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Wonderlust

Whether it's to keep the guys guessing or for their own curiosity, straight women are getting physical with each other on the nightclub dance floor.

By LEONORA LaPETER
Published August 7, 2005

[Times photos: Chris Zuppa]

Tasha Gonzalez, 21, left, and Chiuhgi-i Wang, 28, both of Tampa, dance together at the Green Iguana Bar & Grill in Ybor City last month.

	The dance floor is packed at the Green Iguana Bar & Grill. “People are being more open about their sexuality,” Green Iguana DJ Thomas Barthmus says. “I definitely think it’s not considered offensive to either sex.” Others aren’t so sure.

TAMPA - The three women hesitated at first.

They sat on the edge of the torch-lit patio watching the other people at the party: women in swanky dresses with lots of cleavage, men in loose dress shirts and Tommy Hilfiger slacks.

Maybe it would be okay out here on the patio, they thought. Then again, maybe this wasn't the place. Too many yuppies.

They'd gathered at the Davis Islands Garden Club to celebrate the life of a woman who had died of breast cancer. There had been a raffle to benefit breast cancer research with prizes, a special Pier One breast cancer candle, a month's yoga, an Ethan Allen country French chair.

The DJ was playing Joan Jett's I Love Rock 'N Roll.

Kimberly Scolaro, 35, Holly Staples, 29, and Tanito Brooks, 49, looked at each other and nodded. Then they got up and slowly began swiveling their hips. Soon they were like three spoons, bumping and grinding and rubbing up against each other.

Only then did the south Tampa crowd begin to take notice of them.

Mike Gwiazdowski, 35, nursed a beer at the edge of the patio. He'd been dancing with a girl he met volunteering in a Christmas soup kitchen. He was not at all fazed by the three women dancing erotically nearby. He had seen it so often, it had lost its meaning.

"At first I thought that was real hot, but now I'm like, "Oh yeah, two girls are making out. Big deal.' It used to be attractive. Now it's blase-blah," Gwiazdowski said.

And so there you have it.

The classic male fantasy is becoming passe. Or at least mainstream.

The stuff of bedrooms, porn movies and strip clubs is now playing out in public, on dance floors. Women of all ages shimmy their behinds up against their friends. They kiss. Occasionally, in the raunchiest exhibitions, they grab each other's breasts, partly remove each other's clothes or simulate oral sex.

Then they look over at their boyfriends. Or at least someone they hope will be their boyfriend.

This is not girls trying out bisexuality to be cool. Take this one step further. This is women pretending to be bisexual to attract men.

And it's no longer just college girls and teenagers. Women in their 30s and 40s, raised when being lesbian or bisexual was not exactly considered cool, are experimenting with this. The behavior is filtering up from younger people to older people.

"Oddly, the hottest heterosexual women can engage in public lesbian activity, or girl-girl activity, without threatening their heterosexual identity at all," said Elizabeth Armstrong, an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University who studies sexuality and culture.

Purple and green strobe lights spiraled around an Ybor City dance floor so packed with men and women that it resembled an anthill. A large green cloth iguana hung from the ceiling.

Thomas Barthmus, 31, a DJ at the Green Iguana for nine years, was working the controls in his booth, setting in motion Gwen Stefani's Hollaback Girl. He can't remember when he started noticing "it," but he said the past two years "it's rampant" - so much so that it happens many times over every night.

"I think it's part of pop culture and part of the MTV culture," Barthmus said. "People are being more open about their sexuality. I don't think people are close-minded anymore. I definitely think it's not considered offensive to either sex."

On the dance floor below him, a procession of young women hopped up on a covered pool table, knocked hips and other things with each other and then jumped down. Men looked on like they were taking in a high-wire act, heads starward, eyes wide. Long sips out of beer bottles, you get the picture.

On the edge of the dance floor, Melissa Forsee, a 23-year-old with long dark hair and large, equally dark almond-shaped eyes, walked up. She wore a cream-colored lace halter top and jeans and she held a Bud Light in her hand.

"I do it all the time," she announced proudly. "I think dancing is an art. When I dance, I get both sexes' attention. I will most definitely dance with a girl on any given day."

She turned to her friend, Sasha Talsky, 22.

"Right?"

"Right."

They tapped their beer bottles against each other for good measure.

"I saw older people doing it and in seeing that, I saw how acceptable it was for everybody else to be doing it," said Forsee, a bank data processor. "And I'm definitely heterosexual."

Her friend, Talsky, nodded.

"I think we all wanted to dance and then we kind of realized we got a lot of attention by doing it and people looked at us," said Talsky, a college student originally from New Hampshire. "We're not doing anything wrong. Dancing is not harmful to anyone."

About a half-hour later, Forsee, fresh from dancing on the pool table between a 28-year-old woman from Taiwan with rubber band-like moves and a 21-year-old who once had a job dancing in a nightclub cage, leaned up against a guy she had just met. Trevor Harrison, a 27-year-old Tampa firefighter, looked like he spent many a night waiting for fire calls in the firehouse gym. His baseball cap was on backward and he peered at Forsee through pale blue bedroom eyes.

"I made out with a girl," Forsee blurted. She turned her head around, scanning the sea of faces, looking for the girl.

Not finding her, she said, "Well, I don't know who she is, but I did."

Harrison was asked to ponder the girl-girl dancing. But he was not a man of many words at that point. He wrapped his thick arms around Forsee and issued a thumbs-up.

"It's good. It's good," he said.

"I think it's pretty fun to watch, but then again you think of a girl who's putting herself out there like that as a lush and I would never date anyone like that," said Matt Harwood, 23, a Tampa bartender with a goatee. "I just take a look and keep walking."

Nearby, Amanda Girello, an attractive 21-year-old from Tampa with long blond wavy hair, hopped off the pool table after dancing with another girl.

"For me, I'm in a committed relationship and men always hound you, so I just grab my girlfriend. We're just having a good time. There's nothing sexual about it. Our generation just dances more sexual than the past."

Ugh, said Murta Mundo, 40, a document specialist from Tampa, standing at the far end of the dance floor with her friend, Lisset Greene, 31, of Spring Hill.

"Unfortunately, that's how youth these days behave," she said.

"I get embarrassed when I see it," Greene said. "I'm kind of old-fashioned and I think there are certain things you don't do. I'm a mother, and I think in a few years my daughter will be dancing like this and I'm not comfortable with that. I'm 31. I'm not old, but I've seen in a matter of years how the world has changed and it freaks me out by the way they dance."

You can almost connect the dots to get here. Go back to ancient Egyptian times, in which women drank, danced together and lifted their skirts during the Festival of Bast, the cat-headed goddess.

There's a mile marker in the controversial 1992 film, Basic Instinct, in which a bisexual murderer played by Sharon Stone dances with her female lover, all the while looking seductively at Michael Douglas.

Then in 1993 on the cover of Vanity Affair, Cindy Crawford pretended to shave the throat of a newly outed K.D. Lang, dressed in a suit, to demonstrate the lesbian chic trend.

Singer-songwriter Jill Sobule's 1995 hit, I Kissed a Girl, was about two girls with boyfriends becoming lovers. Two years later, Mantra Films Inc. launched the wildly popular Girls Gone Wild videos in which college girls were encouraged to remove their tops and kiss each other for cameras during spring break and Mardi Gras.

In 2003, the highly erotic Russian pop music duo t.a.t.u. revealed that they were not lesbians and their sexually charged performances were simply a marketing ploy by their managers. That same year, Madonna exchanged open-mouth kisses with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the MTV Video Music Awards.

And so here we are. It's filtered down to the masses. Or at least the masses who go to college or hang out at nightclubs.

One recent night at Green Iguana Bar & Grill, three girls were bumping up against each other and the guys barely took notice. It wasn't until the trio began simulating oral sex and lifting each other's shirts that they drew a ring of rowdy men. One pulled down her jeans to reveal a lacy white thong, eliciting a raucous whoop from the men.

"If it's simple kissing and bump and grind, it doesn't get as much attention," said Cedric Brown, 38, owner of Partybor.com, a Web site about what's going on at Tampa Bay area nightclubs. "Right now, it has to be more detailed, more raunchy, more nudity."

College campuses have become the training ground for the erotic dancing. Laura Hamilton, an Indiana University graduate student and researcher who studied female sexuality among 54 women on a dorm floor last year, found the behavior so prevalent she decided to write a research paper on it.

Hamilton moved onto the dorm floor and immediately noticed the continual bisexual references on the girls' online student profiles, the photos of girls kissing girls, the intimate dancing in the hallways.

"If I'd ask them, "Are you lesbian or bisexual?', they'd look at me like I was insane," she said. " "Of course not. Why would you think that?' "

Many of the girls told Hamilton during interviews that they were acting bisexual to have fun. But just as many told her they engaged in kissing and erotic dancing with other girls because they liked shocking the young men on campus. None carried the behavior through to sexual intimacy with women, and many were virgins.

Meanwhile, some lesbians felt the environment was so hostile to them, they had to leave the floor, Hamilton said.

"This wasn't about being more open," Hamilton said. "From what I've figured out, a lot of this is being edgy and being sexy mainly for men. It's fairly competitive to set yourself apart from other women."

"It is very simple. It's because guys rule," said Michael Kimmel, a gender scholar and professor of sociology at State University of New York at Stony Brook. "The truth is it's a man's world. We set the terms and we decide who's hot and who's not.

"You think women's liberation and feminism entitles you to be sexual? Sure! Fine! But you still have to get us and make us the center of your universe. I ask you one question. Which gender do you think invented the thong?"

He admits he's being facetious. Sort of. "But all my analysis tells me men control the terms of the discussion," said Kimmel, 54, who has written several books on masculinity and male-female relationships. "Men control dating arrangements."

How did we get here? Why didn't women do this as much before?

"I don't think the stakes were so high and I don't think sexuality was so overt," Kimmel said. "Sure there was enormous pressure on women to put out for guys, but I think the stakes were much lower and women tended to police each other a lot more. They used to say, "Don't do that, you're a slut.' Now they use the word "slut,' and they giggle and say, "Go girl.' "

Take Samantha, the predatory single on Sex and the City, who floated from one sexual relationship to another without guilt or inhibition. None of the other girls, who weren't as sexually promiscuous, disapproved of her behavior, Kimmel said.

"I believe part of the problem is that women have been sold this male fantasy about sexual relationships. . . . Women are posturing like crazy to make sure they are attractive and acceptable. They are doing things that their feminist mothers are gagging about."

Linda E. Savage, a sex therapist and author of Reclaiming Goddess Sexuality: The Power of the Feminine Way, said there is a bifurcation in our society, with the extreme conservative movement on the one side and women declaring themselves as sexual beings on the other.

"Women feeling free about their sexuality is a very scary thing to men as a group," Savage said. "Some men love it and a lot like to see it, but . . . we live in the most puritan sort of repressive sexual society in a developed country."

Some women may be dancing suggestively to experiment with their sexuality. In this way, they can act bisexual without being considered bisexual.

This appalls some lesbians. Though some believe the behavior means there is more acceptance of being gay or lesbian, others are outraged that something they value is being used to titillate men.

"I know in a sense that lesbian relationships aren't valued as much as heterosexual relationships, but when I see young girls, whether unwittingly or not, doing their best to trivialize that, I have a problem with that," said Margaret Murray, 40, a communication director for the Arts Center. "They can go back to that life of heterosexual privilege that my girlfriend and I can't go back to."

Some heterosexual girls will turn up at gay bars and dance together like lesbians. Murray said she can always tell they're not gay because the intimacy is missing. She and her friends have spent many a day trying to figure out why they are there.

Meanwhile, Murray said she and her girlfriend are often hounded by men who think they are holding hands or kissing for their benefit. Men are always telling them how much they'd like to go on a date with both of them.

"It makes it harder when my girlfriend and I go out and they see us dancing and kissing and it breaks down that barrier, that "Oh, well I can comment on any women that I see together,' " says Murray. "You'd never go up to a heterosexual couple and comment on their sex life."

Later in the evening, Scolaro, Staples and Brooks moved their hip-hugging dance from the patio onto the dance floor at the Davis Islands Garden Club. Two other women joined them.

"We're not gay," said Scolaro as she danced to the B-52's Love Shack. "It's about having a good time. It's all very innocent."

By then, she had attracted an admirer, Dave Valensky, 36. He admitted that sometimes women these days send him mixed messages. The way they dress, the way they act, it's hard to know what the message is.

"It can all be a bit of a tease," he said. "It makes me, as a man, confused."

Scolaro, who is twice divorced, has a 12-year-old son and works in a chiropractor's office, said she's not trying to attract men such as Valensky.

"You have to understand if you love yourself and you love your body, it doesn't matter what other people think," said Scolaro. "Girls can dance with girls better than guys can dance with girls."

She pauses a moment and narrows her eyes.

Okay, she says with a wicked grin, maybe it's also to "mess with peoples' heads."

- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Times staff writer Leonora LaPeter can be reached at lapeter@sptimes.com or 727 893-8640.

[Last modified August 4, 2005, 12:44:05]