FB Post/Thread/Discussion - Inappropriate Behavior In Tango

 

Confronting Rape Culture in Social Dance

https://interfusionfestival.com/confronting/

Sexual Assault/Harassment in Tango

We never learn - Safe Space Resources

The principles and tenets of safe space in tango are still not being applied in tango communities. It's like we never learn, destined to have incidents repeat themselves over and over again.

Nobody wants to hear about it, they don't want to know about it, they don't want to hear about it, they don't want to talk about it, they don't want to do a deep dive and look hard at the various issues in play, and they damn sure don't want to actually do anything functional/proactive to make Argentine tango communities safer from unwanted, predatory, and even criminal behavior.

It's heartbreaking.

Safer Dance Website

Safer Spaces Guidelines and other docs

Sample Codes of Conduct 

Adam's Note To Leaders (on giving unsolicited feedback)

This is what prompted my poll in the prior post. Hat tip to Daniel Boardman - organizer of the Albuquerque Tango Festival.

From Adam Cornett's Blog:

https://tangowithadam.com/adams-note-to-tango-leaders/

Every week one of my students comes to our private lesson with “feedback.” The feedback she tells me about is the feedback that numerous leaders in the community have been giving her. For many weeks I just answered her questions regarding the feedback (often times I was telling her that the feedback is wrong, because it has been) but today I asked her “how do you get all this feedback from these leaders, do you ask for it?” Her answer “sometimes but usually not.”

I mentioned this to Tilly and told her how surprised I was at how many leaders are giving this follower feedback and Tilly’s first comment was “that’s just part of being a follower.” She didn’t mean this as “that’s what makes followers good,” she meant it as “that’s a sad realization that followers have to put up with.” Tilly herself dealt with this for years when she was trying to be a part of the Boston tango community but quit multiple times because she as creeped out.

Here is my suggestion to leaders: STOP IT!!!

There is no reason why you should be giving this feedback. I watch so many leaders try to teach followers on the dance floor, STOP IT!!!

First: It is completely disrespectful to the follower. You are assuming that you are better than she is, which may not be the case.

Second: You are not the best judge of your own abilities. Often times if a follower is doing something wrong it is because your own problems are being amplified through her body and you are actually seeing your own problems. A true test of your own skill as a leader is to dance with a beginner and have her successfully move on the dance floor with you without saying a word. Showing/teaching her the new gancho (or anything for that matter) you just learned from youtube (or in a class but most likely not because you are now too good to continue your education) is ridiculous .

Third: You are scaring off our new followers. So often I see old men (and some young men) prey on the youngest and newest dancers to the community. There is nothing wrong with large age gaps in dancers. One of my favorite dancers in the world is Lyne Laflamme. Although I don’t know her age, our age difference is relative to this point. If you are much older than that early 20 something follower walking in for her first or second time and you feel it necessary to teach her how to dance allowing you access to her for 3-5 tandas, you’re being creepy, STOP IT!!!

Fourth: Leaders, when talking to an advanced follower stop comparing her to anything else but herself. She is not a porsche, lamborghini, volkswagen or any other car, or any other item. If you MUST say something, tell her “you are such a wonderful dancer,” a leave it at that.

While I’m at it (and these are actually complaints I’ve heard from women over the years): shower, wear deodorant, don’t push your package on her, don’t kiss her, don’t touch her inappropriately (grabbing areas that are not part of the dance), don’t put her hand on your parts, don’t sing in her ear, don’t assume that it’s always the other guys fault when you two bump, stay in your lane, don’t get within a dancers width of the couple in front of you, don’t dance around the room without your embrace (tango without hands or chest) expecting your follower to read your body language as a connection, and last but not least USE THE CABECEO (see awkward picture of me up top, don’t do that).

Poll on Unsolicited Feedback at Milongas

Sorry, comments cannot be over 8,000 characters

Michele, my personal opinion is that there is a general (societal?) assumption that people who perpetrate unacceptable behaviors understand what behaviors are unacceptable in social situations/social dance. We're talking about a minority of folks who perpetrate these behaviors, right? In our community of roughly 250 tango dancers, a figure which includes a dozen or two who rarely/never attend, with 100-150 "active" local dancers, 20-30-40 who attend events nearly every night of the week, there are probably 6-10 leaders (leaders vs. followers) that women have complained about/complain about exhibiting/perpetrating borderline to full-blown unacceptable behaviors. Some women in the community "complain-about-or-know-about-but-still-continue-to-dance-with-them", some women avoid these "problem" leaders, and unfortunately those new to the community are unaware, left to their own devices and unfortunate experiences to figure out who these men are for themselves, that is, unless, other women warn the newbies, as is often the case. My personal feeling is that a fair number of new followers leave our tango community and tango the dance for other social dances, early on (within a week or a month or a year) due to these unpalatable repeat experiences, versus other reasons like "tango is just not for me". Quantifying this number is nearly impossible. It's a gut feeling on my part. But, I do know of 2 or 3 who left, and another 2 or 3 who I was told left the community because of one particular repeat/serial perpetrator. We know of three women in the community who have experienced rather egregious harassing behaviors, one over a period of weeks, one over a period of months, and one over a period of many months. Unfortunately for our community, a number of (highly socially/grouply capitalized) people continue to support and enable and excuse this individual, a fact which has unfortunately caused a rift in the community, mostly involving boycotting of events, or dramatically curtailed attendance (by some) at events, or private/invitation only events. These perpetrator supporters feel that the unfortunate but very necessary public outing of the individual after many months of reports to people in leadership positions and no action being taken (a couple of instances of "the talk" did occur and she'll know who she is if she reads this) and being told to leave the individual alone and only seeing the individual continuing to grow in involvement and leadership and ingratiating oneself and rendering oneself indispensable and solidifying a self-anointed-self-appointed public national face of our community outweighed the seriousness of the harassment of these women. Community-level DARVO. Sorry to digress so much. And my apologies for continuing to write without paragraphs. I suppose my point is this: either these few men (6 out of say, 60 or 10 out of 100?) "know" what they are doing, are actively and premeditatively "taking liberties" (inappropriate non-consensual physical touch, physical proximity, or verbal comments being the vast majority of offenses), or they are completely oblivious of their behaviors, or that they are perpetrating these behaviors. (it's just who/the way they are aka Joe Biden effect) (and might benefit from a list of no's, but it's also probably these individuals who would never avail/think to avail themselves of said list) This, combined with the fact that social pressures mean these individuals are rarely confronted on the spot (on the dance floor by the party of the second part, or at the event that night by parties of the third part), and even more rarely are reported to organizers/(unstructured) community leadership. Our community, like most, has historically depended on organizers and teachers to respond to/deal with problems/complaints. In a vacuum without other teachers/organizers knowing of each other's problems/complaints. Or we sweep it under the rug. We have only recently (three months ago) made attempts at a comprehensive community-wide safe space policy, which resulted initially in a positively-worded safe space intention "statement" versus a full-blown policy, which I seriously doubt will ever come into being. Like most tango communities, we are very loosely organically organized and resistant to committees or boards or working groups or elected officers - which makes policy-making difficult/impossible. There has never been, to my knowledge, (in our community - or maybe any tango community, for that matter...) a listing or statement of "no's" or unacceptable behaviors. I take that back, here is a pretty blunt, albeit short list: https://bit.ly/2InCUB8. Kudos to our beloved EsquinaTango for putting this out there. I'm not calling them out here - because they have done more than most - but there it sits, like most, pretty deeply buried on a website, never to be talked about or have a flashlight shone on it in any healthy constructive communicative ongoing ways. Like maybe in a class. Just "touched on", not beat a dead horse talk about it for an hour. Touch on it in a class once a month for five minutes. Post the "List of No's" on the wall or hold up a flyer at a milonga and just mention it. Mention that it's on the website. Sorry, again, I digress. Kinda. What can I say, I'm a wordy kinda guy, perhaps even prone to verbal diarrhea. (grin) People don't want to talk about it. They don't want to hear about it. They don't want to know about it. They think it's bad publicity for the community to talk about it openly. They think people will think there is a problem in the community. (I'll admit there is some validity to these concerns.) Head in the sand shut up we just want to dance normal (un) healthy human inter/relationships group social societal dynamics type shit.

So, a paragraph finally! Yes, I think there should be a long and brutal brutally honest list of no's and specific inappropriate behaviors. Perhaps a mix and negative and positive language. Perhaps touched on in classes. (Perhaps required by policy if teachers wish to operate under the wider community umbrella of the dancers by the dancers for the dancers.) Perhaps mentioned at milongas. (Perhaps required by policy if organizers wish to operate under the wider community umbrella of the dancers by the dancer for the dancers.) Perhaps periodic a few times a year "tango talk" or "men's tango talks" type tango talks about inappropriate behavior bad habits consent respect behavior-change here's what the womenfollowershumans are saying/don't like - you make me want to I want to try to be a better man/human being type shit. Perhaps incorporated into a full-blown code of conduct safe space policy document with what to do who to talk to if you experience something that feels creepy inappropriate and what will happen if you make a formal report and what to expect if you make a formal report and future perpetrators are maybe deterred from current and future creepy behaviors (or maybe deterred from joining the community in the first place) and it's all about consent and mutual fucking human respect because they see this (tango) community is no longer going to abide as in "This aggression will not abide, man."

Yes, most of us, most humans, don't need a list of "what not to do to other people" and general human etiquette/respect. But maybe now it's #metoo time for making a list and talking about it (or listening about it) even though it makes you/us all uncomfortable to talk about it but talk about it openly and brutally honestly because it's the fucking right thing to do. Y'all. Sorry, again, Michele to digress and get so...so...you get my drift, I hope. And I'm sure it's not lost on you this was not so much a reply to your query, but a long overdue long pent-up diatribe dissertation on the subject. Thank you all (all y'all as we say) for reading and listening and pondering and wanting to be better human beings and acting on that.

Lastly, please forgive/overlook all my cis wording/syntax. It's meant for all, with an open heart and open mind.

Anonymous Stories of Inappropriate Behavior In Tango

Here's the link to share your story, or share with a friend who has a story. Spread the word: https://www.suggestionox.com/r/Bk7Ngh



I have a theory that if people can remain anonymous, they are much more inclined to share their stories of inappropriate behavior in tango communities around the U.S. And around the world I suppose. With the goal of everyone hearing the stories, informing themselves, and hopefully informing and driving change in tango communities everywhere. And bearing witness. Supporting this growing number of victims. Someone said, "it's not an epidemic, but one is too many" - it is a known issue in every tango community - there is no doubt about that.

Well, I take that back, it appears there is substantial doubt that it is a problem. Or people just don't give a shit. Or that it's enough of a problem for the community to organize and do anything/something about. This aberrant thinking, group-thinking, which can paralyze a community into inaction. Inaction over many years because they believe it's not the community's place to put in an organizational or policy "structure". They believe the community has no authority to force some policy on teachers and organizers, when they want to be free and independent and autonomous operators under the greater community umbrella, selling their tango "products" to the consumers aka dancers. And making their own policies. Or the community believes that the teachers and organizers have no authority to implement a community-wide safe space policy. Nobody believes anybody has the authority.

A no-win situation. Lose-lose for everyone, especially the victims. Lose-lose for tango. Lose-lose for our souls. For our morality. For our ethics.

No one wants to stand up out of fear. Women don't want to come forward with their stories, justifiably, because they will be attacked, or scorned, or shunned, or not believed. The perpetrators will often be supported over their victims. We've all witnessed this in the news over the past two years. We've witnessed it in our tango communities.

Only one or two, or three or a half-dozen leaders who are chronic/serial offenders can cause a strong undercurrent of long-term discord in a tango community, cause followers to leave the community, cause new dancers not to engage, not to "stick", cause people to boycott milongas and practicas, venues, teachers, and yes, even festivals. If one of those chronic/serial offenders is in a position of authority in the community, and a group within that community continues to protect that individual, with community-level DARVO, it can do real damage to the health and growth of a tango community.

Tango communities fracture over this. Splinter groups form. Private, invitation-only milongas spring forth. The Tango Underground. It's even within the realm of possibility that an entire parallel community could spring up in a small town or large metropolitan area. A parallel universe of tango where safe spaces and codes of conduct are held as paramount principles for all to be mindful of, for teachers to interweave into their classes, and for all to adhere to and talk about. Without fear of reprisals. Without fears of being judged.

A Tango Universe of the dancers, by the dancers, for the dancers.

Note that I say "leaders" to keep it simple, ascribing to the historical male/leader - female/follower in tango. But obviously this works in all directions and all gender identities. Most commonly these incidents are male upon female.

I'm thinking something like the Standing Up For Safer Spaces Tumblr blog, only without the photos.

Here's the link to share your story, or share with a friend who has a story. Spread the word: https://www.suggestionox.com/r/Bk7Ngh

I'll be creating a new blog to publish these (with any identifying details redacted), along with resources for creating a safe space / code of conduct / behavioral guidelines policy for your tango community.


The actual stories will be posted over here: https://tangoincognitoblog.blogspot.com/

Four Psychological Traits of Sexual Harassers

While most incidents of inappropriate behavior in tango fall into the inadvertent/accidental/unconscious realm, with some in the stupid/creepy unwanted sexual attention realm, fewer in the conscious serial repetitive offenses with multiple women over months or years, and then the more rare, but very serious bona fide sexual harassment.

From Psychology Today - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-be-yourself/201711/four-psychological-traits-sexual-harassers

Ellen Hendriksen, Ph.D.
How to Be Yourself
Four Psychological Traits of Sexual Harassers
What traits make someone prone to sexually harassing others?
Posted Nov 09, 2017

Sexual harassment is as rife as it is revolting. In recent weeks, revelations about sexual harassment and its devastating effects have flooded news and social media feeds. From Kevin Spacey to Harvey Weinstein and many others (and let’s not even get started on Uber), it’s clear and unfortunate that sexual harassment is common. But aside from a few legal-team-filtered statements, we don’t have an insight into the mentality of the accused harassers. What are they thinking when they commit these vile acts?

But before we get into the psychology of sexual harassment, let’s define exactly what we’re talking about. What exactly is sexual harassment?

A common myth is that sexual harassment is just a few notches down from sexual assault but it’s not that simple.

Sexual harassment is uniquely tied to power structures, often in employment and career advancement situations. The perpetrator holds the key to moving onwards and upwards, creating a dilemma for the victim: submit and be exploited or resist and be punished. The victim is placed in an intimidating lose-lose situation without any power or control.

Therefore, sexual harassment can and does run the gamut from demeaning comments to requests for sexual favors to unwanted sexual advances. In addition, it doesn’t always but certainly can include sexual assault, which is any non-consensual or coerced sexual act, including sexual touching.

Harassment is also different than unwanted sexual attention, which consists of unwelcome come-ons and comments that are not primarily designed to demean and intimidate. Think terrible pick-up lines: “I lost my teddy bear, will you sleep with me instead?” from a guy at the bar is unwanted sexual attention, but from your boss, it’s sexual harassment.

To be clear, it’s not only women as victims and men as perpetrators, even though that setup is the vast majority of cases. Of the 13,000 charges of sexual assault logged in 2016 by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (believed to be just the tip of the iceberg), 83 percent of them were filed by women.

And the women who face sexual harassment by bosses and supervisors aren’t just rising Hollywood starlets or, like Anita Hill, Yale-educated lawyers. They’re everyday people—restaurant workers, clerks, flight attendants, students, health care workers, programmers—whose bosses control scheduling, raises, future promotions, and references.

So who sexually harasses? I dug through the research and found four common characteristics of the (mostly) men who sexually harass (mostly) women.

The Four Characteristics of Sexual Harassers

The Dark Triad
Moral disengagement
Employment in a male-dominated field
Hostile attitudes towards women

Let's explore each a little further.

Characteristic #1: The Dark Triad

With a name like “the Dark Triad,” you can bet this is a doozy of a personality trait. Actually, it’s three in one: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.
The first two are probably familiar to you: narcissism is an inflated view of one’s own talents coupled with a lack of empathy and a deep urgency for approval. Narcissists don’t care if you like them, but they do need you to think they’re powerful and worthy of admiration.

Narcissists find a way to justify sexual harassment if they think they’ve been deprived of a sexual experience they “deserve.” They just can’t fathom that someone wouldn’t be interested in the opportunity to get attention from them.

Next, psychopathy revolves around two things: fearless dominance and aggressive impulsivity. In other words, psychopaths are audacious, manipulative exploiters. They too have no empathy but excel at mimicking the correct emotions to exploit their victims.

Psychopaths sexually harass for one reason—because they want to. If the opportunity presents itself (or they create the opportunity), they’ll take full advantage.
Finally, there’s Machiavellianism, named for the Italian Renaissance politician Niccolo Machiavelli. His masterwork, The Prince, describes an unscrupulous, deceitful political philosophy with an eye on long-term goals at any cost.

Combine these three traits and you’re met with a gleeful enthusiasm for exploitation, deception, and manipulation coupled with an indifferent blindness to the feelings of others, all wrapped up nicely with a bow of grandiosity. In other words, a perfect recipe for sexual harassment. Indeed, in a study of almost 2,000 everyday community members, researchers found, unsurprisingly, that each of the Dark Triad characteristics added to a tendency to sexually harass others.

Characteristic #2: Moral disengagement

This is another whopper of a characteristic. Moral disengagement is a slippery slope; a cognitive process by which individuals justify their own corruption and create their own version of reality where moral principles don’t apply to them.
Moral disengagement was first proposed by the psychologist Albert Bandura, who is often referred to as the greatest living psychologist. His theory, as applied to sexual harassment, has several parts:

1. First comes moral justification, or portraying harassment as an acceptable action. Think of Harvey Weinstein’s line, “I came of age in the '60s and '70s when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different.”

2. Next is euphemistic labeling: Using sanitized terms for naming their behavior, like Bill Cosby’s characterization of his sexual assaults as “rendezvous.”

3. Third is displacement of responsibility, attributing the harassment to outside forces beyond their control, like Weinstein’s “that was the culture then.”

4. There's also advantageous comparison which is the insistence that their behavior could have been worse, and distortion of consequences, where individuals minimize the harm wrought by their actions on the victims.

5. And finally, there are dehumanization and attribution of blame, which respectively eliminate concern for the victim and blame her for the incident. Bill O’Reilly did both of these when he commented that a woman who was raped and killed was “moronic” because she was wearing a miniskirt and a halter top, and that “every predator in the world is gonna pick that up.”

The end result? Harassers have no trouble sleeping at night because, through moral disengagement, they rest assured they did nothing wrong, that their actions were normal and deserved, and that they didn’t cause any harm.

The mind is a tricky thing: we often choose behaviors that match our values, but sometimes, through moral disengagement, we change those values to justify our behavior. This is how sexual harassers can maintain their view of themselves as decent, even morally upstanding people.

Characteristic #3: Employment in a male-dominated field

Sexual harassment is well-documented to be more prevalent in traditionally masculine fields, such as the military, the police force, surgery, finance, and more recently, high tech and the upper echelons of the entertainment industry.

This revelation is nothing new: an old 1989 study of 100 female factory workers found that women who worked as machinists—a male-dominated position—reported being harassed significantly more often than women who worked on the assembly line, which was more gender-equal.


Characteristic #4: Hostile attitudes towards women


Even though psychology is a science, it’s not a totally objective field, in most part because research is done by people, and people respond to and draw conclusions from their culture and the biases of a given place and time. Interestingly, while researching this episode, I found a study on sexual harassment from the early 1980s—almost a decade prior to Anita Hill’s testimony at Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings—that stated that most male sexual harassers had no idea that their advances were unwanted or inappropriate. The conclusion was that people who engaged in sexual harassment were simply clueless and infatuated, but now we know better.

The University of Bielefeld in Germany conducted a study in 2012 testing whether harassment was driven by what researchers called a “short term mating orientation,” basically an academic euphemism for love ‘em and leave ‘em—or was driven by something called hostile sexism, and therefore served less as a way to just get sex and more as a way to intimidate and coerce women.

The researchers asked 100 heterosexual male college students to chat online with “Julia,” an attractive 23-year-old woman. With each chat exchange, participants were asked to choose among three different pre-written messages to send to Julia.

The men were also told that this was a memory test and that Julia would later be tested on memory recall. To create an air of competition, they were told that previous studies had found gender differences in the ability to remember.

For each message, the men chose among a joke, a comment, and a neutral statement. Now, some of the exchanges were carefully calibrated to include opportunities to harass. For example, in one combination, the joke was a sexist joke about women in general: “What’s the difference between a woman having her period and a terrorist? With a terrorist, you can negotiate.” It also included a terrible pickup line: “You’re a sweet chocolate and I’ve got the filling for you.” Thankfully, there was also a simple neutral statement: “You seem like a cheerful person.” Participants chose one of the messages to send and then repeated this over 20 different trials.

The results found that the men who were more likely to send the bad pickup lines were also more likely to agree with statements like “sex without love is okay,” or “I would consider having sex with a stranger if it was safe and she was attractive.” Their attitudes mapped onto the “short-term mating orientation.”

Now, those who chose to send the sexist jokes also scored highly on the short-term sexual attitudes questionnaire. But there was more: they scored highly on a questionnaire of hostile sexism, endorsing items like, “Women are too easily offended,” and “The world would be a better place if women supported men more and criticized them less.”

In other words, purely sexual motives predicted unwanted sexual attention but belligerent motives anticipated both unwanted sexual attention and gender harassment. Choosing to send the hostile joke wasn’t about sex at all; it was about creating a disparaging, inhospitable climate for Julia in the context of a competitive atmosphere.

A good litmus test for whether comments are sexist or just a joke is to ask, “Would I say this to a man?” It’s a way to highlight statements that might get defended by a harasser as “harmless fun,” or “What, I can’t even give a compliment?” For instance, a male supervisor wouldn’t tell a man he should smile more, make a pass about the attractiveness of his body, or say, “You don’t have to get all emotional about it.”

To sum it all up, harassment indicates a willingness to exploit and manipulate as a way to maintain or gain power. It demonstrates carelessness toward the victims and aims to “keep them in their place.”

There will likely always be psychopaths and moral disengagement, but hopefully, with all the recent attention given to sexual harassment, more victims and observers will speak up and speak out and sexual harassment will go the way of Harvey Weinstein’s career.

Standing Up For Safer Spaces :: Inappropriate Behavior in Tango

Tumblr blog I ran across in searching for information on developing a safe space policy for tango communities...

Obviously not tango-community specific...but other social dances...

This one strikes a chord:



“I support standing up for safer dance spaces because I have seen people bullied and ostracized by abusers who had more social clout in the community.”

First Post
From arguing when someone says “no” to a dance, to touching someone without their consent, we believe every incident that makes someone uncomfortable deserves to be addressed. We believe that (cis-)sexism, harassment, abuse, and assault are not just an individual problem but a community issue. Many of us have quit attending events or being in spaces that have failed to hear our concerns. We have come together to share our stories with the hope that our communities, including event organizers, will take serious measures to reform the status quo.

We suggest a variety of strategies including:
-listening to and believing survivors
-publicizing and implementing clear and rigorous codes of conduct
-reaching out to people who have expressed concerns
-re-evaluating whether current leadership is adequate or appropriate for addressing safety problems
-establishing a well-trained designated and visible event safety team
-continuing to work to create safer spaces for everyone

Stay tuned for the photos from our first Standing Up For Safer Spaces event!


https://saferspaces.tumblr.com/

or the archive

https://saferspaces.tumblr.com/archive

facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/standingupforsaferspaces/