On Thu, 25, Chris Doss wrote:
> It's not specifically for women though, is it? I'm pretty sure the dance
> is done by both genders. It's non-Middle Easterners who made it into a
> woman thing. (?)
> According to that infallible scholarly source wikipedia, belly
> dancing has nothing to do with femininity or gays or whatever at
> all. It's just a gender-neutral folk dance form, like line-dancing.
I think you're reading that entry wrong. It says that what most people call belly dancing today was codified by Egyptians in the 1930s as a female form.
According to wiki, the male form that preceded this Egyptian codification existed during the Ottoman empire, when boys were sex objects; it was changed when that fashion changed when the Ottoman empire fell. There was no male form for decades. The current male form is not an old folk hold-over, but rather something that started in the 1960s as a conscious extension of the Egyptian form for women.
So it wasn't westerners who made it into an erotic dance, or who made it woman-centered. Rather it was in the west -- in the US -- that the current male version started. It is only now beginning to get to the Middle East. Again pace the same wiki entry.
IIUC, belly dancing in the middle east is much more sex-coded than in the West -- it's like their version of a titty bar. Not only do men not do it, but women don't enter these places to watch. Whereas in the West, it's much lower key and audiences are mixed.
While we're on the video front, there's a wonderful climactic belly-dancing scene at the end of the recent French-Algerian movie _Secret of the Grain_ (La grain and le mulet)
Michael