Is pole-dancing sleazy, sexy or sporty?

Are competitive pole-dancers 'elite athletes', or is the practice tainted by its man-pleasing, strip-club associations, asks FIONOLA MEREDITH

FIVE MINUTES before the All-Ireland Pole Dance Championships is due to begin in Belfast on a recent Sunday night, the contestants are bouncing – some literally – with excitement and tension. The floor of the dressing room is littered with impossibly-high red-soled stilettos and spare pairs of spangled hotpants, while the air is thick with hairspray and the sound of nervous laughter.

Everywhere you look are flawlessly tanned midriffs. A pair of black leather fingerless gloves whizzes through the air, tossed away by a contestant having a last minute costume re-think, while three other “polers”, as they’re known, take turns at taking photos of each other on their mobile phones, striking provocative, feline poses before collapsing in fits of giggles. A burly-looking male assistant is tying a floaty black scarf to the arm of Linda McKane (35). McKane, who is eye-catchingly kitted out in a silver Spandex bikini and thigh-high boots, is a pole dance instructor in Banbridge, Co Down. Rather appositely, given that both jobs require pole skills, albeit quite different ones, she also works as a firefighter.

McKane is a passionate advocate for pole dancing, and she has no time for people who dismiss it as sleazy titillation masquerading as a fitness routine. “It’s basically gymnastics on a pole,” she says. “I can do 20 sit-ups while hanging upside down on the pole and I don’t think many men would be able to do that.”

Seáinín Nic Canna, a student teacher who is the first competitor to take to the stage, agrees: “I feel empowered. It’s not sleazy at all, that’s a dated opinion. It has given me so much physical confidence. I would never have walked about in public in hotpants before.”

Outside in the performance arena – Bar Seven at the Odyssey complex – sales of rosé wine are going through the roof, as the predominantly female audience gets ready for a night of raucous fun. Most are pole-dance aficionados themselves, with practice poles installed at home in their livingrooms, bedrooms or kitchens, and they share McKane’s spirit of defiant, devil-may-care enthusiasm.

“We wish it was us up there on the stage,” chorus Michelle Moult, Clare Smith and Zara Lyness. “It’s a really tough sport that takes amazing strength and flexibility. You just cannot fake it,” says Lyness. “I want pole-dancing to be known and officially recognised as a sport,” says Moult. “I’m leading my children, aged seven and three, into it. They’ll be the next generation. Why not? They climb poles in the playground, don’t they?”

Recognition and legitimacy are aspirations shared by the global pole-dancing community: the International Pole Dancing Fitness Association, the sport’s fledgling supervisory body, is actively campaigning for a category at the Olympics. El Fegan, the organiser of the championship, insists that the competitors – who landed places in tonight’s final at heats held in Belfast, Derry, Banbridge, Letterkenny and Dundalk – are “elite athletes” who will demonstrate “the strength and agility that pole dance now represents in the field of sporting entertainment.”

But isn’t it tainted by its man-pleasing, strip-club associations? Can it ever achieve that kind of mainstream respectability? “Most of us are married women, and our husbands aren’t the least bit interested,” says Michelle Moult. “We have to prise them off the PlayStation to show them a routine.” Who do they perform for, then? “We do it for ourselves, and for the other women. We do the sexy moves for each other, not for our husbands.”

As the competitors take to the stage, each performing a series of complicated acrobatic manoeuvres to a thumping soundtrack, it’s evident (to the uninitiated anyway) that one pole dance is very much like another. There’s the carefree swing, the undulating clasp, the sideways grab with legs or arms splayed out. One poler – Christina Moore – causes a stir by hanging upside-down and walking around the pole on the ceiling. Some contestants remember to grin and look like they’re enjoying it, while the faces of others are a mask of rigid concentration; some glide apparently effortlessly up and down the pole, while others slip more haltingly, the shriek of bare skin on metal audible even above the music.

It’s clear that despite the skimpy costumes and the exaggeratedly sexual shimmies around the pole, this is a “by women, for women” event. Although the men in the audience (mostly boyfriends and family members) whoop appreciatively at the overtly suggestive moves, they seem excluded from the intense interaction between the competitors and their female supporters.

“There’s no nice lead-in to each move: it’s move, stop, move, stop – they need more finesse,” complains one male spectator, but he’s quickly drowned out by the female fans screaming their high-decibel encouragement. A bizarre tableau performed during the interval – involving a handcuffed woman in a Guantánamo-style orange jumpsuit, which she removes to reveal a white satin corset, before pretending to choke her male guard to death – goes down particularly well with the audience.

After lengthy deliberation, the London-based judges (pole dancers and choreographers themselves) decide that the high-energy routine by Co Antrim woman Jo Robinson is the winning entry. Robinson – who says the best compliment she ever got was from a man who said she had the “best calf muscles ever” – goes on to a place in the British Isles Pole Dance Competition 2010, and she will represent Ireland in the European Pole Dance Championships. It’s a popular choice, and the crowd cheer her ecstatically.

But feminist blogger Kellie Turtle, who attended the event, isn’t convinced that the rise of pole dancing is a cause of celebration. “It’s all about sex as performance,” she says. “For all the talk of empowerment, nothing I see here challenges the stereotypes that we know cause women problems. Although I can see that individual women gain something from this, and I would never want to question that, it’s hardly a move towards equality, is it? It still plays into the old idea that women are the objects of sex and men are the consumers.”

Caught somewhere between conformity and naughtiness, sexism and empowerment, sport and sex, the pole-dancing world can’t quite make up its mind where it stands. But the women who take part don’t care about such contradictions. For them, it’s all about the buzz, the glamour, and the addictive lure of the pole.