How I learnt to dance both roles IV: Milongas as the girl, classes as the guy

I started going to the milongas instead to dance as the woman and I danced a lot.  But class leaves you with the psychological legacy that you will forever be prone to bad habits, that you have to work on in class.  It's a business strategy that preys on the vulnerability of beginners and makes people insecure and dependent.  I got so cross once seeing a teacher promote this harmful view, that I wrote Trust me, you need me. 

I still didn't feel I could be good enough.  Now that I didn't do dance class as much as the woman, at the end of a dance I used to ask guys in the milonga if they could give me any pointers as to how to improve but guy after guy said the same thing:  You dance fine.  Just keep dancing.  After a long time, I began to trust in that. I didn't realise though the value of hearing that in the real conditions of the social dance.

Early on I became curious about how different the psychology was when I swapped roles, especially when I had occasionally tried it in the milonga. The different psychology in the dance, but also when deciding who to invite or, sometimes wonderfully, sometimes scarily: being invited to invite!

Ever trusting in authority, not heeding the life lessons I had just learned I went back to the same teachers whose classes I had been to most recently in the woman's role, but now in the guy's role and as a beginner.  It didn't work out at all.  In the first classes I tried on the guy’s side the men simply expected me to follow and at that time there wasn’t as much support from the teachers as there is today. Now some teachers make it clear that if the woman wants to dance in the guy’s role, they shouldn’t be pressurised to dance in the traditional woman’s role. 

I changed class again.  It was horrific - much worse than when on the woman’s side of the class.  There was so much information about the moves and how to contort your body - it was all about thinking - and it was high pressure again.  And of course you had all the responsibility of guiding.  Plus it was a new move each week.  The teacher was a fun, laid back Argentinian but I could feel how stressed the guys were next to me.  Yet there was this sense that no-one could say anything about how hard it was, a very bottled-up, male feeling. The difficulty of what we had to do combined with this unspoken sense of pressure among the guys was so intolerable that I left that too after just a few lessons.