Sharna Burgess Is Teaching Your Daughter to Pole Dance

When "Dancing with the Stars" pro Sharna Burgess announced she was opening a pole dancing studio in Los Angeles, the reaction split cleanly in two. Half the internet called it empowering. The other half asked a quieter, more uncomfortable question: since when did the strip club become the gym? Let me be fair to Burgess. She is a genuinely gifted dancer, a two-time mirrorball contender, and by all accounts a disciplined professional who has spent two decades mastering an art form. Pole fitness is real. It requires strength, coordination, and pain tolerance most of us cannot imagine. Nobody is disputing that. But here is what the empowerment pitch conveniently skips. Pole dancing did not emerge from women's studies departments. It emerged from clubs where men paid to watch women remove clothing. You can drape it in athleisure and call it fitness, but the choreography, the heels, the slow reveal—none of it evolved in a vacuum. Reframing an old business model as self-care does not change what the business model was selling. And who is this actually for? Burgess's classes are marketed to women, sure. But the aesthetic is unmistakably built for the male gaze—arched backs, stilettos, hair whips. If the goal were truly strength and flexibility, we would call it gymnastics and nobody would blink. We call it pole dancing because the packaging matters. The packaging is the point. This is the part that should trouble parents. American girls are already swimming in messages that their worth is tied to how desirable they appear. We have spent a generation fighting that current. Now a celebrity with real influence is telling teenage girls that the fastest route to confidence runs through a pole, and that anyone who objects is a prude. That is not liberation. That is a rebrand. Maybe you think I am overreacting. Maybe your daughter takes a class, gets strong, and moves on. Fine. But culture is not built by individual choices. It is built by the signals we normalize. When pole dancing becomes a suburban birthday-party activity, we have not expanded women's options. We have narrowed them back to the same old stage. The irony is that Burgess could have built something genuinely valuable—a strength studio, a dance academy, a training program for serious performers. Instead she chose the version with the built-in controversy, because controversy sells. And we bought it, because we always do. **The closing thought:** Not every trend deserves a think piece, but some deserve a hard look. This is one of them. If we cannot say out loud that a pole is not a personality, we have lost the plot.