But it's just harmful fun...

Ladies, Gentlemen, and those of you who are neither, your attention needs to be drawn to a rebranding exercise of grandiose proportion. The Cambridge Union Society's decision to put on 'pole fitness' classes this term is the ploy at hand. For those of you who may be confused by this new terminology, pole fitness is apparently something empowering, fun, harmless and sexy, and not to be conflated with pole dancing, a more contentious activity done in lap dancing clubs. The choice to put on these classes has already been defended by the powers that be at the Union and by some of the less salubrious characters on Comment is free. It's also been brilliantly torn apart by David Mitchell in this article: Actually, you won't find female empowerment halfway up a pole

An ongoing discussion on the email list for college women's officers highlights some of the mixed opinions going around. Women's officers clearly care enough about the nuts and bolts of female participation in university life to volunteer for the job, and yet the suggestion that pole fitness classes might go against Women's Campaign tenets like working 'towards political and social gender equality in the University of Cambridge and in wider society' has drawn out a certain amount of ire.

To give you a flavour of the discussion, comments on the list included such gems as:

'It's not insulting to those who don't go and it won't marginalise them because it's optional',

and

'After discussion with fellow undergraduates, women had nothing but positive things to say about the idea of pole fitness, and a strong theme throughout all conversations was that feminism should be about empowering women to make the choices that are best for them individually...They also felt that pole fitness could indeed be separated from the sex industry, if a conscious effort was made to do so.'

The same comment goes on:

'To try to elude that by supporting such things, we are also condoning some of the horrific sides of lap dancing clubs and similar is quite frankly insulting to the intelligence of fellow women's officers and the general undergraduate body.'

'Empowering'. It's become such a buzz-word for proponents of post-feminist ideals, like the idea that being able to choose to writhe up and down on a pole scantily clad was actually what feminism was aiming at all along. Another excellent article has been written about this on The Onion,'Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does' so all that really needs to be pointed out is the obvious: choices aren't formed in an ideological void. Yes, feminism is about empowering women to make individualistic choices, but it's also about campaigning for a setting of equality in which to make choices, so that women are not just presented with the same range of choices as men, but so that the attitudes that pressure choice-making aren't gendered. In this situation, it's clearly not the case that the privileged and intelligent female undergraduates choosing to take up pole fitness are being forced into it, or victimised. But as Greer pointed out back in the day, pussy power, the power to make men look, to entice sexually, is a limited kind of power.

Obviously it feels empowering to gain the ability to be sexier to men; winning the approval of anybody with more power than you feels good. And whilst many of the women who take part probably do, or at least in future will, wield economic and political power of a very real kind, given that relatively few numbers of men are choosing to take up pole fitness classes at present (the classes are women only), I'd say that more work needs to be done on the context in which choices are being made. I'd say that real empowerment lies being able to stand up against things, like pole dancing, that perpetuate the construction of a cultural sexuality in which eroticism is defined by male/female inequality, without being scared of being seen as less sexually attractive. What I'm trying to get at, in a very roundabout way, is this: if pole dancing is really empowering, why don't men do it? If they don't do it, as the common response to this question suggests, because men and women don't find it arousing when things are the other way round ('errrr... it's a basic supply and demand situation, stop trying to make it gendered, you bloody feminist') why is it the case that men and women don't find it arousing the other way round?

There's a couple of possible answers to that. Perhaps the sexualities of hetero men and women are biologically and naturally constituted this way. It just happens to be true that, due to like, testosterone, or chromosomes, or something, that men find the visual aspects of naked women arousing to the point where fetishising the unclad female body as a collection of object parts is an omnipresent part of everyday life. It just happens, biologically and naturally, to be the case, conveniently, that women find it arousing (and empowering!) to be objectified so, and increasingly, to self-objectify in this manner, to the point where it has been institutionally accepted at Cambridge University, the most prestigious centre for learning in the country.

Or maybe both these tendencies are developed as part of the social construction of our sexualities, and maybe it doesn't make sense to talk about what is biological and natural given the fact that we are born into and have lived every day of our lives in an unequal society in which men historically have held all the real sexual (and economic and political and physical and academic and cultural and and and and) power, in which expressions of female sexuality have been historically decried as unnatural, unethical, and crazy, and in which today, the only acceptable female sexualities that there are are those that conveniently play into the dominant subject/object paradigm of sexual relations that has been set up under a framework of prejudice. Why does the rhetoric of empowerment only big up things like pole dancing, in which the only real arousal is male? Could it be the case that the female arousal suggested in pole dancing, in stripping, in prostitution, in porn, is more the arousal generated by the taboos inherent in the brazen and graphic imitation of genuine, actual arousal? I'm not suggesting that pole dancing can never be erotic for the dancer. Like everything else about us, sexuality is created by the myriad of pressures we internalise. What is arousing is what we've been told is arousing. But actually, pole dancing, in its sex industry form, is about the continued relegation of eroticism and arousal to paradigmatic heterosexist power relations. You might say it's no more about fun and harmless expressions of female sexuality than my right foot.

Pole fitness, in no way like pole dancing.

So far I've mostly talked about pole dancing in a loose sense. The other stand out point from the women's list discussion is the idea that pole fitness classes are separable from the sex industry, and that to condone the classes is in no way to condone the nasty bits of sex work of the institutionalised variety. This is a claim that needs some unpacking. Why are the kinds of people who would probably never be caught dead frequenting a lap dancing club, who know that there are substantial problems with the sex industry, who may describe themselves as 'egalitarian' if not *clears throat* feminist, so keen to stand up for this 'pole-fitness-is-completely-different-to-pole-dancing' business? Can it be just that they want to be seen as in line with the pole dancing is sexy and fun agenda so that they aren't seen as frigid and uptight and hairy and probably lesbian? Or do women at Cambridge genuinely believe that pole dancing is fine as long is its just about fun and fitness rather than dancing for men? Well, David Mitchell puts it rather well, 'Even if you say that it's just dancing and good exercise, surely it would be more empowering to learn a dance that can be employed in contexts other than strip clubs?'

As someone who enjoys other kinds of dance for genuine fun and fitness, it seems pretty obvious that learning a form of dance where the fundamental thing that you need to do the activity (i.e. the pole) is something that you only have in the studio (or in strip clubs) seems rather to miss the point. Practice makes perfect, after all. Also, are they going to get a pole for every participant, or will there be just one pole, so that the other women stand around...er... watching... when it's not their turn? Can't be that good for fitness if you spend half the class waiting for a go. It just seems a little bit like wishful thinking/willful denial to try and rebrand pole dancing as just fitness when it is clearly an activity that takes place almost exclusively in lap dancing clubs (and, I suppose, the homes of people who are keen enough to have their own poles). Calling it something different doesn't make it something different. In a cultural vaccuum, yes, those same moves might be completely fine, sexually charged or no, but actually, the sex industry does exist, and it does exploit/abuse/rape/violate/traffic women on a daily basis. Being a pole fitness apologist is a bit like writing a book called 'I'm not writing a book', about how you aren't writing a book because what you are writing is actually a new form of thing called a schbook, which is completely unlike a book.

Until we have gender equality of some sort, there is no context in which pole dancing can ever be something other than the perpetuation of limiting sexual norms that it is, and whilst it is not at all bad to engage in forms of highly sexualised display, it won't be until these things are openly engaged in on a footing of gender equality, in a culture that doesn't constantly reduce women to sexual performance monkeys for male benefit that I will believe that its just 'fitness'.