If one looks at the dance crowd of any country nightclub, one will see that roughly 95% of the line dancers are women. American women are paranoid of strangers, and they want their 6 feet of personal space, including on the dance floor. And they know that, if the entire crowd is shifting back and forth, side to side, and front to back, doing forward kicks and looking like a military training exercise, freestyle dancers will not go on the dance floor lest they risk getting knocked to the floor by a line dancer and possibly disrupting the dance format, so to put it simple, line dancing is a "shield" that keeps all strangers, especially guys, away from them. And adding to it's popularity in America, line dancing even helps people at clubs maintain their default ice barriers between strangers, as line dancers will only see the backs of other people on the dance floor. Many country DJs will even count numbers over the microphone at the beginning of each song to make sure everyone line dances and stays within their own personal bubbles. [links]