Pole fitness has seen a surge in popularity in recent years, with hobbyists saying they find empowerment through the art form. But is dancing pole outside the club an appropriation of sex work?
“To feel myself getting stronger in a super-inclusive, very female space was just genuinely a revelation,” says Sam*. She’s been doing pole-dancing classes at a pole fitness studio once or twice a week for almost two years – ever since she thought it would be fun to go along with a friend who was going through a “really gnarly breakup”, not realising how much the hobby would help her too. She’s tried to get strong and fit before but always felt self-conscious and embarrassed at gyms, and had considered rock climbing, but was intimidated by “maleness”. Beyond her newfound strength, she’s also feeling more confident. Once she needed five to six drinks to hit the dance floor, says Sam, but now she simply doesn’t care. “You can see people’s confidence growing, and there’s just a real sense of safety and freedom which happens in the room. I find it quite magic.”
Sam is one of many people, particularly women, who are finding the pole is a route not only to fitness, but also to a feeling of empowerment. Pole’s leap from strip club to fitness studio is said to have begun in 1994 when a Canadian stripper opened a dance school to take pole to the “everyday woman”. At the same time, group exercise classes were taking off in the fitness industry. The two converged, and pole dancing classes are now hugely popular across the western world, marketed as an empowering exercise somewhat removed from its sex-work origins. In New Zealand, the boom in pole fitness is seen in scores of studios dedicated solely to the activity cropping up from Whangārei to Invercargil. But what does that mean for people who pole dance in strip clubs?
For three and a half years Madeleine Rose, aka Lexi Liquid, worked full-time as a stripper. It’s a “hard, hard job”, she says. “People see us wearing the sparkly bikini with all the makeup and the high heels and think we’re making all this money. The really sad reality of the job is that you don’t always make that much money. You get assaulted. You get absolutely judged by people. You get abused by management.” Early on Madeleine discovered a knack, and love, for pole. When the opportunity arose for her to teach it, she took it as a way to dial back from the demands of the strip clubs. Now, pole fitness provides her livelihood. She’s happy to facilitate people finding empowerment through pole, but it is not without complexities. “It’s not an easy world for a sex worker, and unfortunately, pole fit has commercialised the thing that stigmatises us.”
Madeleine knows that some hard-line strippers are adamant that civilians (non-sex workers) should not touch pole. She knows others who couldn’t care less about pole fitness or what hobbyists get up to – they’ve got more pressing issues to worry about. Madeleine is somewhere in the middle – she believes that it’s possible to be an ethical pole hobbyist, to enjoy pole dancing in a way that is not harmful to sex workers. But, “unfortunately, that’s quite a rare thing at the moment”, she says. Pole is often performed in “a very sort of unsavoury, more appropriating fashion” – that’s when Madeleine has a problem with it.
Sam sticks to classes that are skill and strength based, “really, really unattractive for the most part”, but there are also classes at her studio that are more sensual, classes where pleasers – the high-heel platforms synonymous with strippers – are worn and most recently, classes on how to take good footage and photos of pole dancing for social media. For the most part, the people taking these classes are not sex workers, they’re there as hobbyists. Sam would be terrified of breaking an ankle or that she’d be “literally cosplaying as a stripper”. It seems to her a slippery slope to appropriation, she says, even though there are posters in the bathrooms of her studio about strip club etiquette – namely how to be a good guest and respect the dancers.
Madeleine, the stripper-turned-pole-instructor, quickly saw some issues in the pole fitness space when she moved into it. The majority of studios like to think of themselves as pro-sex work and say they are safe spaces for sex workers, she says, but “there’s a lot of actions and precautions and steps that have to be taken to actually back up that claim. That’s where I see a lot of studios falling behind”. The education about the history of pole and sex work that the studios give students is “very surface level”. Madeleine says it’s easy for beginner pole dancers to “just breeze through having not learned any of this stuff, and accidentally appropriate”.
In response, Madeleine created a workshop called Flow and Ethics, which she teaches at every pole fitness studio that will have her. It begins with an hour of teaching “stripper-style, sexy dancing”. The next hour covers the history of pole dancing from its origins with the hoochie coochie dancers of travelling fairs in the United States in the early 1900s. The dancers used the wooden tent poles as a prop, grinding their bodies against them to attract crowds. Madeleine finishes with guidelines on how hobbyists can enjoy pole in an ethical way that reduces harm to the sex work industry.
While increasing education is making a difference, Bambi, a pole instructor and partially closeted stripper, is encountering plenty of seemingly willful ignorance and micro-aggression in the pole fitness community. In studios, there are people who try to separate stripping from pole fitness by claiming it developed from Chinese pole, a completely separate traditional circus art and athletic discipline. She says that when people try to separate or sanitise pole from stripping, it further perpetuates the negative stigma of sex work. “It can be quite rough,” she says. Another stripper, Celeste*, finds it “ridiculous, infuriating and to a degree insulting” when people separate stripping from the pole. “This thing that my forebears have developed is being taken by people who take what they want out of it, and then they go, ‘Oh, but we’re not strippers.’ It’s like, what are you doing?”
Another area of concern is amateur pole, or pole fitness competitions – events where non-strippers perform a routine to music in front of a crowd and judges. That’s where Bambi (and Madeleine) see a lot of “stripper cosplay”. Hobbyists sometimes perform in a sensual style of dancing, wearing outfits like micro-kinis, small sparkly items, g-strings, or, worst of all, taking their clothes off without acknowledging or showing allyship to strippers. “It’s like you’re taking something that essentially a minority is doing for money and is looked down upon, and you’re doing it for free, and people are praising you for it,” says Bambi. She thinks that when people take off their clothes on stage for fun, they don’t consider that for strippers this comes with stigma and safety concerns. It’s grating that they don’t consider the repercussions. “It’s ignorance and it’s privilege, because they’ve never had that experience, so they don’t understand what it’s like,” she says.
The competitions, which the public is often encouraged to attend, also present a threat to the economics of stripping. Celeste says that she’s had women come into the club and tell her that they love her shoes, that they’ve done some classes and been to some competitions, that they think what she does is so fun “and blah, blah, blah”. Yet once they’re done taking up her time, there’s no tip. “They don’t see it as real work, they think I’m here for fun, and that it’s all fun and easy.” She says pole and dancing – which are completely different in the club compared to fitness studios – are barely the beginning of being a stripper. “For me, it’s harder to work the floor, talk to people and essentially sell things to them. That’s like, the hardest job in the world.” She mentions customers who are abusive, who cross lines, who waste time and don’t pay, say horrible things and even spike drinks. The vigilance needed is “really fucking draining”.
Bambi says that while there have been slow improvements, the pole community is “really doing the bare minimum, if I’m completely honest”. Similarly, Madeleine thinks the industry wants to move in the right direction but is not trying hard enough. “I’m not trying to demonise pole fit people,” she says. “I just want there to be more awareness so that strippers like myself can feel more safe inside the studio, and so strippers can take up more space in the studio, because they deserve it.”
On the flip side, being a pole instructor opens up another employment option for strippers. Madeleine, who is “out” as a stripper, thinks that because of her public profile and the stigma associated with sex work, it would be near impossible for her to get any other job. Yet in the bigger scheme of the pole fitness industry, it isn’t the strippers or ex-strippers cashing in. Classes tend to be expensive, the instructors are contractors with little security and the owners tend to be “fitness people”, not strippers. It isn’t easy to set up a studio – hiring space is expensive and so are poles. Madeleine thinks there may be a “generation” of stripper or ex-stripper-owned studios on the way, “and they will be better – if I had a studio, best believe I would do it immaculately”.
Madeleine is still endlessly positive about people learning pole. “I’m so happy for those people to indulge in this art form. I wouldn’t teach it to civilians if I didn’t think that.” While the content of her workshops is for paying attendees, she does share a few starting points. Put in the work to learn about the history of pole and stripping. Don’t ostracise or stigmatise sex work or sex workers. Actively practise allyship by spending money on strippers or sharing causes and education. Most importantly, seek out a stripper as an instructor – there are plenty to choose from. “It’s totally doable to enjoy this in an ethical way.”
