Pole Dancers Are the Latest Target of Far-Right Grooming Panic

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/pole-dancing-charlotte-pride-festival-libs-of-tiktok-1234585566/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/vO69B

THIS YEAR AT the Charlotte Pride Festival, Whitney Ann was more excited than ever to attend. Her pole dancing studio, Pole Body and Arts, was one of the sponsors of the event, and had a booth there. Plus, it was one of her first ever Pride after having come out as queer. When a little boy came by her booth to try out the pole, believing it was a firefighter pole, Whitney says, it was hot, and he kept slipping off. So she did a pole sit to try to hold him up. “We were out there having a good time,” she says. “And it became an enormous issue.”

That is something of an understatement. A video that Whitney posted to her own Instagram and her business’s Instagram page went viral after it was picked up by Penny Maxwell, a North Carolina-based preacher with more than 16,000 followers. “This is straight-up child abuse and should be investigated immediately,” Maxwell posted. Maxwell is perhaps best known for leading Freedom House, a megachurch that sent out an email in 2013 asking that only white people be at the front door to greet the congregation. (The church later issued an apology.) Last year, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Maxwell also gave a sermon flouting state public health directives requesting that congregants mask up. “This is the only place where people can come and feel normal and we will not take that away from people,” she says in video of the sermon, to tremendous applause.

Maxwell’s post was picked up by Libs of TikTok, the Daily Mail, and Fox News — essentially, all the usual suspects when attempting to cultivate an anti-LGBTQ moral panic. “We have a serious problem in this country,” Libs of TikTok tweeted with a screengrab from the post, which did not censor the minor’s face. The barrage of hate started immediately. “I’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of messages that i need to go straight to jail, that I’m a pedophile or an abuser, which is disgusting,” says Whitney. “[I’m] not abusing a child because he wanted to play on a pole. These grownups commenting these disgusting things are sexualizing a kid being on a pole.”

The panic over the video was doubly bizarre considering that poledancing is a fairly mainstream fitness trend in the United States, as it requires a great deal of muscular upper-body strength. Though it originated among and was largely popularized by exotic dancers, many of whom have criticized the mainstream appropriation of the sport, pole studios like Pole Body and Arts have since become mainstays in cities and suburban communities, to the point that there are even pole dancing competitions worldwide aimed at children.

*snip*


Sure, why not. They targeted teachers FFS and nobody stopped them. Wonder who'll be the next target?

[Skittles]

1. kids need to be protected from books and pole dancers

guns, not so much

[Traildogbob]

2. Music Video's

Will be a big target of Jeebus KKKlan. Although most of their cult are glued to TV to watch. Especially middle age men, they love the black women twerking with big butts. Jeebus don’t like that.

[Nevilledog]

3. Kick