Who is your teen grinding on at school dances???

We've all been to high school dances. For me it was prom in both my junior and senior years. That was the extent of it. The lights were low, the theme sucked and so did the setting - my high school's 80-plus year-old basketball gym. One year I stuck around with my date through the dance and even the post-prom lock-in and we actually had fun. The other year found my date and I having differences and we went our separate ways which lead to us not speaking for nearly a year but we smoothed things over and are damn good friends now. But maybe things could have been different with that last part of the story. Maybe things could have been different if the music was heavier. Maybe if the music had more of a dance beat with some more rhythmic undertones to it there would have been some grinding going on. But let's get real, that was 1996 and I don't remember any suggestive or sexual dancing going on.

Oh, how things have changed in a little more than a decade as witnessed by this video done before Minnetonka High School's 1996 Homecoming dance.



But the dance moves described there make current teen dance trends seem like something from the 1950s. Especially based on this story from the Milwaukee area.

What actually piques my interest are the rules...

• When dancing back to front, all dancers must remain upright -- no sexual bending is allowed. Examples are, no hands on knees, and no hands on the dance floor with your buttocks touching your dance partner.

• There will be no touching of the breasts, buttocks, or genitals.

• There will be no straddling of each others' legs.

• Boys must wear collared shirts and dress pants.

• Girls cannot have dresses that expose cleavage, extend above the mid-thigh, (or) have slits extending above mid-thigh.

I particularly like the phrase "sexual bending". I can guess what it as after being at a few gentlemen's clubs but how is that incorporated in to any sort of dancing that you'd want to do at a high school dance. That's the kind of shit that goes on at a rockin' house party where everyone is drinking and making worse decisions than they usually do.

But what's my stance on "sexual bending" in dancing? Go for it. High school should be fun and "sexual bending" sure beats flat out sex. Remember when you were 16 years old? You were probably a huge ball of hormones pretty much ready to jump on anyone that moves so if "sexual bending" during a dance takes the edge off those hormones then that's a good thing. It's definitely better than a bunch of horned up teenagers who are too embarrassed to buy a box of condoms finding a dark road to occupy their time because they can't dance the way they want to at their own high school.

Sure, my opinion is likely to change in about 15 years when my girl reaches that age but wait until then to call me a hypocrite.

Until then, bide your time by checking out the photos of Minnesota on a daily basis at MinnPics.