Specifically, girls nine years old and younger.

That’s the plan for a class at a Vancouver area exercise studio called Tantra, who also have a studio in Langley. There’s even talk of offering a “mommy and me” version of the class.

But I’m not so much interested in the specifics as I am at addressing the issues inherent in this phenomenon. These sorts of classes are springing up all over and so this is going to keep popping up in the media as people take their turns getting offended by it. So I figured I’d take a crack at it.

It’s not in dispute that the idea of little girls who are not even tweens yet taking lessons in a form of dancing invented by and associated primarily with strippers. In the sexual hierarchy of society today, strippers are considering to be only half a step above prostitutes, who, of course, are thought of as only one step above the bottom of the female sexual world, sluts. Loose women. Etc.

So any juxtaposition of strippers and children is going to set off a lot of taboo alarms in people’s minds, especially in this era where child sexual abuse, and by extension child sexuality and sexualization, is the moral panic du jour and pedophiles (and by extension, anything that seems like it might appeal to them) are considered to be the worst people around, bar none.

But taboos are not rational by nature, and are sometimes completely arbitrary or even harmful, so we have to ask ourselves : In the clean clear light of reason, do these classes harm the girls taking them? Is there anything worth worrying over, or is this just a lot of moralistic squawking with no basis?

I think it’s clear that the classes can do no direct harm to the girls. The pole is just another piece of the jungle gym to a little girl, no more inherently sexual than anything else in their basically innocent worldview. If they enjoy it, and get exercise from it, and aren’t asked to do anything but dance and have fun, then obviously the activity is as harmless as the advocates say it is and the fact that it offends our taboos by juxtaposition is irrelevant.

But that’s purely in terms of direct harm. There’s a lot more than direct harm in play here, and we can’t pretend these things are not there merely because they are unpleasant.

Sure, to the little girls themselves, it seems like a fun, harmless, nonsexual activity. But others are not going to see it that way and these girls are going to sense that. Kids have very good antennae for picking up how people feel about things, and often can perceive far more than they can understand about the world. They can’t grasp sexuality in an adult sense until they themselves go through puberty, but they can certainly pick up all the messages from adults in their lives and how pole dancing is portrayed on television to understand that there is something “weird” about all this, something sexual, and this could cause them considerable confusion and stress that a comparable course in, say, tapdancing or aerobics would not.

Also consider the way these classes are marketed to adult women : they are clearly marketed as something sexual, naughty, something to make you feel sexually empowered while getting a good workout. These messages will not somehow fail to reach the little girls as well, and while they might not understand it, they will still get that this is a sexually-related activity.

A lot of people are going to claim that these classes would somehow be a “magnet for pedophiles”. I’m not too worried about that. There might be a few unwholesome types who would lurk around and watch the classes if you let them, but otherwise there is no danger that somehow these classes will whip the local pedo population into a baying howling frenzy and they will descend upon the girls like rabid hounds. Most sexual molestation happens between a child and someone they know, someone with regular access to them, like a parent, a relative, a babysitter, or a teacher. Strangers who abduct children who do not even know them rarely enter the picture, despite what some sensationalistic media stories would like to tell you, and so the classes would have no particular impact on the likelihood of this happening. Add in the factor that pedophiles have a tendency to be attract to perceived innocence, and thus little girls who pole dance might, in fact, be less attractive to pedophiles rather than more, and I think we can safely ignore this factor as having little or no impact or relevance.

I do wonder, however, what happens when these little girls grow older, pass through puberty, and then look back on their dances of sliding up and down the pole in dancing class. Are they going to be embarrassed by all they innocently did in those classes? Teenagers are notoriously sensitive to any sort of humiliation, real or imagined. Are they going to wonder why their parents let them do something like that? All it takes is one insensitive question from a peer (along the lines of “Why did your parents make you take pole dancing?”) and it could be quite the traumatic thing between a mother and teenage girl.

To me, it seems like there is a small but real cause for genuine concern about indirect repercussions about this particular form of exercise for kids. Seeing as there’s a lot of other forms of exercise for kids that does not carry this sort of baggage, the simplest solution, I would think, is to avoid the pole danging issue entirely and simply sign them up for something else.

It does not, however, warrant government action. Perhaps, if there is professional association for exercise instructors and/or gym owners, that body could recommend against offering this sort of class. But that’s as far as I am willing to go.

But before we leave this topic entirely, I have to address this excerpt from the article in the opening paragraph of this essay :

“I challenge anybody who has anything to say about it being a bad thing or a sexual thing or ‘how can you let your child do this?’ to get up on the pole and try to pull their legs over their head.”

That statement is so appallingly irrelevant and ignorant that it literally made my jaw drop. Then I laughed. I mean, I know fitness instructors tend not to be taken from the brighter end of the gene pool, but this person has got to be a real prizewinner. Only someone of a certain special mentality thinks “Can you do this physical thing? No? Then I win the argument, so there. ”

Some people peaked in gym class.

Tags: children, exercise, fitness, pole dancing, sex, sexuality