Pole2Pole Magazine The Worlds First Pole Dance Magazine

A great article taken from our March 2010 issue of Pole2Pole Magazine. Pole Dancing Delights by Claire Griffin Sterrett.

Photo by George Grigorian Poleagraphy.com

I took my first pole dancing class mostly out of guilt.  The owner of the wellness center where I worked hosted the event and insisted that all the employees go.  Since no one on the staff had showed up for any of the other events, I decided I would suck it up and spend the forty dollars. I had been to a strip club maybe three or four times to before and embraced the classic “those-poor-girls-having-to-take-their-clothes-off-for-money” attitude in order to mask my discomfort with the whole situation.  I generally approached the business of stripping and strip dancing as another patriarchal, chauvinistic tool used to control and denigrate women.  Taking the class seemed slightly beneath me – after all, I was a well-adjusted, extremely sexually open and enlightened woman, right?   I didn’t need to learn to slither around on the floor, or, worse yet, grind my ass against a pole in order to feel sexually attractive.  And then there was the fact that strip dancing seemed inherently designed to reduce men to primal, slobbering hormone bags and that was just...unattractive.  But I felt bad for the owner and, truth be told, a part of me was also extremely curious about what this teacher was going to say.  I was in the middle of my MA program in Somatic Psychology, which focused heavily on bodily awareness, breath and emotion and felt like I probably already knew much more than she did about the body.  I entered the class thinking that I would learn very little: I was just going to swing around on a pole (which I would obviously be really good at) and maybe roll around on the floor some.  So imagine my surprise when 15 minutes into the class I met the edge of my comfort level.  Oh, and I was horrible at the pole.  By the end of the class I had signed up for the 4-week level 1 class.  I didn’t have the money, but I absolutely knew I had to keep taking classes.

It wasn’t that all of my opinions about pole dancing changed in those 60 minutes – or that I even became more conscious of the deeply ingrained beliefs I held regarding women and their sexuality.  The small shift that took place inside of me during that class was much more visceral than that.  It was like a tiny window letting in a puff of fresh air and a part of me said quietly, “It’s OK for me to experience pleasure.”  But I’m not sure that I even knew what was being said.  I just felt the overwhelming urge not simply to learn this movement, but to master it.  And watching my teacher perform at the end of class I felt like I was being let in on a little secret.  A secret that belonged exclusively to women.

The first thing I ran up against in erotic dance class was exactly how hard it is to be a heterosexual woman, and to try to be authentically sexy for a group of women. There seems to be an automatic reflex that demands that I tone it down when in the presence of other women.  And if I don’t, then I’m a whore.  It was easy for me to be sexy for a man.  (Although, looking back, I realize that I was not very connected to my sexual behavior – I was more often than not putting on a good show. It was fun, but unfulfilling.)  Being sexy for another woman was, well, intimidating as hell.  I was terrified of being judged for being sexually provocative, for being sexually aroused, for touching myself and for sharing that experience. Years of being taught that sex was something best shared in a heterosexual, loving, committed relationship had also convinced me that my sexuality could also only exist within these confines.  And teasing it out into what felt like public view was laden with ghosts from the past.  I was worried that I would be deemed “unsexy” by my classmates, that I would look foolish or, even, worse, that I just really wasn’t all that sexy.  And why did I care so much about being sexy, damn it?   Through the work in each of my erotic dance classes, I began to understand that it wasn’t that I wanted so much to be perceived as sexy by others as it was the desire to feel my sexuality in my own body and then to be able to share that feeling with others, without being judged for it.  And there are very few places in our culture where that is accepted, let alone encouraged.

Meanwhile, my studies in somatic psychology were serving as a backdrop for much of what I was experiencing in dance class.  I was learning how and why this movement-based practice could be serving as a vehicle with which to explore my sexuality from a neurological and psychological perspective.  For example, if the body serves as a vehicle for environmental as well as internal messages (it’s too hot in here, I’m so nervous, this doesn’t feel right) and sexuality is experienced primarily through the body, it’s not surprising that a body-based practice would help me to reconnect with my sexuality.  Additionally I was taking workshops on the archetypes of masculine and feminine power and the importance of sexual polarity in a relationship, regardless of gender.

As I continued to explore erotic dance, my questions started to change.  Rather than wondering why I cared about being sexy, I started to wonder why it had been so difficult for me to accept that being sexy was in fact, a positive attribute and did not negate my intelligence or my worth as a woman.  In fact, it seemed as though being sexy, that is, being connected to my erotic self, felt quite natural and even exhilarating.  I was given permission to unapologetically unleash my raw sexuality and any of the accompanying emotions (fear, shame, rage, joy, pleasure) were welcomed with open arms.    No one told me to tone it down, that I was too much, or that I was asking for trouble.  Many of the classes had a spiritual component to them, and references to the goddess were often made.  Why then, was there so much shame and trepidation associated with this practice?  Why did I still feel uncomfortable telling people that I studied erotic dance?  And if this movement, which, as I was beginning to discover, had a sacred quality to it, why were the women who were getting paid to do it generally looked down upon?

What became clear to me was that American culture, for all of its obsessions with sex and the body, particularly women’s bodies, was still tremendously sex-phobic.   On the one hand we live in a culture where we are bombarded with sexual images and on the other we are reluctant to directly discuss how to give oral sex to one another.  It is as if playing at being sexual is wholly acceptable, but truly expressing your sexual desire is not.  This is particularly true for women.  One of the unfortunate fallouts of the feminist movement being concurrent with the sexual revolution is that many women, in an attempt to throw off the patriarchal chains, have argued that any woman who overtly flaunts her sexuality, enjoys being submissive or otherwise experiments with hyper-feminine behavior is simply a slave to the patriarchal ideology and, even worse, is doing the rest of us a huge disservice.  In other words, if you keep your sexuality under wraps, insist that you are appreciated for your head before your body, and never admit that you like to be dominated, or heaven forbid, objectified, then you are a good feminist.  Otherwise, you are a traitor.  Tragically these choices place quite a deal of restraint on a woman who is keen on exploring her sexual desires.  Even worse, women are given a tremendous amount of direction from media sources on how they should look and act with respect to their sexuality, but very seldom is there a place for them to learn about their own subjective experiences of desire.  This puts women in quite a bind.  On the one hand they are given a great deal of visual imagery on how they should dress and behave - usually for someone else – a man.  If they take this direction to the extreme, they are perceived as weak, and caving into the patriarchal values set upon them by society and risk judgment from other women.      However if they ignore it entirely, they are perceived as being too masculine.  If they do have the good fortune to be able to fully own their sexuality and understand that it is theirs to share with whomever they please, they are often considered dangerous, “loose” women and are relegated to the status of “whores” by both women and men.  We have given women very little space to explore and unleash their sexuality without the fear of being judged.  And this is quite deliberate.  Female sexuality is power – it is the seat of a woman’s power.  It is wrapped up in her ability to create, to give birth, to give life.  And it resides in her body.

We have a reached a time where we need to begin to redefine and play with the terms like objectification and submission and how they fit into and overlap in both the feminist vocabulary and the sexual forces in our culture.  If choice is an essential part of the feminist movement, then a woman’s right to display her sexuality should fall under this category of choice.  As Jack Holland points out in his book Misogyny, ambivalence towards women’s beauty remains as part of an ancient hostility towards the body.  This ambivalence “is echoed in many of the feminist writings that call on women to give up the frivolousness of beauty and prove through their minds that they are equal to men.  The solution is not jettison beauty or pleasure or to place constraints on women’s sexuality or their bodies.  The solution is to change our attitude towards all of these things and to reconnect with our bodies”.  Pole dancing, as it turns out, can help provide the brave and willing woman with the path to do just that.