Pole Dancing Class for Kids Predictably Unnerves Anxious Adults

A fitness studio in British Columbia called Twisted Grip Dance and Fitness is offering some non-sexy pole dancing classes for children, which has caused less of a stir than you might imagine if only because studio owner Kristy Craig made an admirable effort to convince parents that in no way was she trying to recruit their children onto some kind of junior varsity stripper team.

It may not have helped that the class is called “Little Spinners,” and features moves taught in more adult classes, such as Sexy Flexy, Pole Fit, Babes on Bikes and Bunny Bootcamp. According to Craig, though the kids’ class teaches “some of the same moves” as the adult classes, nothing is overtly sexual. “There’s definitely movements in [the adult classes],” Craig explained to CTV British Columbia, “that are sexual, but there’s nothing geared toward stripping.”

Craig’s Little Spinners (which currently includes three female and one male student ages five to 12) isn’t the first pole dancing class for kids — news last summer that JLN Pole Fitness in the U.K. posted Facebook photos of girls demonstrating pole dancing moves galvanized a good deal of critics that kneaded and snapped their pearls about the corruption of youth and the stripperfication of perfectly respectable young women. Craig has admitted that it’s difficult to remove the sexual stigma attached to pole dancing, but insists that her class is all about fitness, not REO Speedwagon synchronization.

CTV brings in child psychologist Dr. Derek Swain for another opinion on the pole dancing menace facing British Columbia’s youth, and, though he seems to initially see no harm in pole dancing as a form of exercise, he cautions that young women with pole dancing classes under their belts might be more susceptible to recruitment by the adult industry when they go off to college, “because we know that people in the adult industry are out recruiting in colleges and universities, as well as attempting to recruit in high schools.” So, if people want to keep their kids away from the sex work recruitment offices littered throughout our institutions of higher learning, it’d probably be a good idea to keep kids out of any dance classes, really, since all dancing is just a prelude to a life of living in motels on the outskirts of Reno and falling asleep to the bittersweet sound of youthful promise shattering like a mishandled porcelain doll.