I don’t know about you, but I had an un-pole-ievable summer. This could be attributed to the fact that I spent a good chunk of it at Body & Pole in NYC, dancing my little heart out. Early on in the summer it became my favorite spot in the city – I liked the atmosphere, I liked the people, and I could always count on leaving in a better mood than I’d arrived in. I started showing up to the studio hours before classes just to hang out, sometimes even get work done. Of course, it’s not surprising I felt so at home at a pole studio.
I was eleven when my mom first installed her pole in our living room. At the time, I was unfamiliar with the connotations it held. That would come a few months later, with the success of Akon’s 2006 banger “Smack That.” I knew my mother had always loved dancing, and to me this was just another expression of that, only this time with a metal beam and six inch heels and where you sometimes get to do cool things like dangle upside-down using just your knee pit.
The next year, we moved to Israel and I started middle school there. Suddenly I was surrounded by boys whose favorite hobby was talking shit about each other’s moms, describing all the ways in which they were whores. Stripping, specifically of the pole-related kind, was a big aspect of that. My mom had stopped poling as much, mainly because of the lack of a good studio in our area, but I still knew she had done it, and, more importantly, that she had enjoyed doing it. I didn’t understand how something innocent and fun could be seen as dirty and wrong. In 2009 when Miley scandalized the teen pop culture scene by “pole dancing” at the Teen Choice Awards, I was even more baffled. A) What’s wrong with pole dancing, and 2) Lol that’s not real pole dancing, ya clowns.
A couple years later, my mom started poling again. This time, I was privy to the judgement she received for it. The owner of my hometown dance studio, where she and my sisters all danced, was extremely vocal about her disdain for this salacious recreational activity that could hardly be called dancing. A girl in my sister’s class blabbed about how her mom had told her all about our mother’s “perverted” hobby. Every once in a while, my mom expressed frustration at wanting to accept a professional contact’s Facebook friend request but being nervous about how they would receive her pole photos. Despite all this, she remained unabashedly proud. The pole went back up, and here in this new house, was even given its own room.
And as these things tend to go, eventually pole dancing became less scandalous and more mainstream. So much so that the dance studio owner, the same one who’d been disgusted by the idea of poling a few years earlier, started offering lessons herself. My family was in the car on our way to Friday night dinner at my grandparents’ house when my mom first brought this up. “Noga’s offering pole dancing lessons this year. Would any of you be interested?” she asked.
I’m sure she expected one of my three sisters, all dancers, to pipe up. But instead it was me who said, “I am.” I was just shy of 20 years old, about to be released from the Israeli army, looking for interesting ways to spend the year I had to kill before going off to college the following September. A couple weeks later, I took my first pole dancing class.
It was as awkward as you might expect. I was out of shape, inflexible, lacked a sense of rhythm, and didn’t know the rest of the girls in the class, who all happened to be friends with each other from years and years of dancing together. I basically spent the whole class roasting myself internally, coming up with quips to recite to my family when I got home that night.
But I stuck with it, and somehow I got… Better? Good, even? What?? My Thursday evening lessons soon became the highlight of my week, and later, so did the Sunday morning lessons I added on. The pole community in my hometown was loving, encouraging, and exactly the confidence boost I’d always needed. There’s never any judgement among pole dancers, because everybody knows we all have different strengths and weaknesses, and we’re always there to catch each other (literally) if we fall. I took classes with women in their fifties, and girls as young as nine. I’ll never forget the day my instructor approached me at the end of class and told me I was “born to do this”. And honestly, I’m now convinced you haven’t lived until you’ve been in a room full of 14-year-old twigs emphatically shouting the bridge of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” –
Where my fat ass big bitches in the club?
Fuck them skinny bitches.
Fuck them skinny bitches in the club.
I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the motherfucking club.
Fuck you if you skinny bitches.
Y’all! You are fourteen and tiny. Get over yourselves.
When I got to Brown a year later, I had to stop poling, but after getting back into it this summer, I knew there was no way I could take another break. A few weeks ago I finally bit the bullet and bought my own pole to install in my room, 10 years after my mom did the same. It is my pride and joy, and every night before I go to bed I kiss it and tell it I love it. And I know it loves me too. We’ve never been happier.
Image via Leeron Lempel.