Pole politics

2005 was a confusing year for the feminist cause. On a national scale, the supposed bra-burners roared over a culture of sex, drugs and more sex brandishing aloft the piquant weapon that was Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs. The sub-title was, slightly less pithily, ‘women and the rise of raunch culture’. It begins: 'Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig – the new brand of “empowered woman” who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces “raunch culture” wherever she finds it.’

In short, the products of the feminist generation like to pretend they’re as hardy as blokes in the more biological aspects of romance.

Sadly for Ariel Levy, England – and our university included - saw a massive rise in a new fad exercise – pole-dancing. If you were a Fresher in Warwick, you might have spotted innocent pastel leaflets advertising a fun new dance club. Warwick Exotic Dancers began as a casual exercise class run between the exec and a professional dancer.

When I joined up to Warwick’s new society, the only Ariel I knew did my washing. When I oh-so-playfully wrote for an e-zine declaring the unimpeachable health benefits of pole-dancing, somewhere above, Emmeline Pankhurst despaired.

2 years later, and I have become the very fuddy-duddy I originally sought to defy. Smug in my post-modern (synonym: non-existent) feminism, I would gather up my shorts and leather boots and sashay pole-wards. I got a dubious kick from the strained ‘...you do pole-dancing?’ and the lit-up eyes from my male friends. Because dance is a performance art. Any kind of dance. And any woman swinging around a pole imagines – however fleetingly, usually not that fleetingly – herself in front of admiring audience.

Which is, incidentally where the Warwick Exotic Dancers found themselves in 2007. In order to gain status as a society, the Warwick Exotic Dancers had to convince the resident Women’s Officer that this was quite definitely a non-spectator sport. They succeeded, and the women were left to eventually reach a semi-professional standard. There’s certainly nothing to be said against their dedication.

But, but. The constitution has now been amended to allow the society to give performances. How this one has slipped through the cogs is an astonishing display of Union bumbling. This is not merely performance in theory – 2 members of all the media societies were cordially invited to a gratuit performance. And the 2 that jumped at the chance in our biggest media society, RaW, were naturally men.

And what else was to be expected? Will they honestly persuade themselves that they are watching amateur athletes, displaying an acrobatic finesse to be admired as much for its difficulty as aesthetic beauty?

On one side of the media sphere, the university (with the Union’s support) bans The Sanctuary on campus.* Its justification is that the newspaper is run for profit. Why this is ethically more catastrophic than a group of intelligent women insulting themselves for the sake of entertainment is something only the skewed morals in the Ents office may explain to me.

I’m all in favour of free choice, and the society is of course free to do as it chooses. It is not free to choose how its audience thinks about its performers. Think for a minute ladies (gentlemen may find this one easier to answer) – what exactly do you like about pole-dancing? Really? What puts it above a nice game of table-tennis? Come off it, don’t tell me it’s ‘muscle tone’. It’s that little naughty thrill a woman apparently gets pretending to be, basically, a kind of sex worker. Because every kind of dance has a performance element in mind. I genuinely worry that a Warwick student could make an active choice to perform a pole-dance for an audience - it renders the intellect which got her here in the first place null and void.

*Actually this is a lie. The university is not banning the Sanctuary, it is merely exercising its right to remove it from its private property. Just to clear that up.

Right of reply: listen to the pole-dancers talk to Soapbox