Since Block 1, NBN has faithfully asked the one question everyone wants to know about Dance Marathon: Dancers, would you rather have sex or shower? Sweat, fatigue, and lust battled it out over the 30 hours in the answers to this historical question, but by the end of the night, there was one clear winner.
NBN has gathered this incredibly valuable sex or shower data since 2013. This was the first year that we did not differentiate by gender. In 2015 and 2016, a clear trend defined DM: over time, dancers got less thirsty for sex and more thirsty for a shower.
The 212 respondents of 2017 have confounded all NBN statistical wisdom. For the first time in the past few years, NUDM voted for sex.
Answers to the two categories (just two, even though people continued to beg for “sleep” as the third) fluctuated wildly throughout the 30 hours. “Sex” was the majority answer for seven blocks, starting strong in Block 1 and finishing equally well in Block 10. It lost the battle to “shower” in Blocks 2, 6, and 7.
In every block, tired dancers desperately searched for loopholes in the question, choosing sex so they could lie down or rejecting sex in fear of losing energy in the middle. At the beginning, even the Disney fans in onesies swore sweat was not a problem, and by Block 9, one dancer chose sex “because I’m already dirty.” One horrified dancer wondered if NBN was asking her to have sex IN the shower. Nope.
In the minutes before the DM hosts and co-chairs presented the group awards, a sea of white shirts popped their best moves to Bruno Mars’ “Locked Out of Heaven,” shouting the signature line, “‘Cause your sex takes me to paradise.” Perhaps the key to sex’s success this year is that the shower has never led to catchy songs. Perhaps it’s a particularly sex-friendly and sweat-hostile group of dancers this year. Regardless, NUDM 2017 is closing with one clear winner in the yearly sex or shower wars.