I guess they are. I didn’t click on either of them, as I didn’t know what the first was linking to, and the second was under a spoiler, so I assumed it was something a little more titillating.
What makes pole dancing or stripping or even the direct touching of someone’s erogenous zone sexual is predominantly a whole array of socially shared notions that define something as sexual.
If it were not for that shared social context, pole dancing could be just another athletic routine, stripping could have no material difference from being at a nudist camp or everyday life in a culture where clothing isn’t in use, and a touch to someone’s tingly bits, even, more contiguous with the doctor looking for lesions or checking for hernias or inserting a catheter.
I did say “predominantly”. There may be “flirting postures” that are flirtatious because of hardwired species responsiveness to them as sexual, and there are ways of touching tingly bits where the specific combo of friction and pressure is likely to provoke a physical sexual response, so it isn’t all social. And I think it’s a foolish mistake to ever argue that this kind of thing is all “a social construct”. But most of it is. We assign meaning to human behavior at a just-pulled-it-out-of-my-butt ratio of 10% “it is what it is” versus 90% based on the context clueing us in on how to interpret it.
This is a tacit admission that it IS inherently sexual, even if the teachers and parents don’t want to admit it openly.
If any given activity is not sexual, and it’s not private (such as normal bathroom activities), then what possible reason could there be for barring men?
Okay, googling some pictures I see that a lot of the women are wearing bootie shorts, or they’re wearing bikini bottoms and tight midriff-revealing tops.
The men are…not wearing clothing like that. They are wearing thigh-covering compression shorts and non-midriff-revealing tops.
Why is this?
Also the chief result of this google search was something like “Here’s some sexy women who pole vault.”
It almost looks like anything women do is gonna get sexualized. Who is picking the garb for this sport? Is it any easier to do a vault in a bikini bottom and if so, why aren’t the men wearing them?
Okay, here’s another question. If I were to recast Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” with women, with me in the lead Elvis role, would the pole then become a stripper pole, on account of it’s a pole and I’m a woman? It wasn’t when Elvis slid down it, and then used it as a dance prop. But if a woman did it?
DJ Voice Guy saying stuff like “Next up on the main stage, Saphire. Give it up for Saphire”.
Yeah…still sexy.
That’s fine if you are an alien trying to understand Earth customs.
For those of us from here, it’s understood that a “strip club” is predominantly a place where men go to be entertained by consuming overpriced drinks, watching nude or topless women dance on a stage and paying them to grind on their lap for the duration of a song. The “stripper pole” (as well as the aforementioned 6" clear stiletto heels) have long been associated as a prop of the strip club.
Any connotation I’ve seen of “pole dancing classes” usually has some sort of winking acknowledgement to it’s strip club origins.
So how is that different from, say, Pink performing one of her Cirque de Soleil aerial routines in a skimpy outfit in concert:
Again, I think it’s context. Certainly sex sells and there is nothing wrong with sexuality. But I think there is a fundamental difference between an artist giving an artistic performance and entertaining a bunch of drunk horny guys for singles and 20s
Nope. That’s striptease and burlesque. Completely different classes, and those require you to be 18+.
The only reason pole dancers tend to wear shorts instead of full leotard and tights is that cloth slips on the pole. You can’t twist your knees around it and keep yourself in place without friction, and for friction you need bare skin. (Or leather, which would probably make more people plotz.) A lot of acrobats and performers run into the same problem with other gear/props. I perform with dance hoops, and it’s much more difficult to keep them going properly around your legs if you’re wearing tights or leggings.
I know pole dancing has connotations based on its origins, but these days I think you have to think of it as a form of yoga, gymnastics, or acrobatics, like you get in a circus school or something. It’s just another workout.
Hmmm… ISTM they lingered on the girls doing floorwork and pole poses a bit longer than would have been necessary to establish what was the gear being sold and denounce it. Oh, I’m sure that was just done “so that concerned parents can see how bad it is”…
No, the problem is that it began as a sexualized activity and was turned in to an exercise activity so soccer moms could play stripper.
And so I’m not misunderstood, more power to them.
But let’s not pretend that the exercise has ‘been sexualized’; it started out that way, and to pretend that that context can be removed to make it acceptable for pre-teens is laughable.
My 11 year old daughter is a competitive gymnast and I like high-end strip clubs. There is no way in hell that I would mix or confuse the two. I spent Valentine’s Day/Ash Wednesday at a high-end strip club and there weren’t many patrons around so it was just me and a whole bunch of dancers fighting over my attention and money.
I finally picked the most genuine one and asked her to talk to me for an hour before we did anything. It was heartbreaking. She is college educated, has traveled the world and makes a ton of money that is almost impossible replace through other means but really wants a boyfriend and to start a family but she is trapped financially. She told me all about the perils of the industry and what it did to her psychologically. She knows that she will have to hide her past when she finds someone but there is always a great chance that they will find out anyway and dump her because that has already happened.
There is no way my daughters are doing any kind of pole sports because the connotations are just too blatant and they aren’t going to be strippers either even though I have nothing against it in principle. The risks are just too high and there is no reason for them to ever need to do it. Real life doesn’t work like Pretty Woman.
I feel the same way about Honey Boo-Boo style beauty pageants. I have seen them in person and they are ridiculous to embarrassing. Competitive gymnastics is a very real sport and one of the only ones where the female version is more prestigious than the male’s. It gets serialized a little too but it is mostly about pure athleticism.
Allegedly soccer began as kicking around human heads. Those witches’ broomsticks you let your little girls pretend to “ride”? You know how witches were supposed have rode them and to (and in) what end? Let Cece explain.
Contexts change and they change by the doing.
Not a customer of strip clubs myself I’ve never seen a pole dance there. My personal context is vaguely knowing that strippers pole dance lasciviously but not thinking of pole dancing as necessarily sexual, less so even than belly dancing is.
And as a matter of record, apparently no, pole dancing did not originate as a stripper thing. It has been that only for a fairly short period of the history of the activity. It dates back to over 800 years ago as part of Chinese acrobatics in the circus (one modern example), and has also been part of Indian culture. It’s modern Western burlesque incarnation OTOH only seems to have originated in the '20s when strippers who were part of traveling shows would use the tent pole as a prop. That is what changed the context in America from a Chinese circus activity to a burlesque one.
I have no problem with its being reclaimed as a fitness/acrobatic/gymnastic activity and admire anyone of any gender who can do a flag. I had answered with “consider but probably not” but on review, I would change to, depending on how it is taught (emphasis on its circus/acrobatic origins), “yes, with [those] reservations.”
Pole dancing was a circus act long before it was a strippers act. We’ve got a local business that teaches pole dancing for fitness, and they do children too. I’d have enrolled my son (he loved that kind of thing), but it was clear they were marketing to girls, and he didn’t like hanging out with girls.