Hello

But poledancing was developed by strippers in a stripclub environment. Many of those strippers also had a lot of dance and gymnastics and cheerleader training behind them and they developed pole moves partly as a way to kill time when the club was quiet. They taught each other in an informal setting and innovated and created for themselves. Without getting paid explicitly to do so.

Their talent at being able to do things like this has never been recognised. Even though the first pole schools were opened by strippers and taught by strippers, it has now been appropriated by hundreds of people who have never done sex work and who have no respect for sex work, who think it is “sad” that poledancing has a history inextricably entwined with sex work, who only view poledancing as a legitimate artform once it becomes detached from its sex work context despite the fact it was conceived and built in a sex work environment by sex workers.

Poledancing is not “overly sexualised”. It IS a sexualised dance/athletic art and rightly so - it belongs to strippers and it is strippers who made it. Its beauty and athleticism and skill doesn’t change because it was used in a sexualised environment to help its practioners make more money (although now it is seen as just for middle-upper class non-sex workers to pay big bucks in a formal class environment to learn to titillate boyfriends and husbands whilst staying appropriately fit!). That’s a part of its history. Sexualised things are not inherently worth less because of their sexual nature. To believe so is just to devalue the hard work of the sex workers who innovated it and that is done more than enough as is.

Ritmo É Tudo (21) on Flickr.