There Is an Actual Movement to Replace Applause with Jazz Hands

So...congrats to all you theater grads?

On Tuesday, The National Union of Students (NUS) Women's Campaign announced that it would be banning clapping at their feminism conference in Solihull, England, in favor of using "jazz hands" instead.

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The initial request came from the Oxford University Student Union's Women's Campaign, in order to avoid provoking stress in some of the attending members.

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Whooping at the conference was discouraged for similar reasons.

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The initial reaction to the motion on social media was predominantly of a...how shall we say...mocking nature.

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And some believed the regulation undermined the idea of feminism altogether.

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"Jazz hands are used throughout NUS in place of clapping as a way to show appreciation of someone's point without interrupting or causing disturbance, as it can create anxiety," Nona Buckley-Irvine, the general secretary of the London School of Economics Students' Union, told the BBC. "I'm relatively new to this and it did feel odd at first, but once you've used jazz hands a couple of times it becomes a genuinely nice way to show solidarity with a point and it does add to creating a more inclusive atmosphere."

Just...leavin' this here.

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Diana Bruk
Viral Content Editor

My writing has regularly appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Salon, VICE, Guernica, The New York Observer, BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Esquire, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and many more publications.

I was previously the Senior News Editor at Best Life Online and the Viral Content Editor in the Newsroom of Hearst Digital Media. My portfolio consists of a vast and diverse body of work that includes personal essays, lifestyle articles, breaking news posts, and viral content. My areas of expertise, however, are Russia, sex and relationships, and mental wellness.