- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sarah Gold

May 12, 1999 | In western Massachusetts, where I went to college, there used to be a saying about how local guys regarded students at the area's two women's colleges: "Smith to bed, Mount Holyoke to wed." Smithies were considered the good-time girls, the ones who could match you drink-for-drink when doing tequila shots, or who might be caught skinny-dipping in the Connecticut River at 2 a.m. on a school night. Mount Holyoke girls, on the other hand, were more buttoned up -- the kind you could bring home to mom, the kind who played tennis and wore Peter Pan collars.

So it was with some fascination that I found myself sitting in a fluorescent-lit Mount Holyoke dance studio a few weeks ago, waiting to observe the school's erotic dance class for the first time. The class has been taught since October by Susan Scotto, a professor of Russian. It takes place a few evenings a month in a space borrowed from the dance department. It isn't formally accredited. But I'd heard that it was wildly popular with students and had raised eyebrows in the still-conservative academic community.

Scattered around me in the studio, also waiting for class to begin, were eight or nine young women. They were a wholesome, scrubbed-looking bunch, with freckled noses and short, well-groomed hair, their razor-stubbled ankles and unpolished toenails peeking out from beneath skirts and sweatpants. A few had glasses; one had a Band-Aid wrapped around her big toe. Why, I wondered, did girls like these -- who I couldn't even imagine wearing makeup, much less pasties -- want to learn to how dance with their clothes off?

"It's something I would never ordinarily see myself doing," Patty McCarthy, a sophomore, told me. "But it's good to be adventurous. Just the fact that there's a class like this, at this school -- how could I not try it?"

A senior, Sara Lawrence, was more philosophical: "The thing I like about going to an all-women's school is that you get the chance to define yourself independently of your connection to men," she said. "This class seems like an extension of that. It's a way to explore being sexy just for yourself."

The reflective mood was abandoned when Professor Scotto suddenly entered the room, cutting a svelte figure in high-heeled Mary Janes and a pair of skintight pedal-pushers. Dumping two huge shopping bags onto the floor, she tossed her long red hair over one shoulder and smiled at everyone.

"Hi, guys!" she said. "Ready to boogie?"

Next page | "Chair work" and other fine erotic dance techniques