Love, hate, & tango

Last night I went to a lovely party thrown by a friend who is a tango dancer. The party was mostly women, a handful of men, and several Siamese cats. Since about half the people there were tango dancers (sadly, not including me) we got to watch dance after dance of beautiful tango right there in the living room. It was much nicer than seeing it at a tango show or in the street in San Telmo - this was the real thing, people who closed their eyes when they danced, who danced with the same lust and sadness in their movements whether their partner was young, old, beautiful, someone they just met or had known forever. Tango is an amazing dance - beautiful and sexy and tragic. The man leads and provides the foundation of the dance and the woman adds drama with her little kicks and turns. At times, she leans into him on the tips of her toes as if she will fall if he does not catch her.
Tango was not always a well-respected dance. One of my students, who is 17, said his mother told him that her mother, his grandmother, made it well-known that if any of her daughters knew how to dance tango she would kick them out of the house. There is a myth, I don't know if it's true, that tango was created in the brothels of Buenos Aires.
Besides beautiful tango, I saw something else very Argentine last night - fighting and jealousy between women. One was a potential love interest of my friend, who had recently told me she was playing games with him, playing very cold - he was amused by it. The other was a beautiful tango dancer who may or may not be interested in my friend, or she may just hate the mala onda created by woman #1. Either way, they were really doing everything possible to make each other jealous and bringing new meaning to the expression "if looks could kill." It was very overt and created an almost palpable tension between the two women.
Here I'm obligated to say that competition between women exists in all parts of the world, and that there are, of course, exceptions in Argentina. But there is something here that I really haven't found in other places I've been, an essential sentiment of hostility, competition and jealousy between women. Usually I'm exempt, being a foreigner, but sometimes I do become aware of it and it has a real viciousness that I haven't felt at home. Of course there are so many Argentine women are not like that, who are laid back and strike up conversations in the bathrooms of clubs and laugh at the chamuyero Argentine men.
Anyway, last night left me thinking about it. The vast majority of my students are women here and they are almost all very bright, engaging, kind, ambitious, eloquent people. But is that because we met in a classroom and not at a bar? Really, what is with the interactions between women in this country? I feel like it has something to do with the status of feminism here, that there never really was a women's movement à la Women's Lib in the 1970's USA, and gender roles are still very strictly defined. Could be something with economic dependence too. I think it's complicated, and really, ¿qué sé yo?