Learned Helplessness

The visible change

Something has changed in the milongas. You can see it if you pay attention… more women on the leader’s side of the embrace… more female cabeceos crossing the room… more practicas where the gender of the role has quietly stopped mattering. It looks like progress, and in many ways, it is.

Veronica Tumanova wrote about this recently in her first essay since the pandemic, and as usual, she is spot on. She makes the case that more women leading is good for everyone: for the followers who gain agency, for the economy of tango schools and festivals, and crucially, for the male leaders who will now face real competition and be pushed to improve. It’s a generous argument, and most of it holds.

But there is one question it doesn’t ask. Not about the women. About the men.

Not whether they deserve the competition… they do. But whether the competition, as it actually exists on the floor, is doing what the theory says it should. And what that question is missing isn’t a minor detail. It’s the thing that determines whether the outcome it promises actually arrives.

The invisible hand

Tumanova’s diagnosis of the gender imbalance is precise and worth sitting with. In most communities, there are far more followers than leaders. That imbalance distorts everything it touches. Followers compete harder, improve faster, and still spend too many tandas sitting. Male leaders, insulated from that pressure, have little incentive to develop. They plateau early, sometimes deliberately, because the floor rewards merely their presence more than their skill. The few who become genuinely good acquire a kind of social capital that not many male egos can resist abusing.

She is right about all of this. And she is right that female leaders disrupt it. Women who come to leading already know how to work. They’ve spent years on the receiving end of poor leading and they are determined not to reproduce it. They bring discipline, consideration, and an embodied understanding of the follower’s experience that most male leaders took years to approximate, if they got there at all… (still wondering that for myself too). The competitive pressure they introduce is real.

The theory, then, is sound. More leaders, more competition, higher standards. The invisible hand of the market, applied to the milonga floor.

The problem is that the invisible hand only works when the market is free.
And this one isn’t.

Barriers to entry

When economists talk about why markets fail to produce their promised outcomes, one explanation comes up more than any other: barriers to entry. The competition that should regulate the market and push everyone toward their best doesn’t function when the participants aren’t entering it on equal terms. Adam Smith’s invisible hand assumes a level playing field. Remove that assumption and the mechanism breaks down… not dramatically, but quietly, in ways that are easy to misread. And that is what happens here.

Female leaders are not entering the market of leaders on equal terms with male ones. They are entering it with structural advantages that the theory doesn’t account for, and the community rarely discusses… because discussing them risks sounding like an argument against female leaders, which it isn’t. It’s an argument for honesty about what we’re actually observing.

The first advantage is relational. A woman who begins leading already has a network… friends, dance partners, followers she knows and who know her. She can invite them to dance with a familiarity that requires no proof of skill. She already understands the follower’s experience from the inside. The social infrastructure that a new male leader spends years building, she arrives with.

The second advantage is subtler and more powerful. She is less intimidating. A follower choosing between an unfamiliar male leader and an unfamiliar female one faces a different calculation in each case… different histories, different social dynamics, different physical considerations. The female leader starts with a lower threshold to clear in that respect. That is not a criticism. It is simply true, and it matters for what happens next.

These advantages don’t make female leaders undeserving of their place on the floor. They have earned it, often against resistance that male leaders never had to face. But they do mean that the competition male leaders are now experiencing is not the clean, motivating pressure the theory assumes. It is something more uneven than that. And uneven competition doesn’t always produce the response we expect.

💥Is Tango relevant today?💥
This is what my new series of videos explores.
Watch it here.

The comfortable explanation

The standard explanation for why male leaders aren’t improving is that they don’t care. You see it in the comments, hear it at practicas, read it between the lines of posts like Tumanova’s. The female leaders are working hard, the argument goes, and the men are coasting. Indifferent. Unwilling to rise to the challenge.

I think that explanation is wrong. Or rather, it is right about the symptom and wrong about the cause.

What looks like indifference is often something closer to a conclusion. The male leader who stops trying to improve has frequently done the calculation (consciously or not) and decided that the competition isn’t winnable. Not because he is lazy. Because he is, in his own way, reading the room correctly.

He watches a female leader invite a follower she has known for years. He watches another navigate the floor with the quiet authority of someone who has spent a decade as a follower and carries that knowledge in her body. He watches followers choose them… not always, but often enough… with an ease and willingness that his own invitations rarely produce. And he draws the obvious conclusion: the gap between where he is and where he would need to be is not one that practice alone will close… because the gap isn’t only about skill.

So he stops competing with the female leaders. He narrows his world to the followers he already knows, the tandas he can predict, the milongas where his mere presence is enough. And from the outside, that looks like not caring. But it isn’t. It is something more like learned helplessness wearing the mask of acceptance.

This is what the theory misses. Competition motivates when the outcome feels possible. When it doesn’t, the same pressure that was supposed to raise the standard quietly erodes the will to meet it.

What saves me

I am not writing this from the outside. I am writing it as someone who has felt exactly this.

I consider myself a fairly confident leader. I have put in the years, I care about my dance, and I am not easily discouraged. And yet when I look at the female leaders in my community… at the ease with which they move through the room, especially as beginner leaders, the warmth with which they are received, the invitations that come to them in ways that simply don’t come to me… I know that I am not competing with them. Not really. Not because I have decided to opt out, but because I can see clearly that the competition, as it actually exists, is not one I can win on equal terms.

That recognition doesn’t devastate me. But I am a fairly confident leader now, but it took me almost ten years to arrive in this place. I can hold that knowledge and keep dancing anyway.

A beginner can’t. A man who is two years into tango, still uncertain, still building, who watches this dynamic play out in every milonga… he doesn’t have the reserves to absorb it. He doesn’t frame it as a structural problem or a market failure. He just feels it. And what he feels is that the effort required is enormous… the return is uncertain… and the floor seems to be telling him quietly and consistently that his place in it is shrinking.

So he stops pushing. He finds his level, and he stays there. Or he leaves.

And we look at him and say he doesn’t care.

The other question

None of this is an argument against female leaders. Let me be clear about that, because it is the misreading this post is most likely to invite. Female leaders are good for tango. Tumanova is absolutely right about that. The question I am asking is not whether they should be there. They should. The question is whether the outcome we are expecting from their presence is actually arriving… and if it isn’t, whether we are willing to ask why.

Because right now, the conversation stops at the first question. We have found something that looks like a solution, and we are busy justifying it. The floor is fuller. The classes have more students. The milongas look more balanced. Progress is visible, and progress feels good.

But is it growth? Or does it just look like it?

What I do know is what it looks like from the floor. And from the floor, something else is happening that the business numbers don’t capture.

The male leader pipeline is quietly thinning. The men who are leaving aren’t announcing it. They are just narrowing, retreating, settling. And we are explaining their retreat as indifference, which is a comfortable explanation because it asks nothing of us. It locates the problem in their character rather than in the conditions we have collectively created and are collectively choosing not to examine.

What I am asking is that we at least know that. That we hold the fuller picture when we celebrate what is changing. That we notice what is quietly being lost at the same time.

Because the wheel of history that Tumanova invokes at the opening of her post… the one that is unlikely to be turned back… turns in more than one direction. And not everything it leaves behind was meant to be left.

Before tonight’s Goodnight Tango… just a small thank-you.
The project is growing beyond the blog, with new videos, surveys, and a lively community.
Visiting the shop helps it stay ad-free and reader-supported

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Tonight’s goodnight tango doesn’t need any introductions.
It’s the absolute depiction of learned helplessness and resignation.

Comment below or join the discussion in the community

Need to talk privately? Contact me personally.

Or… just spread the word!