But what the fuck is a dance club? Well … its a building—with a bar (more likely several) and a dance floor—where people go to dance. Some have lights and fog machines and cage dancers and N-hundred dollar bottle service; some are pretty much just a room with some speakers. Most have a bouncer and a line, and many a guest list. Lots host guest musical acts (instrumental or electronic). But what actually makes it different from a bar? or from a music venue?

The answer is very possibly basically nothing — that “club” is a word that people sometimes use where they might have called the same thing a “bar” or a “lounge” and had basically the same business. But the word club, even to someone like me who considers it a confusing thing, certainly has some particular connotations.

Certainly one most de rigueur is the emphasis on dance, and in particular the assumption of a packed dance floor. Dance is obviously very important to human cultures—historically it appears everywhere, from African tribal villages to large annual festivals to back-country family living rooms. But it never really has been a large part of my life. I went to middle school and high school homecomings, spring flings, and proms, but those were only ever regarded with at least some degree of social anxiety and irony. While I get the impression that for many people the idea of “college party” is about as isometric to dancing as drinking, my particular corners of MIT did not follow on this pattern. Indeed it is instructive that a friend of mine, recently 21 and attending a club for the first time last evening described it immediately to him (as very much to me) as “Clubs are pretty much just like High School dances, except: ‘Wait, who cares what I do. I don’t go to school with these people.” To this I would add also “with booze”, “without externalized chaperones”, and “with uncensored and more bass-driven music”. Perhaps more than him I would also add “including the feeling of awkward out-of-context-ness and tentativeness to be in others’ personal space, especially of strangers”

Certainly this comparison arises largely in view of attendance with a group of friends, friends who are not “club friends”. Even amongst the 7 or so people I was with last evening, it was interesting to observe the levels of club-i-ness. In particular 2 seemed pretty totally in their element, and the rest more like fish to varying degrees partially in and out of water. This is observable perhaps too in the strangers and general attendance. So what separates the club-y from the none? Social anxiety, basically?

To repeat briefly, for me so far, at least in the US, the experience of “the club” has been one of awkwardness, personally and observable in others. There seem to be easily locatable archetypes and stereotypes familiar from the high school dance. There are some wallflowers; there are some kind of creepy awkward circling dudes; there are women who seem plenty comfortable dancing with and against other women, but pointedly shy of foreign male attention; there are impromptu bad breakdancing circles; and there are jokers in the corner doing the macarena with a half-cocked smirk. I hesitate greatly to commit to a notion of behavioral difference on gender lines, but, if only as a projection of personal insecurities—but I think too on a taut line of culturally entrenched notions of rape culture and homophobia—the manifest appearance in the club to me is that the average woman seems to be having a better time and the men are divided into awkward camps of kinda concerningly forward and intensely shy of accidental contact. Though I don’t know, I’d imagine this is (unhelpfully) “balanced” by many women being inwardly terrified by fear about the integrity of their drinks and general safety.

Maybe this is just the clubs I’ve gone to. Physical proximity to MIT and Harvard probably didn’t help.

But it’s all pretty awkward in the face of another assumption I frankly have about clubs: that single people (especially straight men) go to them often with a specific intent of acquiring a (short-term) sexual partner. Presumably this was also the case of some high school dance attendees, though that world was not plied and lubricated with (apparent) plentiful alcohol and (more than?) occasional backroom stocks of cocaine and MDMA. Perhaps I am too influenced by the early scenes of last year’s Don Jon, cultural osmosis of the Jersey Shore, and a stray reddit commenter, but I really do seem to think that the people who fall in set 1 above (go to clubs regularly) do so with an assumption of a “hook up” at the end of the night 7 or 8 times out of 10. I think people do live in that world with those assumptions. But I don’t and don’t know those people (that I know of).

And I assume this is part of what renders clubs a mystery to me.

But then theres also the aspect to which some clubs are clubs. As in, they have members—formally or informally. Some I know have actual paid memberships; some have regulars on the bottle service line; some have a reserved spot on the guestlist by virtue of a friend of a friend who hooks up with the bouncer’s cousin sometimes. I have the impression that people who go to clubs often also go to the same club often. Sometimes as often as more than weekly. Certainly some people seem to have a rotation of one of a few (or each in turn in the course of the night) each weekend. And … again… I don’t know those people. But I think they exist?

Does this piece have a point? Probably not particularly. To summarize: dance clubs seem to be either: a) a big focal point of life, b) a regular part of everyday(/weekly) life, or c) both for a large number of Americans. And yet I feel like I know almost zero people for whom this is a true claim. This renders me confused. If I have friends who can explain this to me … that would probably be helpful for my education as an American adult human. Kthnx. Good night.