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After Curfew
Rendering Grinders Toothless
NO one forgets their first time. “It’s like your first kiss, though hardly something every girl dreams about,” said Lilli Beard, 19, an incoming freshman at an Ivy League university, recalling her first “grind” at the tender age of 13.
“It was at my Catholic girls’ school in Manhattan,” she recently said, laughing at what was then a horribly embarrassing moment. “The minute the nuns walked out, this guy came up, completely unsolicited, and latched onto the back of me while I danced with my friends. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Summer camp ... five years ago,” declared my 19-year-old daughter, Harriet. “Me, too,” echoed her sister, Florence, 15, admitting it had happened to her the previous July at the dance at the boys’ camp. So much for archery and macramé.
“Grinding is exactly what it sounds like,” said Tom Rosenbluth, head of the middle school at Francis W. Parker, a K-12 independent school in Chicago, who says he has had so much experience with this style of dancing among his seventh and eighth graders that he cannot help but refer to himself as a “grinding expert.” He added: “It’s basically sex with your clothes on in public.”
The Web site Urban Dictionary has nearly 50 definitions for grinding, though perhaps only No. 18 is really suitable for publication: “Basically the boy gets behind the girl, puts his hands on her hips, and they rock from side to side. It’s supposed to mimic sex, and the teachers hate it.”
Turns out some of the female dance partners do, too. Now, a decade after grinding (or freak dancing as it was initially called) first appeared on hip-hop spring break specials on MTV, there seems to be the beginning of a backlash.
The leader of this anti-grinder movement, taking cues from Sarah Silverman, is the video blogger Jenna Marbles, 24, (her real name is Jenna Mourey) who after receiving both a bachelor’s and a master’s in sports psychology at Suffolk University in Boston, began making YouTube videos. One posted this year on how to ward off grinders has been viewed more than 9 million times.
How to combat a grinder? Just telling the offender to walk away won’t work, she says: “They don’t care. They hear stuff like that all the time.” Instead, she tells girls to do what she does: quickly turn around, say nothing and then stand there staring at the guy with a horrified expression of repulsion on your face, a tactic she claims works every time. “Don’t change your face, don’t look around, don’t talk to your friends. Just stand there.”
It’s a foolproof method, she says in the video: “They walk away. I swear, it is like the greatest thing I have ever come up with.”
Others might want to follow the lead of Saskia Rolland-Bezem, a sophomore at McGill University in Montreal, who said that she and her friends came up with a workable solution after being confronted with too many uncomfortable grinds in her freshman year.
“We dance on something elevated or we dance in a circle with our butts facing inside instead of out,” she said. “That way it’s really hard for guys to dance on us.”
And the guys? Maybe pity is the best option. “You have to understand,” said Sam Dodge, 20, a junior at the University of Michigan, “guys don’t know how to dance.”
He was in the seventh grade, he explained, when a girl at a dance suddenly backed into him. “Grinding allows guys to just hold onto the girl and follow her moves,” he said. “You dance away if she seems really rigid and uncomfortable with it and continue dancing if she seems pretty casual and relaxed in her movements.”
But, he added, somewhat uncomfortably, “Then there are the girls who really go to town.”
This is the first of a monthly column that will explore the social lives of teens and adolescents.
Stepping Into the World of Dance
Eduardo Vilaro celebrates his 15th year as artistic director of Ballet Hispánico with a premiere exploring the life of the painter Juan de Pareja.
The spring season at New York City Ballet opened with an all-Balanchine program and a vintage miniature from 1975: “Errante,” staged for a new generation.
Under the banner “American Legacies,” the Martha Graham Dance Company dusted off a classic, “Rodeo,” premiered a companion piece and welcomed FKA twigs for a guest solo at City Center.
As Harlem Stage’s E-Moves dance series turns 25, Bill T. Jones and other major choreographers discuss its impact on Black dance in New York.
“We the People,” Jamar Roberts’s first dance for the Martha Graham Dance Company, finds the rage and resistance hidden in an upbeat score by Rhiannon Giddens.
In “Nail Biter,” a New York City premiere, the exacting choreographer Beth Gill explores her ballet roots and how to be in her body now.
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