I don’t even know where to start with these two articles.
One is about a studio offering pole dance lessons to little girls. Little Spinners Pole Dance The other is about a woman notoriously known as the “human Barbie” who’s teaching her little girl to pole dance. She also made the news when she gave the little girl a voucher for a future boob job, and when she gave her other daughter botox injections! Read the Human Barbie article here.
Unfortunately, there are people who think that literally embodying every cotton-pickin’ caricatured detail of a truncated feminine sexuality makes a woman more attractive. That kind of woman don’t seem to know any other way to feel good than by making their outsides conform to those impoverished images.
So this “Barbie” is a sad excuse for a human being indeed… don’t even get me started on what’s wrong with her as a parent!
In my promotion of what I call the contemporary exotic dance forms, I encourage women to find their sexual confidence along with their physicality. I believe women are drawn to these arts because so many of us have felt uncomfortable in our bodies, inhibited by cultural norms that continually tell us we’re too old, too fat, not pretty enough etc.
I’d like to see a liberation come about, but not by being a slave to beauty and not by rejecting it. Can’t we expand upon what it is and what it means to be beautiful?
What I learned from many years as an exotic dancer is that feeling sexy and confident has more to do with what’s going on inside than what’s going on outside. Being perceived as sexy is being a compentent “performer”. Period. It’s a form of acting. It is not your breast size, or the length of your legs. It’s not your age, your weight, the color of your hair, or what you’re wearing.
We are more than the particulars of our physical selves, more than what we do for a living, who we parent or who we are married to. We are more than our station in life, these are all just temporary things.
All the outside accoutrements of our different roles are nothing more than props. They can support our experience, help us as we play our roles in life, but they are not the experience itself. Everything evolves and changes over time, so it’s critical to not be overly attached to outside stuff, particularly when that attachement distracts you from the inside stuff.
The performance as “sexy” comes from the inside, once you’ve given yourself permission to embody and project that role. Since we navigate so many roles over the course of our lives, I do think learning how to embody different personaes, (without believing any one of them represents our totality), is a useful skill.
Believe me, I do know the power of an amazing costume and how it can enhance the confidence of the performer, and I’m not opposed to hair color, wearing makeup or even getting plastic surgury. But the kind of woman who’d give her little girl botox injections, a voucher for breast implants and pole dance lessons has just plain got it all backwards and wrong!
I think the “human Barbie” is focused on the outside because there’s nothing going on inside. And she’s setting a terrible example for her girls.
Explorations of sexuality and social power are very complex grown up things. Children need their period of innnocence to grow into their emotional maturity. Children who are not protected from adult things grow into people with a childish adaptation to life that is superficial and shallow.
The little girl who grows up getting day spa treatments, taking pole dancing lessons and getting boob job vouchers will grow up into a neurotic shopaholic “Barbie Doll” who’s entire identity exists in the things she owns, including the idea of her body as a “thing”.
But what exactly does a woman feel about herself if her entire body is a just a collection of “things” needing to be continually upgraded for that which is shiny and new?
What can a woman feel about herself when she is a collection of “things” that have to be bought and paid for?!
