Author's Note: This started as a class assignment and I had so much fun I wanted to share my experience with someone other than my (male) instructor. All names and locations have been removed to protect privacy. Enjoy! CV
Somewhere in mid-swing, it strikes me as disturbing that my instructor is right – I feel like a kid again.
I am swinging around a polished stainless steel pole, similar to those seen at any number of playgrounds. But contrary to the childhood innocence usually associated with sliding down a fireman's pole, when I finish my swing and raise myself off the ground, I lead with my hips, running my hands along my body before continuing to the next pole.
It is a beautiful Saturday morning, and I am learning how to move like a stripper.
Called strippercise, pole fitness, exotic dance, or any number of other terms, this sensual form of exercise has become popular with celebrities such as Carmen Electra. Now, with ordinary women taking to pole dancing as an alternative workout, it is relatively easy to find classes offered by private studios, or even athletic departments at several universities along with other basic dance classes.
When I was sent on assignment to write a first-hand account of a new experience, I knew immediately that I wanted to do something dance-related. I refer to myself as being "endearingly clumsy" and I've always envied the grace that dancers possess – poise that I can only achieve on horseback, when four other feet are doing the moving instead of my two left ones.
A quick Google search turned up low-cost introductory pole dancing classes offered at a local studio. Never one to turn down a challenge, I borrowed some dance clothes from a roommate and prepared to get down and dirty.
The studio I have found is located in a trendy neighbourhood, sharing a city block with an upscale fitness wear boutique and fair trade coffee shops. My instructor fits right in – a petite brunette in spotless workout clothes who first took up pole fitness after seeing a dancer perform on Oprah, and learning her own techniques from a former stripper.
At first, the room where my class is being conducted looks like any other dance studio: big windows, lots of light, hardwood floor, mirrored cabinets along one wall. But there is also lingerie hanging on a small curtained change room in the far corner, not to mention the four poles arranged in a square in the centre of the space.
Six other women show up for the session; at 19, I am easily the youngest in the room. In addition to the instructor, almost 50 and a mother to two teenagers, there are three friends who look to be in their mid-40s, and another three women in their mid-to-late-20s.
Any doubts I may have had about the actual fitness value of strippercise are immediately erased once we start moving. Although the pace can be quite slow, the actual movements require physical strength and endurance.
In one exercise called the "prance", we lie on our backs on yoga mats, and move our legs in the slowest, most exaggerated bicycling motion I can imagine. The next day, my abdominal and inner thigh muscles tell me that, while I may have had fun, I actually got a workout at the same time.
From the floor, we move on to re-learning how to walk, slowing down and swaying our hips. We take that walk and incorporate the poles, moving around and between them, letting the smooth metal slide through our grip as we spin ourselves around, first with our feet on the ground, and then off.
Throughout the class, the instructor offers encouragement, pointers, and pep talks all designed to put her understandably self-conscious students at ease.
After we say good bye to and leave the studio, I join two of the women for coffee, and we talk about the class. I learn that they are friends, both 27, and they decided to join the class after hearing about the studio from another friend of theirs. Both enjoyed themselves so much that they were considering signing up for regular classes, and one comments that it was the first fitness class she had taken that allowed her to feel like a woman.
And if the instructor had tried to communicate anything in the past hour, it was that – the fact that women needed to remember the way they had moved as children, before masculinity, straight lines and powerful forward motion became the more socially acceptable alternative.
And between trying to keep my balance while pretending to drag my toes through sand, swinging around poles, and giggling madly the whole time, I started to understand what all the fuss was about.
Somehow,my inner seven-year-old just got a whole lot hotter.