#NotAStripper vs. #YesAStripper: The Hashtag Fight Pole Still Hasn’t Settled

Of all the arguments the online pole community has had, this is the one that never quite goes away. Around 2015, pole fitness fans on Instagram started tagging their tricks #NotAStripper. Strippers, whose dance the whole thing came from, answered with a hashtag of their own: #YesAStripper. Nearly a decade later, the same fight was still flaring up, this time over a Netflix documentary.

How #NotAStripper started

As pole classes moved into gyms and fitness studios, a lot of new students wanted to make one thing very clear to their friends, families and employers: they did this for exercise. On Instagram, that turned into a hashtag. Writing in VICE in 2018, Sofia Barrett-Ibarria described #notastripper as popular on Instagram around 2015, reflecting a divide between people who pole dance for exercise and people who do it for a living. The people using it, she wrote, said they were pushing back against stigma.¹

That’s the generous reading, and it’s worth taking seriously. Plenty of pole students have had to deal with snide comments at work, awkward family dinners or partners who didn’t get it. For them, the hashtag felt like a shield.

The trouble is what a shield like that implies. If “I’m not a stripper” is the defense, then being a stripper is the thing you’re defending yourself against. Coverage at the time quoted one pole dancer captioning a post, “as you can see, I’m not a stripper. I’m just a regular person.”² That’s the line strippers kept coming back to. “Regular person,” as opposed to what?

Strippers answer: #YesAStripper

When #NotAStripper started trending among pole dancers on Instagram, strippers noticed, and started sharing their own posts under #YesAStripper. Oregon stripper and activist Elle Stanger had been using #YesAStripper on her own photos for more than a year, and in late December 2015 she posted a call on Facebook inviting other strippers to answer #NotAStripper with photos of their own. She told The Daily Dot:³

“Students and teachers of pole dance who try to distance themselves from our art are only contributing to sex worker stigma. It seems silly that someone would pay to learn a skill, while trying to distance themselves from its origins.”

Elle Stanger, quoted in The Daily Dot

That second sentence is the heart of it. The spins, the floorwork, the heel clacks, the body rolls and a lot of the early tricks that pole studios teach were developed by dancers working in clubs. Paying to learn them while posting that you’re not one of “those” dancers struck a lot of strippers as having it both ways.

There was an extra sting a couple of years later. In 2018, MEL Magazine reported that #yesastripper and #stripper had stopped working as hashtags on Instagram, while #poledance was still active.⁴ For a while, the platform was literally hiding the strippers’ side of the conversation while leaving the fitness side visible. (Pole fitness got its own taste of that a year later, which we cover in the summer Instagram hid pole dancing.)

The origin story argument

Underneath the hashtags is an argument about history. You’ll often hear that modern pole dancing comes from Chinese pole and the Indian sport of mallakhamb, both centuries-old pole disciplines traditionally performed by men. It’s a story that shows up on a lot of pole websites, and it has an obvious appeal if you’d rather your hobby didn’t come from a strip club.

Critics say it doesn’t hold up. The Mary Sue’s write-up pointed out that the moves taught in pole fitness classes bear little resemblance to Chinese pole, citing a pole dancer with a background in Chinese acrobatics.² Writing for Glorious Sport in 2023, Katie Baskerville argued that the “sexy” pole most studios teach is overwhelmingly female and was shaped by showgirls, hoochie-coochie dancers, traveling shows and the growth of the sex industry, not by men’s acrobatic sports.⁵

The honest answer is that people have been doing acrobatics on poles for a very long time, and that the specific style taught in most pole studios today comes from strip clubs. Both things can be true. Our own history of pole dancing covers both threads, including the connection between pole fitness and stripping.

The “sport” question

The fight got more complicated as pole moved toward being recognized as a sport, with federations, scoring codes and talk of the Olympics. For some fitness dancers, that was the ultimate answer to stigma: you can’t call it stripping if it’s on a scoresheet.

Strippers and the people who study their work weren’t convinced that helped them. In the same VICE piece, stripper and writer Elle Stanger said simply: “Dancing is not inherently harmful. Dancing nude is not inherently harmful.” Heather Berg, a lecturer researching sex work, argued that sport status did little for strippers’ actual problems, like being misclassified as contractors or not being covered for injuries at work:¹

“What dancers say they need isn’t for pole dancing to be recognized as a sport, it’s for it to be recognized as a job.”

Heather Berg, quoted in VICE, 2018

2021: Strip Down, Rise Up reopens the wound

Just when the hashtag era seemed to have cooled off, Netflix released Strip Down, Rise Up on February 5, 2021. Directed by Michèle Ohayon, the documentary follows women taking classes at S Factor, the pole studio chain founded by Sheila Kelley, and frames pole as a path to healing and empowerment.⁶

Strippers’ complaint was that the film talks a lot about pole and barely at all about the people who created it. Former stripper Alyssa Aparicio told BuzzFeed News, “We started talking about pole as a tool for empowerment, but there is not really, like, context around it.” Stripper April Haze, 24, said the film’s framing made it seem like strippers were simply victims: “To think that we’re just complicit, it’s kind of really disrespectful to us and just takes away our autonomy.”⁶ BuzzFeed’s piece also noted the history: pole fans had used #notastripper, and strippers had answered with #yesastripper.

InsideHook ran its own piece under a headline that summed up the mood: “Netflix Made a Documentary About Pole Dancing and Forgot to Talk to Strippers.”⁷

What the filmmakers said

To be fair to the people behind the film, they did respond. Ohayon said the documentary is “simply a different focus on the pole community” and that it “in no way minimizes or excludes the experiences of strippers.”⁷ An S Factor spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that discussion of stripping as a profession is “appreciated, honored, and woven” into its business, though the company said it “cannot confirm” whether it came up in the classes shown on screen.⁶

Their argument, in short, was that this was a different story about a specific group of women in a specific studio. Whatever you make of that, the reaction showed how raw the #NotAStripper years had left things.

Where things stand now

The tone has shifted a lot since 2015. Many studios now teach classes called “exotic,” “heels” or even “stripper pole,” and plenty of pole fitness dancers proudly credit strippers as the source of the style they love.

The argument isn’t over, though. In 2023, Glorious Sport quoted Mistress LilyMay calling the habit of distancing pole from stripping “a form of stealing,” adding: “The #notastripper trend undermines sex work.” The same piece quoted researcher Dr. Carolina Are on why the venue shouldn’t change how we see the skill: “It is an art and a sport that can be practised in a studio or a strip club.”⁵

If you want to dig into this more, our pieces on whether pole fitness and stripping are really that different, exotic pole dance and breaking the stigma around pole pick up where this one leaves off.

More pole drama deep dives

This is part of our look back at the arguments that shaped the online pole community. Read about the Facebook post that called the spatchcock “ugly”, and the summer Instagram hid pole dancing.

Sources

1. Sofia Barrett-Ibarria, “Making Pole Dancing a Sport Is Offensive to Strippers”, VICE, March 21, 2018. ↩︎
2. Maddy Myers, “Pole Dancers Using the #NotAStripper Hashtag Get Well-Deserved Pushback From Strippers”, The Mary Sue, January 1, 2016, drawing on reporting by The Daily Dot. ↩︎
3. Mary Emily O’Hara, “Strippers talk back to the hashtag #NotAStripper”, The Daily Dot, January 1, 2016 (archived copy). ↩︎
4. Tierney Finster, “Instagram’s Shadowban on #Strippers”, MEL Magazine, June 6, 2018. ↩︎
5. Katie Baskerville, “Pole Dancing’s Heritage Deserves To Be Respected, Not Sanitised”, Glorious Sport, February 24, 2023. ↩︎
6. Lauren Strapagiel, “Why Strippers Are Upset About Netflix’s Pole Dance Documentary”, BuzzFeed News, February 18, 2021. ↩︎
7. Kayla Kibbe, “Netflix Made a Documentary About Pole Dancing and Forgot to Talk to Strippers”, InsideHook, February 19, 2021. ↩︎