Pole Dancing, Lap Dances and Fitness

Most of us associate pole dancing with stripping, but that concept is changing. Plenty of women are stepping up and admitting that they find pole dancing erotic and sexy, and they would be willing to give it a try. I know I certainly would.

Pole Dancing and Exercise
Pole dancing has become an exercise phenomenon with actresses like Kim Cattral from HBO's Sex and The City and Carmen Electra promoting girl power with their own how-to videos.

Kim Cattral recently appeared on the Oprah show along with pole dancing instructor Sheila Kelley to teach women how to release their inner sexpot through pole dancing. The two paired up to write a book called, "The S Factor" which breaks down the individual moves and teaches the reader how to put them together into a routine.

Carmen Electra's Aerobic Striptease workout video teaches you how to tone and strengthen your body through pole dancing. The set comes with 4 different videos containing instructions for how to have a good routine and work out your body at the same time. She even gives step by step directions for giving a lap dance the right way.

Health clubs and dance studios are seeing a demand for pole installations by their hip and groovy modern female patrons. Gyms across the nation are starting to add pole dancing to their workouts and have reported that the pole appeals most to the average woman who just wants to feel sexy in her own skin.

Cardio health seems to be one of the biggest benefits of pole dancing. Because of the manipulation of the body during the workout and the constant movement, the heart gets pumping and it often leaves you winded.

Sounds like a great way to get some exercise and turn up the heat in the bedroom all at the same time.

How Pole Dancing Originated
But how did pole dancing get started? I mean who comes up with ideas like that? I wondered what made someone dance around a pole to begin with and what made the person watching it, think it was sexy? After a lot of research, I've come to learn everything there is to know about pole dancing, well except for actually how to do it and here's what I discovered about the matter.

There is a belief that pole dancing originated sometime in the 1980's in Canada only to be stolen by Americans. Before the '80's there is very little information available about pole dancing but I did find a book on the subject.

According to author A.W. Stencell, in the book titled "Girl Show, Into the Canvass World of Bump and Grind," "One Eye Tommy Fallon and Mom Fallon ran a single-O girl show called Princess Pat. The girl who worked it would strip naked and grind herself up against the 'snorting pole', simulating sex with an imagined male lover. The 'snorting pole', or pole in the front of the stage, was often the center tent pole. These cooch and single-O tops were often very small, twenty by thirty feet, so the center pole would be right up against the front of the stage making it available as a 'prop'. Where the carny term 'snorting pole' came from is lost in time. One girl dancer interviewed thought it came from the reaction of the men in the crowd who, she said, 'snorted like pigs when they became excited!'

The snorting pole went from being a prop in cooch and single-O girl shows to being an architectural accoutrement to most go-go dancing stages. It is still a major prop in nude dance clubs"

Now this is a theory I can get behind because when I think of the early turn of the century tent shows I am reminded that it wasn't just freaks put on display and I can imagine how the women suddenly had the great idea of sexing up the center tent pole to satisfy the visual aspect of their client. There were all sorts of burlesque and strip tease shows taking place under the not-so-big top.

Some pole dancing historians believe it came about as an erotic substitute to England's May Pole dance. The May Pole was originally a pagan fertility celebration and the entire month of May was about sexual freedom. During these celebrations the pole represented the God's phallus in Mother Earth. People frolicked and danced around the pole as a way of celebrating life. After the ceremony people would gather in the fields and have loads and loads of sex to help along nature's fertility in the soil. The believed that sex represented life and that included life brought forth from the soil.

It is said that sometimes May Pole dances got quite raunchy but the May Pole ritual is not the only ritual that involved erotic type dancing. Many of the ancient Goddess rituals and ceremonies involved nude or erotic dancing.

So, now we know that pole dancing originated with Goddess worship and has since been the dirty little secret behind the May Pole. Famous pole dancers include, Demi Moore, Angelina Jolie, Terri Hatcher (The Star of Desperate Housewives), Kate Moss, Christina Aguilera and Daryl Hannah.

All About Lap Dances
Lap Dances originated in the 1970's in New York's Melody Theater by encouraging audience participation. San Francisco's Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre picked up on the trend and offered customers the opportunity to have a dancer sit in their lap for a $1 tip.

The crazy thing about lap dances is that the government decided to poke their noses in it and felt like they should regulate how they are performed. Laws regarding lap dances vary from state to state and the actual type of lap dance you can get varies from club to club.

The average price for a lap dance is $20 for a three minute song and depending on the state you are in, the amount of physicality involved can range from severe lap rubbing to stripping from a small distance.

Watching a lap dance however is completely free if it's happening to someone else. If you want to watch it on the internet or on DVD you can go to Lap Dance Tv.com and pay a fee to order the reality tv DVD series.

Learning to give a lap dance is not all that difficult. A simple google search for how to do it turns up 1,750,000 results with tons of instructional videos and books. Of course you could always buy Carmen Electra's video and learn to do both lap dancing and pole dancing.