The need to feel sexy
I started taking a Zumba class
a few days ago, with a complimentary 3-day pass from my local fitness center. I've taken Zumba before. In fact, I've taught Zumba before. But it's been a while and I am pitifully out of shape.
For anyone who may not be familiar with Zumba, it is an exercise class based on simple, repetitive dance moves, set to Latin-inspired or global rhythms. I love to dance and Zumba doesn't feel like an exercise class. It feels dancing.
The Zumba classes that I attended were ladies only classes. They were packed with women of all shapes and sizes who had one thing in common: leggings.
Many of the women walking into the gym come in wearing long, shapeless black robes, with their hair covered in a scarf. In the dressing room, the robes and the scarves disappear, replaced by colorful, form-fitting exercise clothes (i.e. leggings) and neon colored sports shoes.
I try to follow along to unfamiliar choreography set to music I may or may not know. It is a challenge but it is fun (because, dancing). The women in the class have music in their souls in a very different way than I do. I come from a Latin country and I learned salsa and merengue, cumbia and bachata. My hips have learned these rhythms and they sway almost on their own by now. These women's hips don't sway to salsa. They belly dance. The women would whoot and clap along to the rhythms; they'd ululate. And their hips and legs would shake and shimmy in a way that is unfamiliar to me. And they looked gorgeous and feminine and totally in their element.
Every once in a while, a woman would shimmy her way across the studio, ululating and randomly stopping to dance with another woman in the class, completely ignoring both the Zumba instructor and the choreography. When belly dancing calls, one must obey.
At the end of class on day two, one of these randomly shimmying women pointed at me and started talking to me in Arabic, to which I responded with wide eyed muteness.
"You speak Arabic?"
"Arabic? No."
"Where you from?"
"Mexico"
She turned to the other women standing around her. "Ahhhh! Mexikeeya!" She turned back to me. "I like you! You have good dancing style."
"Oh! Thank you! So do you! I want to learn to dance like you." and I waved my hand to include them all in this diplomatic, plural 'you'. One of the other women asked, "Like me?" and shook her hips, looking oddly seductive in a room full of women.
"Like all of you," I said. "You do belly dancing. It looks beautiful." They all smiled appreciatively and we said good bye with promises to see each other again at the next Zumba class.
What surprised me about this whole exchange was to see these women dancing with each other in class. They would go up to each other, perhaps sandwiching someone else along the way, and they'd dance, opening their arms in invitation. Sometimes they simply added their own sexy shoulder moves and stared at themselves in the mirror. These women who wrap themselves up in shapeless black robes and cover their hair come to Zumba class to feel sexy in a culturally appropriate way: with other women.
I get it. Back home, I took an exercise class called Vegas Stiletto Fitness. It was sexy dancing with as high of heels as you could stand up in, using a chair as a prop for some dance moves. The class was only women. And we stared at ourselves in the mirror: perhaps admiring our legs, or the curve of our asses, or looking at just how sexy it is to roll one's shoulders. This was the first time I saw myself dancing sexy and I was mesmerized by my own reflection.
Looking sexy and feeling sexy doesn't need to include the other sex. In fact, it doesn't need to incude anyone else at all. When I dance, I feel my body in a way I'm not aware of throughout the day. It could be that my thighs are burning and my calves feel like they're going to explode, but it could also be an awareness that I occupy a space and I decide how I move within it.
It's a very empowering feeling.
