Once upon a time, in the very merry old land of oz, a girl I know decided to become a stripper. I know what you are thinking, "My god what happened to this girl to make her think she needed to resort to something so low?!" The answer is she was far from home in another country, she knew she could earn a good amount of money (she of course was not made of money), and she had done quite a bit of pole dancing for exercise and was really rather good. I'm sure at this point you are thinking something along the lines of "Well I suppose she worked out like a whore, so working as a whore is the natural next step." or "She probably showed all those little stripper girls what a real pole artiste can do."
Unfortunately for her neither one of those statements is true. You see, it has long been debated whether you can take the stripper out of pole dancing. Many people assume that a stripper and a pole dancer are one in the same. Strippers on the other hand can become very offended when pole studios make the claim that they "are not strippers". While researching this article I even found one stripper declaring that pole dancers had all the money and were snobby to strippers when they should be opening their classrooms for "real professionals" for free classics.
It seems a bit funny that people get so heated in the argument when the two are neither mutually exclusive nor inclusive of each other. The best thing I can think of comparing it to is pole dancing is like Majoring in Business Information Technology (BIT) and stripping is like double majoring. Now, the basics of BIT can be traced back for thousands of years and so are the basic principles behind double majoring. For a while there was no BIT major on it's own. To specialize in business technology, one would have to double major in both business and engineering. Now we have BIT as a major all its own. Which is easier majoring in BIT or double majoring? Well that really depends on the person and what they are naturally good at and what they need in order to succeed in their life goals. Can someone who majors in BIT also be a double major? Yes, of course. Can someone who is a double major take a BIT class when they want to? Probably, if it is available near them and their schedule allows for it.
Just the same it can be debated that either a stripper or a pole dancer has a harder task in front of them. A stripper can be a pole dancer or she can not be a pole dancer, the decision is entirely up to her. The same can be said for a pole dance becoming a stripper. Although, my friend was not able to cope with the additional difficult tasks of being a stripper, it does not mean that all pole dancers are incapable of taking on the extra things needed to be a good stripper.
For instance, when I was in Thailand, I went to some strip clubs in Phuket to see what it was like. There were general prostitutes on the streets, strippers wiggling on the bars, pole dancing doing some amazing pole work on some pole stages, and even girls in lyras twirling above our head. Now if you had seen a lyra dancer or a pole dancer in another setting you would not have assumed they were "strippers", it was simply that they were working here in a strip club. There once were Chinese acrobat groups that performed moves on poles that were the same as some of those taught in the most complex level at my pole studio. Of course, if you take a level one pole class at my studio, you will learn how to hair flip and booty pop because they are, well the easy things that both pole dancers and strippers do that can get your confidence up.
