4 Monday June 13 2022 | the timestimes2
T
he first thing I notice
about pole dancing
when I see it up close,
in broad daylight,
is this: it hurts.
Elbow-chafe, armpit-
rash, knee-welts —
anywhere the dancers
grip the metal they get burnt. These
injuries are nicknamed “pole kisses”.
It’s a bit of a metaphor for how I felt
when I heard about the rise of pole
dancing in British universities; the pole
seemed to me a rod for women’s backs.
My friend’s ambitious 17-year-old
daughter dreams of doing something
to make a difference in the world.
Before applying to the University of
Cambridge and the London School of
Economics she went to open days to
chat to students and when she
returned, the thing she mentioned first
was that each had pole-dancing teams.
We looked them up on Facebook and
saw a honey-hued quad with the girls
in their “Cambridge University Pole
Dance” team jackets. The difference
between my reaction, at over double
these girls’ ages, and hers made me
realise: I had to go back to school.
So here I am on a Saturday
morning, cross-legged on the floor of
the practice studio at King’s College
London. The college is the newly
crowned winner of the national
inter-university pole championships,
beating rivals at Oxford, Cambridge,
Edinburgh and Bristol and just pipping
LSE to the post. The high, arched
windows look on to an 18th-century
courtyard where a backlog of post-
pandemic graduation ceremonies
have been rushed through. An errant
upside-down stiletto, visible
through the window, has probably
photobombed pictures of rows of
shining faces. I watch three lovely,
dedicated King’s students, a woman
and two men, strip to their teeny
shorts. Baring skin is a necessity for
gripping the pole, although one
Muslim nurse from Los Angeles is
famous on pole-dance Instagram for
doing it in a hijab and a special grippy
all-over bodysuit plus heels.
Maddy De Brugha, Rawdon Cooper
and Harry Cossey practise their
difficult “smile through the pain”
routines and later I will speak to the
LSE team on the phone. They executemoves often named by strippers —
such as the “meat hook”, an advanced
one-arm horizontal body balance —
and I watch. Seeing all three on one
pole is like watching a flesh puzzle, a
three-dimensional game of Twister. I
am not a middle-aged man in a
strip bar getting a stiffy. I’m a
middle-aged woman in a seat of
learning getting confused.
“It’s feminist,” De Brugha says, “in
the sense that women can do whatever
they want and look however they
want in pole and there’s absolutely no
judgment whatsoever.”
When we sit down I say I’m going to
ask “judgy” questions. Their attitude is
“bring it on” — they want the chance
to dispel lingering stigma. Yet my first
difficult question is for myself: am I
just an old prude? I guess my initial
reaction is more along the lines of the
character played by Ryan Gosling in
the rom-com Crazy, Stupid, Love. He
tells his male friend, “The war between
the sexes is over and we won. We won
the second women started pole
dancing for exercise.”
My mind goes to seedy trouser-tents
and men of a type not dissimilar to
Boris Johnson, whose friend Jennifer
Arcuri said she had a pole set up in
her living room when she invited him
over to her flat. In the past two
decades pole has boomed as an
exercise class at hundreds of gyms and
specialised studios; Cossey says that
there are three pole fitness studios
within a ten-minute drive of his flat.
The pole was originally installed in
strip bars to stop women in teetering
heels falling from the stage, and
dancing with it developed into a whole
genre of male titillation. Some argue
that, to evolve into a bona fide sport, it
has to sever those stripper ties and
align itself more to “pole acrobatics”,
as practised in traditional Chinese and
Indian dance, but most in the field,
and all the students I talk to, prefer to
honour the debt to sex work.
As a culture, we are still undecided;
even in an exercise context it is still
not considered appropriate to allow
children to take pole dance classes.
And it is only in the past five years
that pole clubs have entered university
life en masse, at first as societies, then
recognised as university sports with
male founders and participants such asWe’re students, not
strippers. Why pole
dancing is the new
university challenge
Think gyrating on a pole is a seedy activity reserved for sex
workers? Helen Rumbelow did, until she discovered that it’s a
competitive sport for undergraduates at the top universities
the male pole dancer who campaigned
for the first University of Oxford pole
society in 2018 while doing a DPhil in
materials. This year pole fitness —
with 150 members — was voted
“sports club of the year” at LSE. “It’s
taken a very big turn,” says Madeleine
Crosby Wilsher, the president of the
LSE club, whom I speak to alongside
one of her vice-presidents, Ethan Hill.
Nearly all five students describe the
same arc: they saw the club at the
freshers’ fair and were momentarily
surprised. “I saw ‘pole’ and I was, like,Above: the LSESU
Pole Fitness Club.
Main: King’s College
London students
Maddy de Brugha,
Rawdon Cooper and
Harry Cossey‘What?’ ” De Brugha says.
“They do this? Because I
just thought: ‘strippers.’ ”
She decided to give it a go.
“This is probably the only
time in my life I’m going to
be able to do pole and not
be judged for it.”
Each of them fell hard,
figuratively and literally:
controlled falls are part of
routines, but most have
cracked something in
uncontrolled falls. They still
love the discipline. Pole is
far harder than it seems, on
skin — “a prolonged
Chinese burn”, Cooper says
— and muscles.
“It’s often not taken seriously,”
Crosby Wilsher says. “People say
you’re just spinning around on a pole
and I think, ‘If you only knew.’ ”
A fun sports swap with the LSE
rugby team was hilarious and “created
some respect”, Crosby Wilsher says,
recalling how the rugby lads struggled
to lift themselves off the ground and
lost in a “how long can you hold a
plank?” competition. Meanwhile, pole
dancers can scamper like monkeys up
drainpipes and hang upside down on‘W
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