Why can’t more men just wanna have fun?

I’ve got a soft spot for Rog off Dancing with the Stars. It’s not just his boundless enthusiasm and a voice that slips down your throats like the first sip of a mochaccino on a cold morning. It’s the fact that he’s a middle-aged, awkwardlooking white dude who’s dancing on screen. And he’s not just dancing, he’s throwing every ounce, every muscle, and every bristle of his remaining hair into giving the most passionate, committed dance performance he possibly can.

Do you know how rare that is? Seeing a middleaged white man who’s a passionate dancer is like seeing a Toyota ute with a pink, sparkly paint job. It just doesn’t happen.

And here we are with Roger Farrelly, and Chris Harris, proving the average Kiwi bloke can get his groove on. It’s like seeing a hippo do the can-can, equal parts surprising and spectacular. So I love Rog. I love him because of the subconscious message he’s putting out that men are allowed to have more than the emotional range of a teaspoon.

Watching dancing in a nightclub is the perfect example of the bizarre ways in which we force men to suppress their emotions. You see any woman out on the town and you know she’ll get down. There’s this wonderfully permissive attitude for women that, when they go out, they’re allowed to let loose, to be silly, funny, crazy, passionate, outrageous, or just a plain hot mess on the dance floor.

And unless you deck a barman, there’s no criticism that you’re too bad or too silly or too crazy. It’s a perfect metaphor for how we allow women to be emotionally articulate. Women are allowed to say they’re having a bad day, or they’re upset, or they’re angry or insecure. If they do, it’s no threat to their femininity and they’ll probably have an army of sympathetic girlfriends.

But just watch men on dance floor. They either hang around in awkward clusters on the fringes, throwing longing looks at the d-floor. Or they’ll lose control, seize a woman and dry-hump her from behind like a rabid pitbull until they get smacked away. They just can’t have fun with it.

Men, white men especially, just can’t go out on to a dance floor and get down. And it’s not because women don’t want them to – God knows we want them to. It’s all internal. They’re worried they’ll look dumb, they won’t know what to do, or worst of all, they’ll look unmanly.

Being a man means you don’t let loose because being a man means you can’t publicly display enjoyment. Nor reckless carefree ecstasy. Nor euphoric momentary disregard for your troubles, and enthusiasm for the present moment.

Men are either hungry or horny or angry. That’s it.

Men teach other men that. One of the favourite insults men throw at other men online is ‘‘soy boy’’. It’s used to belittle any man for talking about any emotion except anger or resentment. (Supposedly soy milk contains too much oestrogen and makes you an emotional ‘‘female’’.)

And women do it to men, too. I had a passionate discussion with my Uber driver this morning. He’d made a status on Facebook saying he was feeling a bit down, and one of his female friends had scolded him to be more of a man. I told him that’s why he needed feminism.

It is. Society puts all sorts of awful expectations on people for their gender. Men are no exception. Just look at all those dudes who’re afraid to be kindy teachers because they’re afraid of being profiled as a paedophile.

More specifically, this kind of emotional suppression is incredibly damaging to us. When a woman gets rejected in a bar, she might be hurt, but she doesn’t flip. She goes quiet, goes back to her girlfriends, has a few shots, confides in them, they console her that she’ll find love one day, and they all drunkenly twerk to Nelly throwbacks.

But can you imagine a man getting rejected, going back to his mates and saying, ‘‘Yeah it was tough, I’ve just been feeling really alone since my last breakup and being rejected really brought up all those unaddressed feelings of shame and fear of being unwanted.’’ No. He’s going to call the girl a fat, lesbian bitch. Now there’s many reasons why he might do that (#internalisedmisogyny). But one of them is that men often have no emotional vocabulary for identifying any complicated emotions, let alone expressing them. The only thing they are allowed to do is get angry. And then beat the shit out of a stranger on the way home for looking at them funny.

So I’m so glad Rog is up there dancing his mesh socks off. Every time he shows the passion of a tango, or the giddiness of the quick step, or the tenderness of a waltz, he’s showing us that men can feel the tenderness that is innate in us as human beings.