'Freak Dancing' Craze Generates Friction, Fears

By Catherine Gewertz

Bethesda, Md.

Blue and red light beams blend, spreading hazy purple air. As the hip-hop pounds, the hips intermix; they're 14-, 15-, 16-year-old hips. They're boys' hips, girls' hips, front to front, back to front. It's twos, it's threes; standing up, bending over.

It looks like sex, but it's dancing. It's called freak dancing, and teenagers of all types are freaking at middle and high school events across the country. And though pairs of grinding pelvises filled the floor at a Valentine's Day dance at a suburban Washington public high school, it might well have been the tamest freaking on record: The kids stayed dressed and on their feet.

At other schools, blanched administrators say, a girl might be on all fours, with one boy's pelvis pressed into her face and another's pressed into her bottom. They see boys on their backs with girls spread-eagled over them; girls bent forward with boys' hips thrust into their backsides. Students know it by different names in different towns: freaking, grinding, jacking, booty dancing, the nasty. They do it to hip-hop and rap. Articles of...