Several high-profile pole dancers with more than a decade in the industry have recently been posting about experiencing pole burnout. I watched with interest as someone who has felt this at different points in the now ten years I’ve been pole dancing, and wanted to contribute to the discussion with some professional reflections on pole dance, performance, entrepreneurship and their relationship with an increasingly demanding creator economy.
Pole burnout according to pole stars
An Instagram reel by hard style performer and instructor Anna Frost recently caught my eye (shared in YouTube format below because it looks prettier here). Titled “Couples Therapy,” like her upcoming YouTube series of the same name, Anna’s reel was a candid confession centring on how she now essentially… hates pole dance. It’s not that she doesn’t want to do it ever again, but it’s natural, she says, to go through love/hate phases with something that is, for many of us, our longest relationship – in Anna’s case, 14 years. Her series is meant to re-inject love into pole, after experiencing burnout from teaching on top of a full-time job, in an industry where students are increasingly advanced and expect new moves at every class.
I found the comment section particularly heartening. There, so many pole stars I would have never suspected could feel anything close to pole burnout opened up really candidly. The Pole Wizard himself (Jakub Kolasa) for instance, said:
“You have no idea how frequently I stress about what else I could do as someone who has only done pole for a living for years now? Then I hate myself for it cause I’ve dreamt of this career since I was a child and worked SO HARD to get to where I am, to do all these exciting things and have all these incredible opportunities, but I’m just so tired all the time ?“
Similarly, Beth Hamilton discussed changing energy levels with age (hear hear), and Chlo Hood likened teaching pole to any self-employed job, which too often relies on pushing ourselves hard towards financial security and business longevity. Elsewhere, Natalya Nightshade wrote about pole is one of the things she does, one of the art forms she partakes in, but not who she is.
I found all these reflections very relatable, having recently discussed some of these aspects in my 10-year pole anniversary post.
It’s very easy to make pole your identity when you start it. As an art and a sport created and popularised by strippers, pole can be revolutionary in your self-discovery, helping you come to terms with internalised shame, misogyny and whorephobia. Embracing the opportunities it offers can mean it becomes a crucial part of our being, and because society can’t cope with art or work being of a sensual or sexual nature, it becomes a label that they put on us and that, in turn, we reclaim.
But as Natalya wrote, we all contain multitudes, and prioritising just one side of ourselves for years can lead to burnout or loss of love for that particular discipline.
My experience with pole burnout
As I’ve discussed extensively on this blog, I’ve had to really fight to make sure that I’m not burnt out by the art, sport, practice, mindset that changed my life, a.k.a. pole. This has been a process of stripping back (pun intended) my list of activities, my commitments and the things that stopped me from feeling like pole dancing was something I enjoyed.
I decided to become a professional pole dancer almost subconsciously. The wish to “do more” with pole than just attend classes developed around my third pole showcase in Sydney, when I realised how cool performing was, and how good it made me feel. I soon realised that to perform well I needed to refine my technique, so when a studio owner took me under her wing to train me as an instructor, I jumped on the chance.
But I got lost in teaching, panicking about delivering good classes so much that my training became solely about refining my instructor offering more than about the exploration and nurturing of my passion, which were key to still loving pole. When I decided that being an academic was going to be my main career, not just because of its (sort of, given the current climate) longevity but also for the impact I could make with my research, I realised that preparing classes was the main way I was spending my time when training. All of a sudden, pole was a source of anxiety instead of pleasure, and I almost didn’t want to train anymore. Stopping to teach regularly outside of workshops helped me fix that particular glitch, and fight the first instance of burnout – especially after teaching online so much during the pandemic that I was still injured all over the place.
Soon I found that teaching wasn’t the only glitch.
After realising how much prepping for competitions without often seeing results hurt my love for pole, I also took a step back from competing, not forever but as a mindset. I realised I preferred performing, getting paid for it, and nurturing my creativity in ways that gave back instead of taking energy, and I’ve been doing that ever since.
This year alone I’ve performed more than I ever have, and earnt more money from performing than ever. I don’t always think: “NAILED IT!”, but I never walk off stage feeling deflated or sad. I still feel the performing nerves and adrenaline, without the drawbacks of joining events for most of my day with increasing anxiety as I wait to find out if I’ve placed, or if I’ve ruined my reputation. See some recent pics of me performing at Peaches Dreamhouse Cabaret last month as an example.
The last activity I had to strip back to avoid burnout has been posting on social media. Don’t get me wrong: I still post more than the average person, because as someone who has been working in the creator economy for over a decade, as an academic sharing findings with the general public, and as someone who loves posting pictures of her ass, the overlords’ platforms are still useful despite their many failings. But while before I felt that to ‘exist’ as a pole dancer I had to constantly share my progress, full performances and achievements, now I’m more of the mindset that these platforms are incredibly extractive of our time and labour, that they take more than they give back, and that they don’t deserve more free ass than I’ve already given them.
I hadn’t realised how much pressure I was putting on myself to polish videos, to create constantly, to edit seamlessly, and to avoid censorship. As I have stopped centring Big Tech in my life outside my research, I realised I want to be a communicator more than a creator: I want to share my findings, make people aware of what I do on and off the pole, but that’s it. For the full experience, you’re gonna have to watch me or to me offline. As a result, this also released the pressure to earn from social media, through brand partnerships, collaborations or potential for virality.
Ironically, I’ve been making much more money as a performer, speaker or researcher this way than by pursuing brand partnerships that, ultimately, put money back into Big Tech just through the sheer eyeballs on them.
The effect of this has been, however, that I’ve felt less connected to the pole community – including from some people I thought were friends. I do not necessarily mind: I have now come to find more solace in people who are less online than in those who must shoot content at all costs. Maybe this is a consequence of ageing, but I’m glad to see that the real pole friends I’ve made offline and online are staying, and we still see each other even without attending pole ‘marathon style’ 12-hour events, or without shooting content together.
I think I have done OK when it comes to fighting pole burnout, maybe because I’ve been fairly quick to identify when something was no longer serving me. But it still feels like burnout is always round the corner, and a lot of it has to do with some of the things I’ll discuss below.
Pole burnout and the creator economy
As I wrote in my anniversary post, pole is central to my life and mindset, but I have now diversified the spaces in which I find meaning, because when pole is something you do instead of something you are, it’s easier not to let the pursuit of success or the avoidance of failure rule your life. The love for pole can be found again. A bad performance can be followed by a good one. The fact that I haven’t trained for a week isn’t the end of the world. And so on and so forth.
Still, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of what the pole stars above have been discussing is burnout with pole as work: of course, when a hobby and a passion becomes connected with paying your bills and stop being part of ‘play,’ this happens. But there’s an undercurrent in the discourse that is undoubtedly connected with the new dimensions that work is now taking.
A lot of this is, I believe, due to the increasing demand of the creator economy.
Hear me out: this is not just because I am a digital criminologist observing the inequalities generated by social media and the creator economy, or what scholar Glyn Easterbrook-Smith describes as an “insecure, often short-term or piecemeal, employment, frequently facilitated by a platform or app.”
This is because when you rely on a capricious and unreliable intermediary like a social media platforms to attract potential customers (be that students, people who book you to perform or teach, or clients in the club), it’s pretty difficult not to make one side of you – the pole side – your whole identity, and then beat yourself up if you don’t succeed or enjoy what you’re doing.
We’re told that if you choose a job you love you’ll never work a day in your life, but in reality when we turn a passion and a hobby into a job we’re then stuck with all the things we hated about that job – the pressure to earn and perform, the admin, the client relations, the reputational struggles etc. – with something that was meant to take our mind off the other job. All of this without the chance to be fully candid about it, because it’s a harder sell to say: “Come learn from me, I hate this right now” that to say: “I love my life, come learn from me.”
This, in a way, can be true of many professions arising from a passion, especially now that, as my colleague Sophie Bishop has written, influencer practices are creeping into many careers, becoming a requirement to succeed.
But the creator economy asks pole dancers so much. Already when I was teaching, I had to promote my classes to polished dance videos than I then had to edit well, posting them in the hope the algorithmic overlords would not censor me – a precarity that hits so much harder when your only job is a sex-related or adjacent business (I lost my own accounts many times, so I can relate). I had to be familiar and engage with social media content trends, in the hope that going viral would help me escape the shadowban. I had to be aware of the dramas, controversies and ethics of our industry – something personally very important to me, because I don’t want to hurt anyone, but that also required time, education and care. I also constantly had to upgrade my skills, keeping up with trending combos, and force myself to try them even when I knew they weren’t made for my body.
Now that teaching is not part of my life as much, I’m noticing this is getting worse. Pole content is everywhere, and I can see how easy it is to feel like you’re falling behind if you don’t make it. The options to post professional looking content have grown: when I first started posting pole on my Insta, you could post single pictures, or very short, 15-second videos. Now you have stories, dumps, reels, TikToks, and all of them have to be seamlessly created and edited to give that professional allure that may attract customers and protect your reputation.
On the flipside, pole dance and sex work content is being deleted left, right and centre, so pole dancers, and particularly pole dancers who also strip or do sex work, have to toe the line of community guidelines with an expertise and knowledge that is not required of most creators.
In short, while I have always argued that social media have helped popularise pole, raise awareness of its origins, and normalise it as a practice, they have also gentrified it, added more and more labour to pole dancers’ plate, and created unrealistic expectations – I blame you, #poletok girlies making “Beginner” combos featuring deadlifts and more advanced tricks.
Other potential causes of pole burnout
Other factors adjacent to social media and connected to pole dance as a practice may be contributing to people feeling exhausted – and no, I don’t just mean the rise of technofascism, the US and Israel pushing us further towards World War III, and hope being long gone from the lives of Millennials and Gen Zs.
Whether we like it or not, pole is political. Luckily, in many countries it’s no longer controversial or debated to say that pole dancing comes from stripping, and that sex workers need to be centred and celebrated in our practice. But because of pole’s inherently political nature, many pole dancers are being called to engage with other important political issues of our time. Personally, I think it’s important we all do it, because being apolitical and not using our platform means not doing our part in a society that is shifting towards fascism at breakneck speed. PR-wise, Ed Sheeran is living proof that if you don’t do politics, soon enough politics is gonna do you. Yet, for people who just wanna run a business, this adds an extra layer of engagement, education and sheer studying that may have not been present in other business endeavours, and a pressure to communicate all of this correctly. Some people find rising up to the challenge stressful.
Another factor is, as others mentioned, age. Many of us got into pole when we were in our early to mid-twenties, maybe at uni, maybe at a slightly less horrifying time. Now, many of us have other full-time jobs that are more reliable to pay the bills, maybe we are starting to build families, and we have seen every pole drama under the sun develop with little to no change. So we are tired, and we engage less.
The fact that pole is expensive, relies on good physical health, access to equipment for those of us who don’t have a pole at home, and that we are all doing our little spin as the world literally burns may also be contributing factors.
In short, times are way less hopeful than 10 years ago, and we may be burnt out not just by pole, but by life under technofascism as a whole.
So what do we do?
So what do we do? Do we just… stop doing this great thing that we have loved for so long just because it doesn’t feel the same?
For some, this may be the answer and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I am an optimist at heart (despite my frankly abysmal mental health) and I really liked the spirit of Anna’s “Couples Therapy”. For me, the stripping back of pressure and activities has really helped – something that Chlo discussed as well, arguing that separating the dancing we do for ourselves from what we teach can help. Similarly, pole legend Annie Norris talked about accepting where we’re at in our age, skills, priorities in a recent reel, and forgiving ourselves to remove pressure and judgement from dancing.
Mainly, I would suggest decentring social media from our practice as much as we can, which is easy to say when you have a job that doesn’t strictly rely on it, I know. But decentring can mean stopping the uber-advanced combo we see from being the one that we teach, or settling with a number of posts we are comfortable sharing each month, instead of running ourselves into the ground with #content. Decentring can mean understanding what works for our business, and not letting the algorithmic hamster wheel dictate how much and how often we show up.
There is a reason why many influencers are going back on the corporate ladder: because it’s not sustainable to only work through platforms that don’t want us to win. So let’s make them work for us instead of the other way round, so we can still shake ass in ways that please us, and not burnout for the overlords.
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