I WANTED TO be Michael Jackson when I was a kid. I’d regularly have my white socks pulled high above pants that were intentionally two sizes too small from my shoes. Single white glove. The whole thing. I’d slide across our kitchen floor until my mum told me to stop before I broke something while Dirty Diana blared through the speakers. Dancing wasn’t a performance or even a thought back then. It was just what happened when music played.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, I stopped. Maybe we all did. Dancing became something you did drunk at the club or at weddings or ironically at parties. Something women did with ease. Something gay men owned at clubs. But us straight men? We learned to stand still, bob our heads maybe, shuffle our feet with a beer in our hands. Now I’m generalising, of course, so if this doesn’t apply to you – dance on. But as a rule, most men learned that our bodies were tools for labor or sport or sex, but not for expression.
I fell back in love with ‘dancing’ through Gaga and 5Rhythms classes. Gaga is a movement language developed by choreographer Ohad Naharin that strips away mirrors and choreography, asking you to follow sensations through your body: listening to your bones, your joints, the space between your ribs. 5Rhythms, created by Gabrielle Roth, guides you through five distinct movement patterns; flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness, as a kind of moving meditation. Both practices reject the idea of performance and invite us into presence.
The research on dance and men’s health is the craziest part. A 2024 meta-analysis published in The BMJ reviewed 218 clinical trials involving over 14,000 participants and found that dance reduced symptoms of depression more effectively than walking, yoga, strength training, cognitive behavioral therapy, and standard antidepressants.
Dance had the largest effect size of any treatment examined.
I think the benefits go deeper than biochemistry. Dance addresses something uniquely broken in contemporary masculinity: our disconnection from our own bodies.
Most men, including me, live from the neck up. We’re taught to think our way through problems, to strategise, to control. Our bodies become vehicles we pilot rather than homes we inhabit. We go to the gym and treat our flesh like machinery; sets, reps, performance metrics. We have sex and try our best to be fully be present for it, running commentary in our heads about technique or duration or her satisfaction. We’re ghosts in our own meat suits.
Dance forces us into embodiment. You can’t think your way through rhythm. You can’t strategise your hips into movement. You have to actually feel where your body is in space, what it wants to do, how it responds to sound. This is terrifying for many of us because we’ve built entire identities around control, and dance demands surrender.
Dance activates the posterior superior temporal cortex; the part of the brain responsible for multisensory integration and social cognition. It literally helps us perceive our bodies in relationship to others and the environment. For men who’ve been trained to see themselves as separate, independent, self-sufficient, this is insane neural rewiring.
I get why guys avoid it. When I first walked into a 5Rhythms class, I thought it corny as hell. Everyone seemed to know some unspoken language, dreadlocks, harem pants and nose rings. It felt like some weird interpretive dance convention. I almost left.
But then the music shifted into the Staccato rhythm: sharp, percussive, angular, and something in my body unlocked. It felt like it remembered what my mind had forgotten a long time ago. That movement was once joy before it became self-consciousness. That this body I’d been treating like a problem to optimise was actually a source of intelligence I’d been ignoring for decades.
Here’s what dancing regularly has done for me: I sleep better. My chronic back pain improved because I’m not holding tension in places I didn’t know existed. Sex is different, I’m actually in my body during it rather than performing. I can read other people’s emotional states better because I’m more attuned to subtle physical cues. When I’m anxious, I can feel where that lives in my body and move it through rather than think it away.
The Buddha talked about kaya-gata-sati: mindfulness immersed in the body. Most meditation practices start with the breath, with stillness, with observing the body from a distance. Dance is the inverse: it’s the body teaching the mind how to pay attention.
Yes, you might have to tolerate some hippie shit to find your way back to your body through dance. You might have to endure a woman named Moonbeam talking about “moving your sacred masculine energy”. You might feel stupid and uncoordinated and like everyone is watching you (they’re not, they’re too busy with their own experience).
But I know the alternative is worse. The alternative is living in a body you never fully inhabit, dying without ever really knowing what it felt like to be alive in your own skin.
Fellas, I’m not saying become a professional dancer. I’m saying move your body for no reason except that music is playing. Put on a song, close the doors if you want and let yourself move and be ridiculous. Let yourself remember what you knew as a kid: that dancing isn’t about being watched, it’s about being alive.
The white glove is optional.
