This is the continuation of a
post I made on FaceBook. It's taken quite a long time to write because
trying to put my initial thoughts down on the page, so many tangental thoughts
crowded in it got difficult to keep my focus. Anyway, here it is ...
February 9th is National Libraries Day, apparently. It's the culmination of a week of celebrations in schools, colleges, workplaces and, of course, public libraries across the UK. In support of this campaign, to highlight the importance of libraries Midlothian Council are staging a range of events in an attempt to encourage more people to use the library services. So far, so good. Until you delve into the detail a bit and find that amongst the very laudable events they are staging, such as Author Events, Local Studies and, even, Love Your iPad sessions are 'booky table tennis' and 'Pole Fitness taster sessions'.
'Booky table tennis' involves using books as bats. Using books as table tennis bats????? Whoever came up with that idea should, at the very least, be horse whipped. In fact, tarring and feathering is probably too good for them. Books should be treated with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the dessicated and rotting remains of the beatified and the saintly! And if treating books in such a cavalier fashion wasn't a heinous enough act ... Pole Fitness? POLE FITNESS??!!
Pole dancing fitness sessions are "a fun and interesting way of encouraging more people into our libraries" according to Midlothian council's cabinet member for public services and leisure.
Midlothian council's cabinet member for public services and leisure needs to educate himself (yes, it is a man. I'd say predictably, but that would be sexist and, besides, enough women fall into the same trap as to make me want to weep blood!)
As a sport, or fitness regime, pole dancing is controversial. It's supporters will say that it is difficult: that you need to have coordination and really good core and upper body strength to be able to do it. This is undeniably true. What is also undeniable is that Pole Dancing has an association with the erotic that equally challenging fitness regimes, such as Pilates, do not. And therein lies the problem.
Watching someone pole dancing is almost inevitably an exercise in the erotic for the viewer, probably more so than it is erotic exercise for the participant. It is whether we like it or not, widely seen as sexual in its context, if not in its content, and for most people has very close associations with stripping and lap dancing, both of which, rightly or wrongly, are seen by many as being just a whisper away from prostitution. Actually, taking the strict definition of the word, if money changes hands then they're all pretty much of a one.
Many people, I think, consider stripping and lap dancing to be demeaning to women. It objectifies women; reduces them to commodities to be used, and even abused, for money. So in those terms, pole dancing can be no different.
There is, of course, the counter-argument that, rather than being demeaning, activities of this nature are actually empowering to women. For some, maybe. For the minority who actively choose to take that route to empowerment of their own volition; for the very few who are actually completely in charge of their own productivity, so to speak; those who are not forced or otherwise coerced into it through circumstances and lack of choice then, yes, I can quite see that it might be. Most of us, I imagine, will have read an interview with a (inevitably, it seems, young) woman with First Class degrees from Oxbridge who has actively chosen to work in the sex industry: who is taking advantage of male sexuality by being 'the exploiters, rather than the exploited'. But there's at least part of the problem. Whichever way you shake the snowglobe, and however much glitter you dress it up in, the fall out is simply exploitation.
Really, is this what the feminist movement and the drive for equal opportunities was all about: giving women the freedom to pretend to be sex workers in the name of 'fun'? Perhaps I've missed something, but how is that in any way liberating? How is it emancipating? How does it strengthen or support the notion of women having broken free from the age-old stereotypical view of the best places for them being on their backs, their knees or in the kitchen? How appropriate is it that this take place in a library, a place, supposedly, linked to erudition and learning? And how appropriate is it that this is supported and even staged on the authority of civic leaders: people supposed to rule, inspire and guide the citizens who have elected them?
