Dancing is a lost art. I am a sophomore who recently experienced her first fraternity party. I’ve lost my “fraternity party virginity,” which is a phrase I have taken the liberty of borrowing and one that makes me cringe while writing it, as it is a touch too gritty and earthy for my tastes. As my readers will soon realize, though, not everything is as delicate and exquisite as I wish. At the party, I found myself sitting on a couch – who knows what organisms call that cushion home – next to a recent, a girl very similar to myself.

She was refreshing, since we gals seem oh-so-hard to find these days. We sat taking in our surroundings, laughing at the sweaty guy in the red shirt, who looked like he would fall over like a tree in the forest, knocking down neighboring bodies.

Then, all of a sudden, the dance party started.

There is evidently something in the combination of the beat of music and the atmosphere of a black-lighted room that turns girls into animals, like men who morph into werewolves in the presence of a full moon. What has happened to dancing?

What was all but thrown in my face (as my seat on the couch was rather low) was not dancing – it was sex to the beat of Beyonce!

Expression of this sort – I refuse to call it dancing – is nothing new to me. Though I swear it was a mistake that I was born into this generation, I have lived as an innocent bystander for the past 19 years. At proms, my date and I always had a blast making up steps as we went. Let this be a lesson to all who are confused: dancing is comprised of steps – not “positions.”

There is a chance that I am just the weird one. Perhaps I am the girl stuck in the Stone Age, arguing for an ideal buried so far underneath piles of lacy thongs that it has suffocated, leaving no chance for its return. Maybe I am speaking with the words dignity and decency on my lips during my final breath before I reunite with the rest of my kind in extinction. Nevertheless, I refuse to believe that there is not at least one reader who agrees with me and shares my repulsion and conviction.

This summer at church, my mom and I sat behind a young girl with her family and presumably her boyfriend. At the end of Mass, as we were walking to our car, my mom exclaimed, “Can you imagine what she is like in a dark room? She couldn’t keep her hands off him in church! It was like she had some kind of sexual twitch or something!” My mom is a mom, and therefore, however hip I believe her to be, it is not shocking that she might react this way. But I am 19, and I was equally appalled.

We have moved beyond Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey (I almost used the word “surpassed” here, but decided against it, for that word usually has the connotation of a beneficial advancement). We have defined our own generation with an entirely new level of sleaze. I mourn the death of dancing, and, at the same time, I fear the possible loss of an art form ever more precious and satisfying to the soul.

What has happened to the young ladies of the world? To where have they run beautifully cloaked in their grace and elegance? They must still exist – somewhere above it all, not perceived or appreciated by all those who live their lives on the basest of levels. I think the young men of the world should set out on a quest to find these rare jewels of femininity.

They must bring them back to a place where all can learn from and appreciate them. When young men find these girls of grace and elegance, they must take them by the hand. Together they will bring dancing back from the dead.