The Make Me Fabulous dance studio in the U.K. is offering pole dance classes to children as young as three years old for £5 a pop. That’s right, while their moms are taking adult pole dancing classes, advertised as “sexy, relaxing, and invigorating,” their daughters are taking their own class: Little Spinners. There has been much uproar as to whether this is an appropriate class for toddlers to take. What does it teach them?
Class instructor Carly Wilford stated, “there is nothing sexual about it. I am trying to remove the stigma from pole dancing and show that it actually helps children keep fit and learn balance, much like gym classes. Nothing has meaning apart from the meaning someone attaches to it.”
Unfortunately for Wilford, in our society, pole dancing does have a negative connotation. It is commonly associated with strip clubs and other non-child-friendly activities. In recent years it has emerged as an exercise form for adults but I have never before seen it marketed for three-year-olds.
Claude Knights, director of the charity Kidscape had this to say: “The children will innocently enjoy copying the raunchy moves they learn, but be completely unaware of the sexual messages these send out which inevitably can have dangerous results. It is of course very important for children to take exercise and group activities, but why would you package it as pole dancing, something which has overt sexual connotations?”
While these toddlers have no idea that they are engaging in sexualized exercises, which is its own set of problems, I have to admit that what scares me more than anything is how other people, and by that I mean unstable people such as pedophiles, will react to it if they ever come into contact with these innocent children. I admit I have been known to jump to the worst-case scenario at times, but I can’t shake the feeling in my gut that these classes are encouraging children to advertise things they should not be selling. Pole dancing classes, no matter how innocent they are intended to be, are not entirely innocent. Obviously, the uproar that the Little Spinners class has caused has proved that many people, including some child protection groups, are not comfortable with the message it is sending. As Knights stated above, these classes could have dangerous results.
Those of you who have read my blogs know (I hope) that I am a big supporter of letting kids be kids, and guiding young girls so that they can grow up to be intelligent, confident young women instead of overly sexualized representations of what society wants them to be. Frankly, if my daughter happens to be a little bit sexy when she grows up (face pinches as the thought of her 6 year old being anything other than a 6 year old), that’s okay, but I am going to make it my mission to make sure she knows that she is not limited by her appearance and that being confident, attractive, intelligent, or accepted does not mean she has to cater to what society thinks she needs to wear, look like, or writhe around.
