The lessons I learnt from pole dancing
Pole dancers in care homes Who wouldn’t rather watch young bodies perform fireman spins than a fusty drama?
Christchurch, Dorset: I think we all suspected this was where the hard-core stuff went down. We just didn’t know it was going down at the Fairmile Grange care home. Living up to its brochure’s promise of “Making everyday extraordinary” the specialist nursing facility made headlines last week when it was revealed that a group of local pole dancers had been hired to come and perform for its elderly residents. Extraordinary and “deeply inappropriate”, according to the thought police.
Now, just as if every colour were renamed “blue” you might find it hard to identify blue from, say, yellow or green; in a world of shrieking “improprieties” I genuinely don’t know what’s inappropriate any more.
I get that holding a door open for a woman, helping her with her bags, calling her by any form of endearment or touching her knee beneath the dinner table is wrong in a seismic, career and marriageending way (and, I mean, ice-cubes-in-white-wine, croissant-and-doughnuthybrid, female-007 wrong). And I’m guessing that what would be considered “appropriate” for old people is corned beef and Smash TV dinners alongside a generous helping of Joan Hickson in something soft focus and Agatha-christie-based.
But here’s the thing: Fairmile Grange actually thought to ask those old people. And what the oldies deemed appropriate in the winter of their lives were a gaggle of limber females with frankly awesome gluteal definition performing a series of “fireman spins” around a stainless steel pole to the strains of Harry Belafonte.
I know how hard those fireman spins can be because, a few years back, I took pole dancing classes and learnt two important lessons. First, “aerial fitness” is not about sex and provocation, but gymnastics and female empowerment. And, secondly, don’t ever, ever apply any form of body lotion before a pole dancing class: the sound of skin against steel as one plummets to the ground from 16ft up isn’t something anyone should ever have to hear, and somewhere I still have the burns to prove why Vaseline Intensive Care was a particularly bad choice.
In any case, when asked whether I was there to “embrace fitness through sisterhood” and “liberate the fearless, fierce and sexy goddess inside of me”, I didn’t have the guts to fling back: “Actually, I just want to look good naked.” So I smiled, nodded and wrapped my legs around that pole in what I hoped was a convincingly feminist manner.
I doubt either Fairmile Grange’s directorship or its residents were pushing pole dancing as one of the many unlikely pursuits to have been rebranded “female empowerment” tools. They just wanted to be entertained, to laugh and, most likely, to relish the acrobatics of those fit, young bodies. Forced to defend their “impropriety”, Izzy Nicholls, the operations director for Fairmile Grange’s umbrella company, Encore Care Homes, issued a statement saying they were “proud to challenge stereotypes” and keen to offer residents in their establishments the choice “to experience new and progressive activities”.
All of which makes me want to book myself in for a stint at Fairmile myself, but I hear there’s a waiting list for the waiting list now. After all, this might be the last bastion: a speakeasy-style fantasy funhouse where we can escape prohibition and enjoy wildly inappropriate acts in the company of wolf-whistling men and give-as-good-as-theyget women.
Certainly, given the choice of hanging out with a bunch of resentful, gender-neutral millennials railing at the unfairnesses of the world from behind their iphones, and 80 frisky nonagenarians, I know where I’d rather be.
‘This might be the last bastion: a speakeasystyle fantasy funhouse where we can escape prohibition’