And why this phrase is a problem.
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It was the end of a long shift, and my body and mind were both exhausted. I had already dealt with a handful of rude, argumentative people, and diffused a number of escalating interactions. My Best Stripper Self was at her limit. I had one more stage set left in me, and I felt good about it, too. I saw a group of three girls walk in, and make their way directly to the stage. Perfect, I thought, I’ll make my house and tipout on this last set and end on a high note.
“Are we celebrating anything tonight?” I asked.
“Yes” she said. “It’s my birthday”.
Behind her, the floor guy offers her friend singles.
“Oh, I don’t have any cash” the friend says.
I looked at the Birthday Girl with empathy, it was 4:30 am. We closed in 30 minutes. Her friends brought her to a strip club for her birthday, and didn’t even bother to bring cash. I was the last girl on stage, and the DJ was announcing Last Call.
“Is it your first time in a club?”
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, and her response was arguably the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my decade and a half in the industry:
“Oh, no. I can work that pole- I’m ✨certified✨”
I felt my body twitch. I blinked a few times to try and shake the energy off of me.
“Oh” I said, defeated and beginning to feel activated. “Considering how unprepared you all are, I would have thought it was your first time. I can also work this pole, but if you’re not prepared to tip me, you won’t get to experience it”.
“Well, I know your face- so why don’t you show me anyway and I’ll tip you later” she bargained.
I stood up and walked to the back of the stage and waited for the song to end so I could exit and go home. The can of worms she opened were not worth my time or energy to clean up.
I was so upset about what she said that I was not going to remain quiet about it, but I was going to wait until I could organize my thoughts in a cohesive manner to fully explain why I became activated.
Here goes:
Being certified is something that Pole Studios offer to legitimize the instructors that they have. This is because when Pole became popular outside of clubs, the practitioners didn’t want to be judged the way that Strippers are. They began advertising as “Pole Fitness”, alongside the problematic hashtag: #notastripper. Which, surprise surprise: further pushed the stigma toward the community that brought them Pole to begin with.
As Pole became popular and more competitive, the “Pole Fitness” community wanted to standardize the techniques into a curriculum to bring legitimacy to the skill, and move further away from the association with Strip Clubs. They created the Pole Fitness Alliance in order to separate, and rebrand themselves as Athletes. This became problematic in the 2010’s when they were hosting their national competitions and requiring the competitors to hide their history in clubs as a guise to fein legitimacy. I know this because I was there.
These days, you can pay an amount of money to learn the “standardized” practices for ‘pole fitness’, and become certified like you would become certified in yoga- and there’s nothing wrong with that. Where there is something wrong, is when you come to the source- ie: a strip club- and attempt to establish a hierarchy because you believe your ‘certification’ puts you on a level playing field with the very people who are responsible for Pole existing to begin with.
A comparison to this behavior would be like telling the Dali Lama that you’re on the same level, and know all about meditation because you took a 200H course and became certified. It’s just, tacky.
This behavior suppresses Strippers and enforces an ‘us against them’ mentality around a craft that was founded on empowerment, individuality, and acts of survival. I’ll speak for myself when I say that my favorite part of Stripping and Pole is that there is no technique, and you can look beautiful doing it however way you like. And I say this as a person with a very expensive degree from a private art school in DANCE PERFORMANCE.
Now, don’t get me wrong- I enjoy Pole studios, and I can appreciate that Pole is becoming more mainstream. If I chose to compete, -which I have considered- I would want to know what would be expected of me as far as technical ability and judged form. I would though, continue to be a loud and proud Stripper because that’s the history of the craft, and I dislike that certain entities are trying to erase that very important truth.
My takeaway from this experience is that rather than needing to ‘sanitize’ and legitimize Pole dancing by creating a curriculum and paywall around it, we can collectively argue the stigma surrounding Stripping to begin with. Why do we need to make new words and rules about it just to be accepted?
xo,c