Yesterday I finished reading Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs. And, wow. She makes a few good points (such as the chapter about teenagers and the conflicting messages they receive about sexuality), but these are vastly overshadowed by the BS that constitutes most of the book. For example, the chapter on bois and transmen was absolutely ridiculous - and completely unnecessary.
In the book, Levy makes quite a few references to pole dancing, either by calling it by its actual name, or referring to it with more derogatory terminology such as “spinning on a pole.” (Yeah. Because that’s all it is.) She always speaks of it in a negative way, implying or stating outright that women who participate in pole dancing (either as a hobby or as part of their job) are simply trying to “fit in” within a culture that places men’s sexual desires above women’s.
I’ve seen similar arguments made around the blogosphere lately. Maybe they’re not new; maybe I’m just noticing them more now. Whatever. Either way, it’s a whole lotta horseshit.
For example (and I am not going to link this thread, you can copy and paste it into your browser if you’re so inclined; I’ll be damned if I’m going to give them a Technorati hit)…
http://www.christinielsen.com/blog/about2getskinny/2006/05/sluttin-my-way-to-skinny.html
… wherein pole dancing is described by a commenter as, “a performance in celebration of the culture of whacking off.” (And there are many more colorful descriptions in the post itself and the comments.)
*sigh*… Christ on a stick. Just cry me a goddamn river already.
The thing that apparently hasn’t occurred to Levy, or to radfems in the blogosphere making sweeping generalizations, is that maybe, just maybe, it’s not about men. This is just as infuriating as some of the men I’ve talked to who, upon learning that I’m taking pole dancing, make some dumbass comment about how my boyfriend will love that or they wish they could watch and do we get naked in class and blahblahblah. I guess they can’t conceive of the fact that for once, this is not about them; it’s about me.
I mean, it’s awesome if I can get Rusty all sexed up with some of the stuff I learn in pole dancing class. But, that’s not the primary reason I’m taking the class. It has nothing to do with trying to fulfill a (supposed) male fantasy, and everything to do with getting in shape, increasing my confidence, and confronting some old, deep-seated fears.
What’s so hard to understand about that? (The “false consciousness” card won’t work here, btw. I call bullshit.)
Besides, wasn’t Levy wringing her hands, throughout the entire book, over women who do things with the intent of giving men what they want, rather than doing it for their own reasons?
Anyway. Just some thoughts I had whilst lolly-gagging around the blogosphere during my interim of unemployment.
READ ME: Disclaimer
23 Responses to "Just one quick thing about pole dancing"
I will happily admit that, when I decided to take the pole-dancing workshop with you next Sunday, that I was also excited to tell CB and see his eyes get that familiar gleam in them. So yes, its something that excites him, but because it excites him, he starts suggesting other things in our sex life, which excites me. So really, it all comes around to what makes me happy.
Plus, if I can convince him to pay for the Strip Tease class, all the better. ;)
Yep.
this is what is so irritating about Levy’s book and so manyclaims based on journalist’s reports about “women these days”. I mean, come on, these journalists are capitalizing on the latest sex panic and everyone just takes the freaking things seriously. They’re trying to say things that are outrageous enough but not too outrageous, so they can get attention and advance their career.
It’s a thrill a minute if you’re a journalist to get something juicy from someone so you can attract attention. And little thought is going into whether it’s representative.
so, find someone who says that she does it so she can get in shape to stand on her head while her boyfriend fucks her, ‘Woo! What a scoop!” Then, you call up the latest, hotest cultural critic to wring his hands at what happened to feminism.
oooo.
anyway, I anxiously await the rest.
I suppose that the criticism would be that we aren’t understanding how this makes other people feel they have to be pole dancers for the boyfriends.
But it is just spinning on a pole, more or less. I don’t discount that in your mental subjectivity it can be an immensely culturally transformative, spiritually transfigurative, and karmatically radicalising experience.
But, that’s just as true of me watching paint dry.
Oh, sitting in a chair focusing my retina at points on a fresh slab of drywall. As if that’s all it is.
Well, in terms of its external representational content, really, it is.
In other news, what if you liked standing half-naked on a bright street corner at 3 AM? While, based on the ideological thrust of this post, I could see you potentially claiming that it is a great affront to be seen as a hooker, that it’s not about men, it’s just your personal enjoyment of the activity of standing on a street corner at 3 AM, outside world flies in your face. You’re engaging in a behaviour whose association with sexual vulgarity and prostitution is widely acknowledged by near-universal, crystallised cultural consensus, and you cannot reasonably expect not to be perceived that way.
Pole dancing is another such activity. You may appreciate its value as a mode of aerobic exercise — I imagine you hold that in common with more than just a few strippers — but that’s not the defining attribute of its distinction from any more conventional form of cardiovascular exercise. That, and you’ve said on several occasions that you’ve wanted to strip, that pole dancing has psychosexual appeal to you, and now, that you’re “confronting some old deep-seated fears.”
Deep-seated fears of what? Exercise?
I think you’re barking up a woefully contradictory tree here.
v. crack the prozac in half. seriously
Prozac? What’s that? :)
Oh give me a freaking break, valeko. Seriously. Until you’ve tried pole-dancing, realized how physically demanding and downright difficult it is, how much coordination and balance it requires, and had your muscles be sore for days after the work-out… you can’t tell me one damn thing about “what it really is.”
I mean, I could rabbit on all day about what rock-climbing, or rugby, or belly-dancing, or any other activity I have never done “really is,” but I’d be talking out of my ass and would look like an idiot to anyone who’s actually ever done any of those things.
Besides, I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what kind of behavior I’m “engaging” in. Liek I said - I’m doing it for MY reasons. I don’t have to explain to YOU what those are, unless I choose to. I don’t care how many people sit around wringing their hands because of my “behavior,” it’s not going to prevent me from doin git, and it’s not going to change the fact that so far? This has been one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.
Oh, and to this little bit of supposed wit:
Yes, actually. Thanks for making it sound like that’s something stupid. Do I get to make fun of painful parts of your past, now?
Like I said - I have my reasons. You might wonder, “What?? How could she have deep-seated fears of exercise??” Well, you haven’t been me, so try not to show your ass, m’kay? I really don’t feel like getting into it, esp. since I already experienced people talking shit and minimizing the abuse I experienced as a kid on a blog thread the other day when I acually tried to open up about this stuff.
Here’s the thing about Ariel’s book and about Valeko’s comment that “it’s just your personal enjoyment of the activity of standing on a street corner at 3 AM.” What is oh so woefully missing from both of these perspectives is money.
Sure, everyone wants to talk about the sex part of sex work and what that means for women, men and society, but what about the money?
Believe me, sometimes its just about the money, not empowerment or anything else - making a living.
Yep.
And then, of course, that opens a whole ‘nother can of worms and you get long-ass threads like this one that seem at some points to go in cirlces rather than doing much else.
One thing that I thought was good about Rachel’s recent article (the one that’s made so many people gnash their teeth and rend their clothing) was that she talks about how something does have to be empowering for you to choose to do it. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be, and that’s okay.
Er, that should’ve said, “doesn’t have to be empowering.”
I have to disagree a bit, Dacia and Amber…in my view, for these fools who grip and moan about women doing sex work or even simulated pole dancing, it’s ALL about nothing else BUT the sex….in that anything that invites sexual arousal that doesn’t mesh with their conceptions of sexuality conditioned by the most severe restrictions (either procreation within marriage or monogamous personal “intimacy”) is considered such a cosmic threat to their well being.
The base word here is EROTOPHOBIA.
The fundamental fear that sex (especially female sexuality)unharnessed from narrow social controls will ultimately lead to the gravest social and economic harm; not to mention global corruption, social pollution, the fall of “civilization”, losing world wars, and so forth.
So deeply intertwined and so deeply assumed is erotophobia in our culture that even the mere implication of sexual arousal within a non-sexual objective (such as Amber’s pole-dancing cardio class) is enough to draw the harshest criticisms and assumptions of promoting “sexual vulgarity”.
Even those who consider themselves to be sexually sophisicated and “modern” in their thoughts are more than capable of imposing their own myopic assumptions of “sexual slavery” and “vulgarity” onto others. (”What I do isn’t sexual, but merely “erotic” and empowering; but what YOU do is “pornographic” and enables evil male rapists, pedophiles, and awakens sinful desires which destroy humanity.”)
Even Dacia’s point about doing whatever you need to do for survival is lost upon the erotophobes, who would much rather, in my view, see women die as slaves (or, in the more “liberal” viewpoint, be rescued by crusading “feminists” into more “respectable” professions), than to ever accept their rights to engage in such “degrading” sexually inviting behaviors.
How else can you explain the sheer vitriol and bitter hatred thrown at even mild expressions of female sexuality that deviate from the canon of sexual “purity” (whether invented by religious fundamentalists or “feminists”..and it’s becoming much harder to differentiate the two sides, considering the consensus that both have against sexually assertive women)…even something as basically harmless as pole dancing???
Erotophobia really is the root of all this….and is really the last (and probably most fundamental) acceptable form of oppression…not to deny the strength of the traditionals such as racism and sexism and economic class, but fear and loathing of sex (what I call “sex-hate”) is far more fundamentally rooted..and will be the toughest to crack.
In the meantime, the best response to those haters is to just do whatever feels right to you, and give them a nice middle fingered salute.
The chapter on transmen and bois felt so out of the blue in the context of the rest of the book. Word on the street saying that Levy herself is a dyke (who may or may not have done time around the East Village) puts it in more perspective, but uhm, well. I found it disingenuous. I dunno; not even the not outing itself, just, writing about personal-is-political stuff from what frankly felt like an anthropologist’s perspective feels off, to me.
I made no claims about what pole dancing “really is.” In fact, I specifically said that the most I can do is speak to what I called its “external representational content,” rather than some essentialist ontology.
The entire — and singular — point of my comment is that it’s not reasonable or pragmatic for you to expect that most people aren’t going to perceive pole dancing in vividly sexual terms — with the attendant dynamics of sexual morality and power — rather than solely encapsulated in the abstraction of an intellectual objective and a cardiovascular activity. That’s not because that’s what pole dancing “really is” (who knows?), but if I had to select a term for it, I’d probably reach out and grab: what it “means” (i.e. to others).
With regards to my comment about exercise, I do apologise. Indeed, I considered it rather improbable and thus grounds for an uncharitable wisecrack. I certainly didn’t mean to insult or belittle you.
Valeko I think in a nutshell your post (above) is saying I haven’t tried pole dancing, granted, but I’m entitled to define it along the lines of its common perception to most, which is in terms of its sex-industry past.
Unfortunately this doesn’t take into account pole dancing’s recent and continued move away from it’s sex industry origins into a place where many ordinary women of all backgrounds use it as an everyday pursuit. And this does nothing to reflect this change.
Continually harking back to pole dancings origins in order to define what it is today will soon become obsolete, misguided, absurd and inaccurate.
And for a clearer understanding of what pole dancing today is about, no amount of intellectualising and theoreticising can beat actually jumping on a pole and seeing for oneself.
I’m ending with this quote from one of the world’s top pole dancing artists: “I can only say, also, that there seems to be a dying of the old and a turn to the new right now: the old being the outmoded structure of talented women being exploited to make someone else money, while the new is women claiming their own power and
choosing not to give it away to people who disrespect them. The choice is ours.”
Maybe you’re right. I don’t know much about pole dancing.
But it’s fair to say, in a purely scientific, positivistic vein, that my account of pole dancing is, at the present time, more sociologically correct than yours or Amber’s.
When that changes, I’m sure it will be a very intriguing thing.
Ahhh, Valeko…
What does it really matter if some women are taking more kindly to pole-dancing as a means of combining exercise and sexual self-expression???
I mean….do these women really give a flying fuck if others still see pole-dancing as associated with stripping and “sexual vulgarity”???
And what would you say about aerobic institutions like Crunch, who have pioneered integrating erotic (even graphically sexual) motions into their aerobic routines?? Would you attack them as being tools of “sexual vulgarity”, too???
If it works for Amber and it works for these women, then there is no issue. If you don’t like it, there are other more traditional exercise regiems elsewhere that suit your tastes.
To hell with what those others think…they’re not the ones taking the course.
Anthony
‘But it’s fair to say, in a purely scientific, positivistic vein, that my account of pole dancing is, at the present time, more sociologically correct than yours or Amber’s. ‘
Hmmm - that would depend on who you asked!
Anthony - spot on.
Of course it would depend - if you’re speaking in specifics. I’m dealing in generalisations. ;)
Sigh .. yes …. and the sooner people will stop ‘generalising’ about pole dancing, often falling back on tired old cliches and worn stereotypes to support their arguments, the better.
In the interests of accuracy and making a credible point at least? Thank you.
Sadly, generalisations, statistics, and inductive inferences are a very necessary aspect of consciousness and not just the prerequisites to the combinations of the human intellect, but even elementary cognitive functionality.
Why use superfluous didactic constructs in order to obfuscate the discursive assertions being propagated when simple plain English does the same job equally well and a tad less verbosely? Love from a pole dancer with a Masters degree in medieval latin not fazed by high school 6th form essay-speak xx
Because we all want to be successful team-players like you.
Hey.. Corporate management-speak too .. Versatile. Anyway as it’s a blog about pole dancing thought I would add I had a *wicked* class last nite would recommend it to anyone