I think ambivalence about pole is an equal opportunity thing–for Boys as well as Girls. My daughter Johannah is obsessed that her best friend never see the pole room in the basement and always closes the door when she comes over. But before I bought her her own FLIP camera, I discovered a few video clips on mine with her doing spins! (Ahem! she’s also not supposed to pole alone–for safety.) Laurie’s pretty adamant about not letting her post any of those kinds of vids, so I’ve tried to get Johannah involved in some of my videos as a spotter–and let her sneak in a spin or two.

It’s too bad that the "sleazy" label gets attached to pole dancing, but frankly, I think that sexism has a lot to do with it. The parking lot is always full at the strip club a few suburbs over–I bet none of the guys there think of themselves as sleazy–only the dancers get labelled that way.

So yeah, I pretty much agree with all the ladies in this post. Kids will pick up on however you present the activity. And if they get ashamed of it later, it’s probably no big deal. When he was a teenager, Jake always made me drop him off at school a block away because I drove a Honda Civic and that wasn’t a cool car. Now he lectures me about how I should take public transportation because cars use too much gas…

Joel