Slutdropping: the dancefloor move that's bringing women together

Amid all the horrors that form an average freshers' week, talk this year was of a decidedly unpleasant new trend. The Everyday Sexism project, informed by a tip-off, reported that a bunch of knuckle-dragging students had slammed down the sticky lids of their laptops and gone for a drive. Circling nightclubs, they'd offer lifts to a lone, slightly drunken woman. If she accepted and clambered in to the car, she'd be driven as fast as possible, as far as possible, in the opposite direction to her chosen destination. Then she'd be chucked out. The lads called it "slutdropping".

These men deserve all manner of studenty ailments – glandular fever, library fines, dodgy kebabs and more – for the vileness of their behaviour. They also deserve it for tarnishing the name of a dancefloor move that has, of late, been bringing young women together.

The real slutdrop is a move that, to get technical for a moment, is not dissimilar to Legally Blonde's "bend and snap". You fling one hand in the air to steady yourself while you squat, straight-backed. Despite inevitable anterior cruciate ligament injuries, go down as low as is possible, then pop back up immediately. If you're wary of tearing your trousers, hoik them up, Harold Bishop-style. (If you don't you may pay the price; one friend has unseated six pairs of trews). Oh, and keep your ankles together.

For the sake of your thighs, you don't have to slutdrop throughout a song, only at the end of the drop; the bit in all pop where a crescendo builds and soars and the bass falls out only to smack back in a moment later. It used to be that dance tracks would only have one or two big drops but thanks to EDM, the bangers born of Skrillex and Deadmau5, there's a drop in every chorus. Calvin Harris, Pitbull, David Guetta, the Wanted and the Saturdays are excellent proponents of pop-drops, because they keep the moment coming, relentlessly.

A night of repeatedly ripping thigh muscles does tend to hurt. As keen slutdroppers stagger out of clubs, one might suppose the Forrest Gump-in-leg-braces gait is down to a dodgy drinks policy. But it's not, and even the men who 'drop know it has hidden benefits; do it for long enough and you end up with thighs fit to crack Enigma codes.

The origins of the slutdrop can be traced back to music videos inspired by pole-dancing: Christina Aguilera's Dirrty and Pussycat Dolls' Don't Cha. Pole-dancing has – thankfully – had its moment as a supposedly empowering hobby, and on the dancefloor slutdropping has moved on from that too. Women come together for a slutdrop. Like a shot of Jäger, it's mostly done in a circle of friends. It's a Beyoncé-inspired gesture of kinship; it just happens to involve a big bounce.

By stealing the name for such a nasty, abhorent practice, those Unilads have reminded us once again of the word's perjorative sting. The slutdropping move, meanwhile, is one of the few examples of the word being reclaimed by women. Squatting next to a bunch of tanked-up mates might not seem like society's progressed much past the Paleolithic era, but it's a true signifier of feminine camaraderie and for that reason alone I hope it's here to stay.