoke out. And the worst that could happen is - what? That the person in question mocks me for overreacting and won't dance with me again? That he mocks me to other people? That his feelings are very badly hurt by me taking his innocent groping the wrong way and never comes back? None of these are catastrophic things, and having Creepy Guy and his creepy friends avoid me or socials in general as determinedly as I avoid them would improve my evenings tremendously. And yet still I keep quiet.

This shouldn't be a part of the scene. We should be able to deal with this when we see it, instead of defaulting to the strange and inefficient method of letting them dance with everyone in the scene until everybody is avoiding them and they stop coming back because all the women mysteriously vanish between songs (in effect, what happens is that the regulars all find out pretty quickly and Creepy Guy just spends months upsetting new dancers and putting them off the scene entirely). It should be normal and expected for dancers to set boundaries, and for those boundaries to be accepted by others. We shouldn't be managing Creepy Guy's potential hurt feelings first and foremost, driving other dancers away from the scene in the process, but that's what we do. It's easier to go with what we know, to not make a fuss, to underreact for as long as possible then feel bad when people start to get hurt.

I have no solution. But maybe seeing the problem is a start.