The first time I go to pole, I’m 5 minutes late to class because I don’t know where to lock my bike. The studio is in a nondescript converted warehouse off a busy 6-lane boulevard. The bike ride is quick but there’s a lot of swerving around Amazon vans and trucks unloading in the bike lane, a corridor of road work and exhaust fumes. When I step into the studio, disheveled, the woman at the desk genially waves me to the room where class has begun. There are just two other women, sitting on yoga mats unfurled by the glossy metal poles that stretch up to square plaques on the high wooden ceiling beams. One classmate is wearing tight black cotton-spandex shorts; the other, a thong. I feel conspicuously over-dressed, a frumpy biker, in my knee-length shorts and loose tank top.
The instructor tells us how to sit on the floor. Not like this, she says, imitating a natural seated position and its slouchy obstruction of the part of your butt you sit on. Like this — and she stacks her knees neatly over each other, one leg extended, and pops out her butt instead of sitting on it, putting weight on the side of the thigh instead. I’m reminded of 9th grade drama class and being told to “sheet out” to the audience — even when you’re having dialogue with another actor, you point three-fourths of your face to the crowd. The great drama being presented for consumption here is a human ass. It’s no Hamlet.
In her well-reviewed standup show on blowjobs, “Get on Your Knees,” Jacqueline Novak describes how being self-deprecating is a defense mechanism: if I look in the mirror and point and laugh and say, There’s a fool! then of the 2 of us, one’s a fool and one is a person who can tell a fool, instead of two fools.
Like oral sex or public speaking, pole is difficult because it’s the enactment of a fantasy and it only works if you believe, or pretend you do. You have to lie on the floor with your knees stacked, ass out, like you think your butt is incredible and everybody wants to see it. The moment you doubt this, or begin considering that your butt is a “nice butt” only through the strange alchemy of being born post-“Baby Got Back” and being a freshman in college in the era of Kim Kardashian gleefully callipygian on Paper Magazine’s cover, and then muse about the coercive nature of any kind of normative conception of butts and the fatality rate of Brazilian butt-lift surgery (BBLs) — well. The moment you laugh nervously or slouch down onto your butt cheek and off your thigh, the fantasy falls apart. It’s a little bit like singing in that way. In the fall semester days when I went to a sociology office basement room once a week to learn from another grad student how to sing, I heard quickly that I sang much worse when I was scared, that I had to sing loudly as if I was good, even though my instinct was to sing quietly because I knew I was bad.
After we move from the butt-out seated position on the floor we fan-wave our legs out, which is murder on my bike-tightened hamstrings. In this position the pelvis is on display like a peacock’s plume. Then the instructor has us stand up on our toes as if we’re wearing heels and strut around the pole, our bodies leaning out like the arch of a capital D. I look everywhere but the mirrors on the walls of 3 sides of the room. At one point I can’t stop messing up, the choreography for a basic spin is beyond me, I keep mixing up my “inside” (closer to the pole) and “outside” feet when I listen to the instructions, the instructor comes and roughly jerks my arm up the pole — You need to be holding higher, she says — and tells me to stick my hip out more, then snaps, Don’t look at your feet, look in the mirror! That’s what you paid for.
At the end of the class she puts on music and tells us it’s time to record ourselves. Now there are a bunch of videos on my phone like this: one in that light-filled warehouse, one in a dim Manhattan studio with no mirror, clips from a chair dance class at the same Brooklyn studio, where I went with a friend. This friend tells me there’s a line from the show How I Met Your Mother, where the misogynistic character says, We won the war when women started pole dancing for fun.
An attempt to redeem the reputation of pole dancing from the seedy association of booze-soaked gentlemen’s clubs and sweaty dollar bills by saying it’s just like any other form of exercise would obscure the strong emphasis, at least at this Brooklyn studio, on appearance and sexuality. In chair class, everyone wears a thong; the instructor is in a leopard-print bodysuit with no back, just knotted strings. Sweating onto my black fold-out chair surrounded by almost-naked women running their hands over their bodies I don’t know exactly where to look; I’ve forgotten the choreography again, but there’s something that feels more fraught about staring at your classmate to copy the next step when that step is introduced with “Lead with your asshole, you want your asshole facing out!”
Did we lose the war? There’s a story in which I was bent over a chair making slow Figure-8s with my hips because I’m insecure about my sex appeal, my body, my ability to bend it to the pornographic imagination, the imagination that is most young men’s imagination because they grow up on porn apparently, a generation of screwed-up kids who learned how to screw from waxed babylike vulvas and priapic cocks shining under illumination as powerful and indiscriminate as the mounted light dentists use to illuminate your crevices. Maybe someone like the sociologist Catherine Hakim (I don’t love her work — the views she espouses are often fatphobic and unapologetically discriminatory, as on display in this Slate interview) would argue I was investing in my “erotic capital,” but that feels like earning chips that you can only cash in at one casino. A passable 3-minute dance number won’t get me an academic job or let me turn world-historical tides. I’m no Salome.
In the subjugation story I try to get good at a skill that isn’t really a skill, not the way running really fast or learning how to use the text editor Vim or growing tomatoes is a skill, because calling something a skill implies the freedom to choose it. We don’t call Listening for a Long Time to a Man at a Bus Stop Who Wants to Tell You He Knows Someone from China or breastfeeding or being pretty skills — we don’t call things that women are forced to do skills. Catharine MacKinnon at a law and feminism conference at Yale, the regal materfamilas with a silvery crown of hair, raised her hand at the end of a panel to inveigh against calling sex work sex work; these are prostituted women, she declared. (Invisible) subject-verb-object. What am I, on the chair?
In another story I wanted to be in my body, I wanted to move it around and see what it could do, especially parts I’d never had the chance to think about consciously before. A book I was reading, Flawless by Elise Hu, introduced me to the term “sensualism” (coined by Céline Leboeuf at Florida International University): this is the concept of celebrating our bodies for what they can do or what pleasures they can feel. I saw Maggie Rogers play a concert in Paris and she sang this song, the whole crowd burst into rapturous sound with her: This time I know I’m back in my body. She was so alive on the stage, sweating, discarding her white suit-jacket and jumping around in a bra-less ribbed white tank underneath, stopping a song her band started playing because she needed a drink of water, then restarting. I loved her terribly. Dance like everyone wants to fuck you or everyone wants to be you, my friend told me the night Biden’s victory was announced and we were outside, dancing in the street. Sometimes to-be and to-fuck feel like the same thing, isn’t that the lesson from “On Liking Women?”
I don’t know where you’d go to learn pole or chair dance as anyone who presents as a man. While there was no gender prohibition for class participation — the studio says everyone is welcome — it felt like an overwhelmingly femme space. The desire to enact a kind of gender fantasy, sex fantasy — what I feel like I’m doing as I twirl or sway around a pole or a chair — is not accessible in the same ways, especially not to cis men (the poor lambs). I spent a lot of time around cis men when I wrestled in high school. You could write tomes about the eroticism of homosocial athletic pursuits, but there’s a difference: fighting and other contact sports are about winning and dominance, at least that’s how people talk about them, and if you were to say you wrestled because you wanted to touch people, they would probably throw you out for being a little freak.
“Magic Mike” did not catalyze a mass exodus of Channing Tatum-wannabes to pole studios designed to attract manly men. To carry out an art-and-movement form that situates performance as productive of desire you put on the trappings of femininity and do drag.
Am I lucky, then? I get to just take off my clothes and gyrate. It’s strange having this ticket I didn’t pay for. Or maybe it’s the choke-chain of patriarchy jerking me home. It’s something to do. All the other women in my crowded second chair dance class pull on extraordinarily high heels halfway through the session. Some have long blood-red points. When we are lying on our backs with our feet in the air, they bring the heels together with a loud clap. The sound makes me flinch.
Today under low light the pole instructor tells us, Look in the mirror, flirt with yourself.
Flirting requires the other, and when you imagine that the person in the mirror is the other there’s a strange way it can split you. I’ll think more about that later.
Sometimes I like the idea of dancing in a way that is visibly effortful or even ugly. I really loved this moment in a butoh workshop I did with a friend in the Berkeley flats, standing outside under the setting sun and holding saltwater in our mouths like chipmunks before spitting it as far as we could into the dusty street. I like the idea of singing loudly and not especially well. What I like about the idea of ugly dancing and bad singing: the world in which these were possible and desirable would be such a kind one. One where we didn’t see movement and art as sites to accrue capital so much as something to do in noisy ecstasy with each other.
Still. Beauty (or sexiness) is rarely neutral and the attempt to cultivate it usually reproduces the biases of the society in which we live, but I don’t think that means there is nothing of value in occasionally strutting to where desire points. I don’t know if I’ve lost the war. Perhaps alongside the question, What’s your power? we might ask, What’s your pleasure?
Image credit: The Seated Clowness (Mademoiselle Cha-u-ka-o) (from the series Elles), Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1896), Met Collection.