Confessions of a middle-class pole dancer: ‘It’s permission to be sexy’
The Sunday Times - Review - January 22, 2006 'Honey, stick your bottom out more. That's right - gorgeous!" I am teaching a dance class on a cold
January night in north London. Eight women are breathless, sweating lightly. Their ages range from
24 to 45, their body sizes from a petite 8 to a curvaceous 20. A cross section of this class reveals a student, a fashion buyer, an advertising manager and a
barrister. We have trained with press-ups so we can take our weight on one arm and spin round,
shrieking exultantly like little girls in a playground, letting our hair fly behind us. One of the group does a handstand then locks her legs about the smooth metal pole, giggling
with triumph as she pulls herself upright. "I haven't played like this since I was a little girl," she shouts. Having recovered from the trauma of being caught in the London bombings (which I wrote about
in these pages), I have returned to my day job in a busy publishing office. But on Tuesday nights
I teach women to pole dance for fun. My students call it Rachel's Feminist Disco Pole Dance Course.
We wear T-shirts, shorts and high heels. No men are allowed to watch and few will ever see the skills
that these women have spent weeks perfecting, though several of the class are now intending to
buy poles for their homes. "I am amazed how much I love this," says Tina, one of the students. "It's permission to be sexy.
I feel like a total goddess." "Bollocks to the gym!" someone else shouts, collapsing with laughter. We all cheer. So are we female chauvinist pigs? Will we feel cheap in the morning? Or are we jiggling and writhing
secure in the power of our fortunate femaleness? Sex, like everything else now, is commoditised.
There are fashions in sexuality and body appearance, just as there are fashions in hairstyles
and clothing. Are the silicone breasts of today's bikinied celebrity so different from the plucked hairline
of the Florentine courtesan or the powdered bewigged lady of the Georgian court? But our breasts are
silicone-free, our sweat is real. So too is the money we earn ourselves to pay for these dance sessions.
Who says we are letting feminism and ourselves down? Not all the women who come to the studio
learn to pole dance for fitness and fun. Some do it so they can earn money. With no-touching
rules strictly enforced, and £20 handed over for every teasing three-minute dance, the ones
being exploited in the "gentlemen's clubs" are the men, say the young women who flock to work there. Unleashed female sexuality can be explosive, shocking. But as the women wrapping their legs
around the poles and shouting with triumph in my Tuesday class point out, lots of us are having
too much fun to want to stop now. We're dancing while we can, because we can, for the sheer hell of it.' Rachel North - The Times | 
