Since I wrote about bosoms last week in honor of Breast
Cancer Awareness month, I thought this week I would write about bums, as in
gluts. As in our bottoms.
I’m writing about butts because it only seemed fair and
because, well, I need to set the record straight on something. As anyone who
reads this blog knows, I love to dance. I’m not particularly good at it, but
I love it. After the sensational Miley Cyrus twerking incident at the VH1 music
awards, I got some very personal questions about my opinion of the whole thing
that included the full-out solicitation of my thoughts on the dance move itself.
There was even some hinting about whether or not I, myself, have twerked. Let
me set the record straight right here and right now…
I think before I twerk. I can twerk. I have twerked. I
simply choose not to twerk.
I have nothing against the dance move, which you can see by
going to Youtube and typing “twerking” in the search box. FAIR WARNING: This
will bring up all kinds of demonstrations of twerking, from the least obscene one
can make it to the most bizarrely pornographic. Miley Cyrus’s version, I
thought, was fairly tame compared to most I’ve seen. If done correctly, it can
be a viable option for choreography, depending on the dancer, audience, venue,
and music, but it's not for everyone. Most of the objections to it come from the fact it basically looks
very sexual, kind of like the dancer is dry humping air.
To me, it’s not quite so sexual as frightening. When dancers
really get going, it looks more to me like someone trying to give birth and
failing, kind of like the dancer is desperately trying to expel something from
her body. That, coupled with the driving beat it’s usually danced to, give it a
horror movie vibe, and I find myself sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to
see what will erupt from the dancer, kind of like the feeling one gets when watching
Alien movies.
There are some women who can do this move so that it actually
looks like their butts are moving independently of the rest of their bodies,
which is kind of surreal if you watch it long enough. It ceases to be sexual
and instead becomes either comical or optical illusion-ish, so much so that it
detracts from the dancing itself.
The other part of twerking is that if you don’t do it
correctly, you can really hurt your lower back. You really have to use your
core and tilt your pelvic, or you can risk serious injury. In ten years, most
of the teens who are at this very minute twerking just to irritate their
parents will find themselves at the doctor’s office with lower back pain.
Imagine a 20-something hobbling in to see her GP, completely befuddled as to why her
lower back is so sore all the time. The doctor will knowingly ask whether his recalcitrant
patient ever twerked back in the day, and she will have to sheepishly admit
that, yes, indeed, she bowed to peer pressure and did her best Miley Cyrus
impression at senior prom, and well, she hasn’t walked quite the same since.
It’s because of the latter, the potential for injury, that I
choose not to twerk. I suppose if I really felt the urge to impersonate Grace
Jones in that one movie where it looks like she’s giving birth to a bottle of
perfume, I would do it, but those urges rarely occur. How about you? Do you twerk? Have you? Come on, do tell!
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