I’m a guy who loves pole…may I weigh in?

The timing is perfect: I just got back from an evening drinking with some top-notch pole instructors from New York and Northern California, after a weekend of truly awesome workshops and last evening’s pro exhibition. All the classes were co-ed: dance classes, spinny class, flexy class, everything, and I’m glad of it.

Yes, I’m one of the few straight guys around (51 years old, married, 2 kids). As far as I can tell, pole feels just as fun to me, in basically the same ways, as it does to women, including the straddle-pops and bodywaves (male and female bodies aren’t all that different; for both of us stretching and moving feels GOOD!). Of course doing flamboyant tricks semi-naked a few meters from similarly-dressed people can challenge your self-image, but all we students are in the same room practicing the same tricks, and if any of those amazing women are worried that I notice how good they look and how gracefully they move, they haven’t yet gotten word to me. I love watching everyone practice and perform; in class one woman today said she liked how I look (she said she was jealous of my abs …). I do some moves well, some ungainly, a mixture of klutz and showoff, maybe stronger and less flexible than the women, but overall pretty much the same, and all of us know it…I tell you, co-ed classes absolutely can *work*, and I feel amazingly close to the people I’ve danced with.

I think pole is a wonderful sport both for body-awareness and self-expression, one of the few which freely mixes strength, flexibility, momentum, performance, and sexiness. I can totally understand if some people need a single-sex environment to discover pole, but please don’t make it sound wrong for a man to enjoy pole in the same way a women does.