Fitness And The Pole

No ordinary aerobics class: Faux-stripping for fun and fitness is probably infiltrating your gym as we speak.iStockphoto.com

 

by Elizabeth Nelson

I always believed that stripping was a rarefied skill set practiced only by those individuals who ply what we old-timers used to call the "sex trade." Then in the early 2000s came Carmen Electra, flush with another of her bold, Edison-like innovations: in a series of videos, she combined stripping with aerobics to create the ultimate in low-impact workouts for the vamp in you.

At my gym, an enormous raft of empirical evidence attests to the ascendancy of this phenomenon. Long lines, bright lights, big beats, short shorts and a general atmosphere of pandemonium permeate the premises every night that these classes are offered. It's a frustrating predicament, because I like dignity, but I also like things that are popular. What to do?

The uncomfortable idea of appropriating stripping to improve your abs, after the jump...

From what I can ascertain, one moves up through the "Strip Bar" and "Pole Dancing" classes to arrive at "Turning Tricks." Yes, that's what they've called it. If you think my gym might be only unconsciously evoking the glamorous world of sex for hire, rest assured that you are quite wrong. The class description couldn't be prouder: 'We should pay you for this class!' it gleefully announces, thereby straddling the line between raunchy and confusing that's usually explored in KY commercials.

Perhaps you are asking: What's the harm? You swing around a pole for an hour at the gym, surrounded by some nice, like-minded folks. Maybe learn to give a cardio lap dance, maybe engage in some vaguely prurient escapism that doesn't require penicillin. Of course, this approach clinically excises everything that is toxic, violent, and exploitative from the actual world of stripping.

My darkest thoughts run to minstrelsy: whether these classes don't constitute a fetishistic, cartoonish eroticization of what is, after all, a fairly dreary job. Despite efforts by HBO's Real Sex and glamorous music videos to persuade me, I remain resolutely skeptical that stripping is the first career choice for women with family fortunes or access to executive positions at Fortune 500s.

And yet here we are, at a high-end health club in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world, playacting the fate of largely lower-class individuals with limited options. And all of this for fun and "fitness," even while the classes "playfully" acknowledge the tangential relationship between pole dancing and prostitution.

Am I just a sanctimonious killjoy, or is this trend, at a minimum, in pretty poor taste?

It's disconcerting when, at the top of the above infomercial, the host proclaims with the bald certitude of a distinguished Barrister that 'women love to strip!' Um, really? More likely, women of a particular level of privilege love this watered-down, milquetoast simulacrum of stripping.

And then! At the end of the video, the host -- blissed out on endorphins and the sweat and bonhomie from the Strip Bar class -- distances herself from stripping culture, announcing that she's going home while the real working girls are just getting their evenings started. If only we could all be so fortunate.

In a January 2009 profile in Vanity Fair, Tina Fey said, "I love to play strippers and to imitate them." But she went on: "I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that." Maybe it's time for all of us to start with the woman in the floor-to-ceiling, black-lit mirrors.

Maybe there's still something to be said for jogging.