Essay: Woman in the Pole Dance Class
What's underneath 🫀
Poets too are "strippers"—paring back skin to reveal what's beneath. —Joyce Carol Oates
It’s Sunday night, and I’m crawling across the floor to a woman I’ve just met. Haley sits in the chair straightbacked, her long legs covered in fishnets. Her gaze is reverent, nearly solemn.
Slinking toward Haley makes me so bashful, I nearly turn around. I consider making a joke, but we’re not being funny. We’re being sexy. Beyond that, I recognize we’re doing some kind of deep other work here, in the space between our two bodies. We’re in flow. We’re in heat. We’re at the altar of all our complicated gods. And we are trying not to laugh in church.
I started taking pole dance class as part of a series here on Substack where I go to unusual, brazen, or sometimes extremely ordinary places. Then I write about the complicated, surprising, and often transformative experiences that arise as a result. When I signed up for erotic dance class, I hoped the essay would write itself. Turns out, it did.
Pole dance makes me feel naughty and liberated both and at the same time. Like a little kid saying a curse word softly in the dark. Eager, just to feel the shape. Today, in class, we’re learning a lap-dance element with a multi-step structure: crawl, splay, undulate. I’ve never asked for anyone’s number, let alone gyrated above someone’s lap to Hosier. But here we are.
Our instructor says you can imagine anyone in the chair. She rarely gives lap dances to the men she dates. Instead, she often imagines her friends, sometimes her younger self. She says this isn’t really about sex. It’s about being seen. About being witnessed without words—in the first language of skin and spine. Arch and pulse. Pole humbles and exalts you. Body to body. It demands of viewers what poetry demands of readers: Encounter me. Witness me. Remember me.
I approach the chair and suddenly think of my mother, then my sisters. The multitude of intimacies lost since I moved out west: late-evening walks, Derby pie, school pick ups. My mother’s hair, now fully white.
I slowly circle Haley’s thigh and begin to remember long afternoons snuggled against my sister reading Emily of New Moon, just the two of us, my cheek resting against her rib. There’s so much love in the memory that my knees begin to tremble. When I open my eyes, Haley looks as if she’s been struck by lightning. It’s not desire I recognize in her, but its gentler sister—devotion.
Now it’s Haley’s turn to dance now and mine to sit. Watching Haley feels like catching sight of something rare and secret and lucky. Like when you spot the fleeting rush of a white-tailed deer on the side of the mountain. You feel like the only human in the world who’s just spotted a dream. After class, Haley and I put on our street clothes and beanies. You’re amazing, we say softly to one another.
I learned recently that many scholars trace pole’s origin back to ancient India as a sacred art called Mallakhamb which literally translates to "wrestler and pole.” And after each class, I walk out feeling like I’ve wrestled something too. Every time I touch the pole, I grapple with old shame in a new body.
It was tough at first—touching the pole. To dance erotically around a symbol I used to exclusively associate with the male gaze and then crawl my way through a lap dance. But over the last month of classes, there’s been tremendous power in subverting my previous association and dancing instead for my own pleasure. To be watched by women and then to witness them in their softest glory has become a kind of strange church.
Beyond the incredible women who have welcomed me into class, I feel especially indebted to the deep and meaningful contributions of strippers and sex workers that worked the pole long before it entered the mainstream. I would not have access to it now without their profound gift.
Beyond self-expression, erotic dance is perhaps the first space I’ve ever had the freedom to move erotically without hyper-vigilance. After a lifetime of trying to keep myself safe on the sidewalk and invisible at the bus stop, it’s overwhelming to finally release the curve of my hips. With each turn around the pole, I think back to all those years of tugging down my skirt and pulling up my camisole. Of tiptoeing on pavement so my heels didn’t clack. Of starving my body into straight lines. I swivel and the grief spins too. The pole cradles my spine. What a waste, I think—all those decades of such careful stepping.
One poler tells me dancing helped her heal her anorexia. Another tells me that it gave her back a sense of autonomy. Another tells me pole is her sanctuary. Once when I tripped on psychedelics, I imagined myself as a tiny purple throated frog in the middle of the Amazon jungle, croaking full thrum, open throat. To me, that’s what pole is. Purple sparks and frog heat.
Lawyer and pole dancer, Lady Jane writes: Pole demands that we “be accepted as both sexual beings, and ‘whole’ people with personal and professional lives. The practice of exotic dance demands that the two should not and cannot be divided.” At nearly 40, as poet and a woman, I guess I’m finally ready to be seen.
Encounter me. Witness me. Remember me.
It’s Sunday night again, and Haley and I pair up. We know this dance well now. I sit back on my heels and then rise slowly, swaying slightly to the music. I move behind the chair, nuzzle my cheek against her shoulder. It’s awkward until it becomes tender. So much body. So much holy. Tonight, our dance is private and soft. Like painting your little sister’s nails or bathing your elderly mother. I’m dancing for Haley and somehow to her. I’m trying to tell her something. Something I’ve been trying to say all my life.
October’s Field Assignment: Dancing Queen 🪩
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