“Get you a girl who can do both – pole dance and academia” (and who gets, like, really anxious about it). “Doing both” was, for a while, my brand, something I lived and breathed, without too much thought. But as my responsibilities and profile grow in inverse proportion to my precarity, lately I’ve been filled with crippling anxiety about the reality of doing both, which is much less #girlboss and a lot more #girlstruggle. In my first blog post since the summer, follow me on a journey inside my very anxious mind, and come out the other end with me as I find solutions to navigate a somewhat public identity crisis.
Doing both: a recap
My journey into academia was accidental. I’ve always been an introverted nerd who loved studying and struggled in every other work setting, but somehow decided journalism and then PR were for me, got burnt out and depressed (also following an abusive relationship) and thought studying was a way to buy time as I figured myself out. At some point during that studying, I realised research could be my actual job, which doesn’t feel real to this day. In parallel to that, right when I started studying again and went back into academia for my MA in criminology, I took up pole dancing. I was still figuring myself out professionally, so I didn’t really worry about the publicness of pole and of my moderate but nonetheless existing social media profile, also because it did not cross my naive mind that people would discriminate against me just for showing my body (I knew jack shit about sex work stigma then). Then, I realised wanted pole to be more than a hobby too, and somehow continued doing both pole dance and academia as both practices became crucial to my wellbeing, my professional life and my identity.
Fast-forward to the first year of my PhD when, as a precarious, partially funded doctoral student, I was advised to separate my creator/pole dance persona from my academic persona to avoid awkwardness with students and hiring or conferencing discrimination. At the time, I welcomed the separation as I continued to figure things out. By the time I defended my thesis however, the pole dancing side of my life had become so relevant towards my research that it made sense to de-compartmentalise. As a very online millennial, I of course did this via Twitter, before it became the Elon Musk owned hellscape it is today.
Passed my viva with minor corrections today ?? I had decided this was going to be the day I brought Batman & Bruce Wayne together 😛 So I’m gonna close my academic-only Twitter & unify my presence under this account. Here’s why it's important to me to be both people at once. pic.twitter.com/XzEC5zzek4
— Dr Carolina Are ?? bloggeronpole (@bloggeronpole) December 16, 2020
And so I became the girl who did both, and consolidated this identity in public.
This wasn’t without its risks: it took me a year and a half to find a postdoc that would hire me. I kept getting to the final round of interviews only to be told I interviewed great, but that they found a better fit. As I often say in my talks about hiring discrimination in academia, I do wonder if the “better fit” didn’t have their ass out on the internet.
Yet, when I found a postdoc that celebrated all sides of me, allowed me to do my own project and publish more than I could have hoped for, it seemed like things had fallen into place. For a while, I really enjoyed this life: on an average week I could be collecting data towards a study uncovering issues I deeply care about, doing write-ups of papers while sitting in cute Hackney cafés, getting interviewed by journalists about my research, training towards a performance or indeed performing at a fun event, all the while getting paid to speak somewhere or to create content, and attending whatever new launch, Fashion week party or Queer sexy meet-up under the stars. I love this variety, and I love that all of these different environments and tasks feed a part of me that each one of these alone couldn’t feed.
But it’s all about compromise, and I started noticing the compromise in June 2023.
#stopdeletingus
You may remember that in June 2023 Instagram deleted over 50 kink, sex work and sex positive accounts from the London scene overnight. As the person who often steps in to help deleted users in the face of platform governance’s failure due to my engagement with social media companies, I was suddenly overwhelmed with help requests, which went from 2/3 weekly deletions to help with to… almost 60 overnight. So I girlbossed too hard to fight the girlstruggle and had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of them all, alerting several journalists to what was happening – see Lydia Morrish’s Wired story.
The situation created a dilemma.
Throwback to the last fun days of 2020: sex workers led by Rebecca Crow and the group I was part of, #EveryBODYVisible, the coalition between a multi-stakeholder anti-censorship campaign, gathered outside Meta’s London headquarters to ask for a meeting and protest against censorship. I was there, holding a sign and wearing stripper shoes.
But when I was called in by Meta in 2022 to feedback on their policies, consolidating (or at the very least improving) a relationship that had always felt shaky, I was told they initially didn’t know how to engage with me because they said I was – and I quote – “too much of a crazy activist”.
So when the mass account culls started in 2023, I wanted to do something but was very aware of all the different audiences I was speaking to: I was now an academic employed by a research centre, interacting with platforms and with deleted users. I couldn’t take a militant route to avoid burining the bridges I need for my research and to help my network. So my agent Lover Management did the activism part, and organised an incredible campaign and protest with Klub Verboten, one of the most high-profile deletions at the time, and the whole London kink scene: #stopdeletingus. I was just the quoted expert on the campaign, which by the way was happening when I was speaking at a conference, switching from voice notes to journalists about the deletion to the conference room.
It was here that I was first presented with the challenges of doing both. But these challenges had been bubbling below the surface, and they came to a boil last summer.
The 3 AM panic
The reality of my life as a pole dancing academic is less Get Ready With Me To Slay the Patriarchy in 8inch Heels and more Girl, So Confusing.
The panic started, once again, in Amsterdam.
After this year’s Global Digital Cultures conference’s drinks, I fell asleep right away and then woke up, wide awake, at 3 AM thinking: “Did I just say something that will ruin my career?”
Initially I blamed it on the weed: it’s fully legal in Amsterdam, and usually a joint sends me to sleep after the speaking adrenaline. I often have trouble sleeping, so I’ll take anything (legal) that can help me do that. Maybe, I thought, it was just spacier weed than usual.
But the feeling persevered as I began to do some of the biggest things in my career so far. One of them I have already announced: I was part of the working group that created the IBSA Principles, or the Principles for Combatting Image-Based Abuse, in response to a White House call to action. One I can’t announce yet, but it’s the biggest project and collaboration in my career so far, which will attract a lot more eyes on me when it’s out. And although the team I’m working with is absolutely lovely and supportive, the fear of getting out of my usual, supportive audience bubble felt real, as the new academic year – the year when my postdoc finishes and I will once again be on the dreaded academic job market – loomed close.
Throughout my summer in Sardinia, which was more demure than brat apart from a few nights, I would go out and party and then wake up in the middle of the night worrying that the party footage would have been career-destroying.
(Reader, it wasn’t. It was no different from stuff I post on the daily).
The feeling continued even when coming back to the UK, constantly poring over my social interactions in life, at work events and online.
This affected my relationships. Suddenly, I was hyper aware of the collaborations and content I could post. I was afraid I no longer could be a creator, or that I would have to massively edit myself again, fears I didn’t even take into account upon going into the job market the first time round because… I guess I had less to lose?
Managing audiences
“Can I be a pole dancer and a [insert job]?” is one of the questions I get asked the most.
As I wrote in more detail in a previous blog post, it’s not all #slayqueengirlboss #yesyoucan. It’s a complex equation of what and who you can afford to lose, and how willing you are to welcome context collapse. Could I wait to find a postdoc? Yes, because at the time being a full-time pole instructor and content creator with the occasional spot of academic teaching was enough to pay my bills… because my Italian parents bought me a house and I wasn’t gonna be under a bridge. But not everybody has the same privilege, and I certainly wouldn’t have had it if my parents were of the same social class, but from the UK.
Not all jobs are the same. Not all bosses are the same. Some jobs, some bosses, even some institutions will welcome or not be bothered by a pole dancer, but others might. You will have to find out, and find out what the HR department says. You will also, most likely, have to test the waters and understand how much of you you wanna reveal, how and why.
Suddenly, you may be on the wrong side of the internet – and with that come misogynists, conservatives, and just all-around dickheads. Some of those people’s beliefs may be shared by employers, and yet in a lot of industries (like mine), visibility is almost a requirement so your exposure to them is almost inevitable. Your safety and sanity may depend to the support resources your job will allocate for you.
Ultimately, doing both means having to be hyperaware of who’s in your audience, something not always possible in the age of social media virality. It means editing your speech and your persona according to who you’re talking to. It means being politely angry instead of fucking furious when speaking to social media platforms, constructively furious when you’re speaking at academic conferences or responding to shitty reviewers, and actually fucking furious when you’re chatting with users who are affected by de-platforming. It means always switching mode. A lot of the times, the switching is stressful, and it requires pushing your own boundaries as much as the boundaries of the person you’re speaking with or working with.
For me, being both means being constantly under scrutiny: by ‘the platform gaze’ under which I must research and attempt to make an impact through my work (as I wrote in my latest paper), by funders and potential employers, by the users I am trying to help and connect with.
It’s a constant negotiation and persona-editing that is not always glamorous or healthy.
Solutions: spilling my guts
The solution came, as it always does, through the wisdom of women, the gays and the theys. Speaking with my boss, she simply said that she did ask HR whether my being a pole dancer was a problem, and that she was glad they said no and that she would have had a problem with them if they said yes. She said the negotiation I have to do on the daily still makes for an interesting life, and I guess that’s true.
But it was at my friend Mary Morgan’s literary salon Cult Chaos (you can follow it here) that I somehow found my peace. At Cult Chaos, a very femme, queer, unruly space, people are invited to read or perform something according to a theme. In September, the theme was GUTS. So I spilled my guts.
I had nothing prepared, I just sat on a stool and talked about my anxiety and asked for advice.
I had a beautiful conversation with Anastasia Oceano, an energy healer that immediately reminded me that it’s not just about me. They reminded me that the reasons why I’m feeling anxiety about how I present myself are connected to the same censorship battles I’m fighting. They said that if people do ask me about how to “be both,” they do it because they look up to me and because people do need to be able to have a professional life without hiding who they are or hiding their sexuality. They reminded me that if a place or a job wants me to change who I am, I always used to say I would not wanna work there.
And I guess it’s as easy as that: I’m a better researcher because I’m a pole dancer, and the nakedness, the sexual energy are part of the package. If you hire me, you also get this because without it, I can’t research on the issues that affect our digital sexual lives and expression as well.
The conversation reminded me of when colleague and academic idol Zahra Stardust, the OG stripper, porn director and performer I interviewed last summer, told me that she loved how I have not toned down my performances since becoming more visible in academia. And it’s true, I haven’t, maybe because of a false sense of security or because subconsciously I still don’t want to compromise all sides of me to please just one of them. The anxiety will come and go, in waves, depending on my career and life stage, and I guess I just have to process it instead of keeping it in.
All it took was finally letting the anxiety bleed out of my brain in a supportive space to remember why I do what I do the way I do it. The anxiety is still there, and so are the precarity, the negotiation and the challenges of speaking to multiple audiences. The #girlstruggle is there and may always be, but when communicated – to employers, friends, agents, colleagues – it feels a bit less daunting.
So if you made it this far, thank you for giving me space to ramble about the challenges of being the girl that does both. I guess I wanted to write this post because, after having a few conversations with friends, they seemed surprised about my anxiety because I look like I have my shit together. The truth is I don’t always have it together, and I would hate you to think my life is all slay no pain, because the glamourisation of precarity, tiredness and hustle that I sometimes see online is not cute.
Incidentally, if you want more nuanced “doing both” chats, come to Zahra’s book launch, where I’ll interview her about sex, porn, platform governance and, of course, being a sexy person in the academy. Sing up here (it’s free).
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