Recently I renewed my membership with AARP, an organization the ever-cheeky humorist Lori Notaro has called a “death cult.” Then I turned right around and signed up for my first stripper pole class. This wasn’t some sex-for-death Freudian reflex; I was simply indulging my own blessed contrariness. AARP suggested respectability, the dignity of social elderhood. But pole dancing suggested the louche and provocative, both of which were pure catnip to my f*you Gen X sensibilities. What I was doing was offering the world a joyfully defiant proclamation that it was never too late to try something outrageous. Even—and especially—if it seemed out of character.
I looked to Gloria Steinem—her spirited ballsiness—for inspiration. In the spring of 1963, the feminist icon donned a Bunny costume to work undercover at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club for two weeks. She did it to understand Bunny culture and expose the dark side of what women endured for poor pay: invasive “required” blood tests and gynecological exams; aching feet and bodies trapped in tight costumes; drunk and leering male patrons, a tiny fraction of whom Steinem recalled looked at Bunnies “as if [they] might [actually] be human beings.”
Steinem was just 29 when she trussed up Bunny-style in the name of investigative journalism. My ends were nowhere near as noble. I was taking up stripper poling at nearly twice her age in the name of curiosity and fitness. I needed to tone a body that had become gravity’s sad plaything with more vigorous exercise than I had been able to manage on my own. Not that I knew what pole dancing could do when I realized this. That would take the serendipity of a dinner question posed to my adventurous late thirty-something friend Anjoli about a Facebook post of her in a leopard-print leotard, thighs clamped midway up a stripper pole, one arm thrown back exuberantly behind her head.
Gravity wasn’t entirely to blame; neither was age. At least some of the sag had come from having lost 25 pounds and succumbing to the lure of a sedentary life. Swimming two to three miles a week and doing daily dumbbell lifts. That was helping. But a trip to Portland was coming, a trip that would include treks all around Mt. St. Helens and Rooster Rock Park. None of the trails I wanted to hike were marked as less than moderate in difficulty. And unless I took my fitness more seriously, those trails would more than likely defeat me.
Brazenly energized, I did an online search for a place that offered pole dancing near me and landed on Brass Ovaries. It was a gym owned and operated by women that also offered classes in twerking and high-heeled cardio to anyone, male, female or non-binary. That openness stopped me from passing righteous feminist judgement. This was a space to work out in creatively sexy ways. That the activities incorporated elements (women’s heels) and movements (female butt thrusting) fetishized by patriarchal culture was so much beside the point as to render it moot. No Playboy Club, information on the gym website made it clear that it offered safe-space protection to anyone in crisis. When I got there, I also saw that the gym also shielded student pole dancers in the front room practice area from the voyeuristic gaze of passersby with a heavy turquoise curtain.
Anjoli told me to wear shorts or a bathing suit. The more skin I could expose, the better my body’s ability to grip the pole that would be my silent dance partner. Dressed grunge-refugee style in a Nirvana t-shirt and Levi cut-offs, I took the bus to a sketchy part of northeast Austin and walked through an area full of neighborhood watch signs. The ambience was absolutely perfect for the cool, underground thing I was about to do. So was the teacher who introduced me to some basic Pole I moves. With dark hair that cascaded halfway down her back, she was a heavily tatted former stripper who had also studied everything from ballet to hip-hop dance. Eyeing us beginners—some of whom had made the mistake of wearing leggings—she repeated Anjoli’s advice. It’s OK to strip down: it’s all about skin contact with the pole. She smiled and stepped out of her spandex exercise pants. The more you do this, the less you’ll wear.
The teacher took us through warmup moves and vigorous yoga stretches that not only revealed just how stiff I had become but made me sweat so much my hands kept sliding down the pole. Even the liquid chalk she’d given us couldn’t absorb the moisture pouring out of me. Tossing her hair, she showed us beginner moves on the pole: the skater, move that forced us to use upper body strength to balance vertically, one leg on the pole, the other bent back in the air, a foot above the ground. The crucifix, a sitting move that forced us to use inner thigh muscles to “sit” on the pole hands arms extended at either side. And the one and only move I could do: a trust fall that spiraled my body down to the floor. I struggled, cursing not just at my weak arm and core muscles. But at the luck of practicing behind a trim woman thin as poles we worked and young enough to remind me that I was the oldest person in the room. Old enough, in fact, to be the class mother.
I went home sore and exhausted, but strangely exhilarated. Done well, stripper poling could be a glorious display of athleticism and camp. But the teacher warned us it might be a while before we could go back and she was right. Recovery took almost a week. My wrist, arm and shoulder muscles ached from all the grabbing and hanging while painful bruises appeared on my calves. Not that I could really use any part of my leg to do much anyway: I’d also crunched my sputtering knees and overstretched the inner thigh muscles enough that on a good day, I could just manage a passable shuffle. But out of the steaming hot mess my body had temporarily become, a steely—if slightly masochistic—resolve emerged. I would master that damn pole if it was the last thing I ever did.
Anjoli told me that the next class would be better. And when I went back three weeks later, it was. But by then I had also intensified my regular swimming/weight-lifting regimen. This time, I could sit on the pole, do more tango twists and dips around it. And even, on occasion, earn clapping accolades from my classmates, all while keeping my innards relatively intact. Dressed in a high-cut Jane Fonda leotard and surrounded by women stripped down to bras and booty shorts, I felt less like an object-in-training and more like a female athlete from ancient Sparta who trained unselfconsciously in thigh-exposing tunics. Or nothing but her own skin. Snaking our bodies around steel poles to the beat of bump-heavy music, we were in it for the sweat and the self-expression. I’d been all wrong about Gloria Steinem. Her courage, like ours, came not from ballsiness but from difference. From what the women in that room might have called ovaries made of brass.