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My friends were winding and grinding as early as junior high school to songs like “What’s Your Fantasy?” and “The Thong Song.”

Will someone please tell me when having anal sex on the dance floor became socially acceptable? Allow me to digress.

With the exception of a prom or two, I have always been somewhat uncomfortable in social dancing situations. From awkward junior high school snowballs to the more recent getting my groove on at C-Street, I simply cannot stand interacting with most men on the dance floor. This doesn’t mean that I surround myself with women or that I don’t enjoy the occasional Urbana house party, but it does mean that if a drunk boy attaches his pelvis to my hips, I’m outta there.

My biggest gripe with the dance form more commonly known as grinding is that it requires no face-to-face interaction. Grinding allows its instigator to approach a partner on the dance floor from behind and to engage in what in any other circumstances would be classified as sexual assault. Grinding carries a wealth of social implications; dancing with someone in this way can inspire fleeting romantic feelings, in addition to its ability to fuel awkward future interactions between those involved. It perpetuates a sort of dominance that leaves some people feeling invigorated and others feeling violated and uncomfortable. If you sympathize with the latter opinion as I do, it is easy to quickly become jaded to the campus bar scene.

But the college bar scene is in no way responsible for giving birth to this dancing (if you can call it dancing) trend; my friends were winding and grinding as early as junior high school to songs like “What’s Your Fantasy?” and “The Thong Song.” The biggest surprise to me throughout my junior high and high school years was the lax sense of supervision at school dances. There were chaperones around every corner but that never seemed to influence my peers’ abilities to get down and dirty on the dance floor. At dances held by the Schaumburg Community Recreation Center, for example, chaperones passively stood by as pre-teens got hormonal at a dance on the first Friday of every month. Though I do not condone censorship of personal expression via dance, I would stand by a movement to regulate the hypersexuality of today’s teens, especially in an academic setting.

Hypersexual dancing breaches the level of respect that exists between those involved and often makes the rest of the people in the room uncomfortable. That being said, is it too much to hope that slow dancing at arms-length comes back in style?