Forget Botox for 8-year-olds or push-up bras for 12-year-olds. A dance studio in the British midlands is offering pole-dancing classes for children as young as 3. In the “Little Spinners” class at the Make Me Fabulous Dance Studio in Northhampton, little girls are taught to spin around, climb up, and slide down the pole with their legs open in a V-shape. (Watch a British news report below.) The class’ instructor, Carly Wilford, insists there’s “nothing sexual about it,” and says she’s “trying to remove the stigma from pole dancing and show that it actually helps children keep fit and learn balance, much like gym classes.” Outraged child advocates are urging the government to step in and help protect the innocence of the younger set.
June 17th, 2011 | 10:33 am
Where will it stop?
Just where?
There was a really good comment on the UK site: if pole dancing is “just about fitness,” why aren’t parents taking their little boys to learn it?
How shameless.
This is the same country that denied a wonderful Christian couple the right to be foster parents because of their wholesome Christian sexuality views. It’s the same country where they have a homosexual pedophile activist (Peter Tatchell) clamoring for the sex consent age to be lowered to 14.
I’m sure the government would have no trouble at all assigning foster children to either the (pedophile) pole dance teachers nor the homosexual pedophile activist.
But a healthy, loving, wonderful Christian couple? Treated like criminals.
I hope the UK children’s activists will be able to do something and not lose yet again because we live in such morally deformed times. As usual, it’s always the most vulnerable in society who will pay the most awful price.
And… not too long ago, there was that fiction movie where a family goes to a beauty pageant for their 10-yr-old daughter, and what does she do? A strip show, thanks to the encouragement of her grandfather who loves pornography and the support of the homosexual in the family and the girl’s parents.
The movie was acclaimed over and over again by liberals.
I think these are also good examples of just how false the mantra is that sexuality is something that people do solely in their bedrooms. Sexuality is something that people carry around them all the time, that impacts several other domains of our lives, and quite often, those that are quite outside the bedroom.
June 17th, 2011 | 10:59 am
I don’t think the problem is that dance using a vertical pole is inherently sexual, or that pole dancing can’t be de-eroticized and made suitable for anyone. The problem, it would appear from the pictures, is that the little girls are doing erotic pole dancing, some of them in kiddie versions of adult-type outfits. I agree it’s objectionable.
June 17th, 2011 | 11:22 am
Objectionable, certainly. Seems more a problem for social disapproval to tackle, rather than legal sanctions, though.
June 17th, 2011 | 11:35 am
Ray Ingles Seems more a problem for social disapproval to tackle, rather than legal sanctions, though.
I agree. Getting the government involved in this is a bit silly. Sadly, social disapproval has lost much of its force in an age when we are all expected to act like social libertarians.
June 17th, 2011 | 12:44 pm
Pole dancing would have been a healthy phys. ed. activity – had the pole dancers not gotten to it first. Now that it has been ruined, I doubt that there is any way now that it could be turned into a wholesome endeavor.
June 17th, 2011 | 2:07 pm
Social disapproval doesn’t work any more, because the culture is fragmented. People simply don’t care about what others think, and there are legal protections in place to grant people the freedom to do what they like.
It’s the world people wanted, so what are you going to do? Social disapproval needed it’s teeth pulled because it was used against pure minorities. The side effect is that now, any well-organized one can skirt it.
June 17th, 2011 | 8:45 pm
Social disapproval doesn’t work any more, because the culture is fragmented.
It sure does.
The problem is, the only people using it are the ones who use it to shame the ones they call “prudes” and “puritans”.
It’s sort of comically ironic, actually, how the right to do whatever you want does not include the right to disapprove of what anyone else does. But people have fallen for it – and so many people are cowed by that stigma, and that fear of shaming, and therefore don’t stand up for what they really think, or for what’s right.
June 17th, 2011 | 9:58 pm
That anyone would send a child to a place called “Make Me Fabulous” to begin with seems at least as problematic to me as the pole dancing.
June 17th, 2011 | 10:26 pm
“Social disapproval doesn’t work any more, because the culture is fragmented. People simply don’t care about what others think”
I totally disagree. Just because our culture has become relatively more diverse doesn’t mean we don’t have plenty of behaviors that are unacceptable.
June 18th, 2011 | 12:48 am
Jeremy, the problem is “unacceptable” has no teeth unless law backs it. Pure social disapproval doesn’t matter because people can cluster together in like groups and pretty much ignore you otherwise.
Plus, well, dude. Human breast milk ice cream. Remember THAT argument in SHS? It seems like any legal behavior will find some defenders.
June 18th, 2011 | 11:25 am
Didn’t belly dancing basically start out as a type of ‘pole dancing’ that has now become more normalized.
June 18th, 2011 | 12:11 pm
“Social disapproval doesn’t work any more, because the culture is fragmented. People simply don’t care about what others think”
I totally disagree. Just because our culture has become relatively more diverse doesn’t mean we don’t have plenty of behaviors that are unacceptable.
Well, sure.
It’s okay to sexualize your little girl, but don’t you dare not compost your coffee grounds.
Liberals – and the media that picks up and defends their worst ideas – don’t see anything wrong with destroying children – in fact they tend to favor eating one’s young – unless it is done by a right winger they happen to hate anyway or it conflicts with their ideological agenda.
June 18th, 2011 | 7:35 pm
Boonton, I’m not sure what you mean by normalized. In the west it is a small thing done by an enthusiast culture, and like pole-dancing, it was briefly bolstered by the early 2000′s exercise craze.
When Tae-bo came out, everyone and their mother were trying to find new types of alternative exercise, and both pole-dancing and belly dancing were packaged as such.
As for the east, no idea. But neither in the west are normalized. You don’t do pole or belly dancing in gym for high school, and like the commenter said, men don’t do it either. Not like yoga, for example.
June 19th, 2011 | 12:14 pm
It’s okay to sexualize your little girl, but don’t you dare not compost your coffee grounds.
Not sure where you’re getting this? Starbucks even gives out its used coffee grounds for free to wannabe composters.
Dblade
By ‘normalized’ I don’t mean that everyone does it, only that its jumped from being an erotic activity to being a relatively neutral one (or one for non-erotic purposes like exercise or what is probably happening with pole dancing getting transformed into an art form). Likewise yoga is an activity that was once a religious one but got transformed by the West into what a non-religious one….
As for men not going either….well ballet is dominated by female dancers. Few females show any interest in playing football, even versions of the game that are less physically aggressive like touch or flag football.
Even with ballet, dance is simply an art form which has serious male-female roles. With naturally curvy bodies, dance forms that emphasize the body’s curves and sensualness are going to be primarily for female dancers even if there’s no overt sexuality to it. I don’t want to make any predictions about something as unpredictable as art but you’re not going to find male belly dancers anytime soon as anything other than a gag.
June 20th, 2011 | 9:43 am
Boonton, you missed the extra “not” in Blake’s sentence.
June 20th, 2011 | 10:51 am
“I don’t think the problem is that dance using a vertical pole is inherently sexual,”
The problem is almost never that any object or action is “inherently” anything. But everything has a context, and sometimes context is just too obvious to quibble over. Sometimes it’s harder, but this just isn’t one of those times.
June 20th, 2011 | 3:10 pm
I don’t think it has been normalized by those standards. To do so you have to untie the actions from the philosophy, and that can only be done when the actions themselves are contextually neutral or not related to the philosophy.
One person draws a bow back, and hits a target. The other draws it back, becomes one with the target, erasing the distance between it’s existence and yours. But both people pull an arrow back, and it doesn’t really show the zen nature of the latter.
But poledancing always shows a sexual nature to it, and the reason why they thought to make in an exercise is because the motions take a lot of work. Plus, it spices up dull routines. Not really sure though it’s neutral by your definition though, in the way yoga is because of that.
June 20th, 2011 | 3:55 pm
Another example of a practice that degrades sexuality, that objectifies women, and can also be tied to the sometimes associated business of prostitution.
But for liberals, degrading sexuality (and women) in every way is normal and acceptable, as long as the harm befalls adults.
Not only that, they must make every excuse not to hold themselves and their destructive sexuality ideology accountable.
June 21st, 2011 | 12:40 pm
But everything has a context, and sometimes context is just too obvious to quibble over. Sometimes it’s harder, but this just isn’t one of those times.
Contexts change, though. With a ‘portable pole’ being advertised on TV for use, I guess, at picnics and so on its starting to seem like ‘pole dancing’ may be slipping away from its stripping roots and become simply, well a dance/performance. This wouldn’t be the first time an art form that originated in the adult industries ended up becoming mainstream. ‘Fan dancing’ for example was basically striptese, today you could probably get away with doing it in any family talent show.
June 21st, 2011 | 12:41 pm
And more to the point you could probably visit every strip joint in the US and not find a single ‘fan dance’ being performed today if your life depended on it.
June 21st, 2011 | 1:56 pm
A few reasons I suspect you’ll see it jump from being part of the adult industry to being thought of as mainstream….
1. Aging, no one finds their grandparents very erotic. At some point the things we think of as erotic will be old fashioned to the younger generation, even childish. The ‘can-can’ dance, for example.
2. Safety – I suspect as a toddler/kid industry pole dancing offers an edge over gymnastics in terms of safety. Yes you can fall down and break your neck but really pole dancing seems ideal for offering a lot of the challenges of gymnastics without the danger of momentum. I think a lot of parents have a cringe factor when it comes to gymastics and the pole can play to that.
3. Cost – You need a pole and maybe some mats and less space than a karate studio takes up. What do you need to buy to set up a gymastics studio for kids? In line with #2, the insurance costs would probably be a fraction. OK maybe today the outfits are trying to mimic the adult roots of the activity…but as soon as business owners realize that cost is their competitive edge watch pole dancing become the activity you can send your kid too in shorts and a t-shirt while the gymnastics studio remains the one where you have to buy special outfits, sign an insurance waiver and worry about your daughter breaking her bones every time she charges at that hoarse or dismounts from uneven bars ten feet in the air.
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