Pole Dancing for Jesus
Ladies and gentleman, I’ve made a decision. An important decision. A potentially life-altering decision. I’m going to quit the Congress on Research in Dance and join the Society for Ethnomusicology instead.
Why? Well, this will come as little surprise to those of you who regularly read this blog but it comes down to simple mathematics: there are more men in the Society for Ethnomusicology than there are in the Congress on Research in Dance.
Dance research conferences seem to attract three sorts of people: women, married men and gay men, whereas ethnomusicology conferences, on the other hand, present more opportunities for “networking” than a college frat party.
Granted, in order to date an ethnomusicologist, I’d have to resign myself to lifetime of papers on Victorian ornithologists and “the sonic specimen” and (no, I’m not making this up) “Pole Dancing for Jesus: Gesture, Masculinity and the Circus of Sexual Ambiguity in Gospel Performance” but the way I see it, there are worse things in life.
In particular, ending up alone.
In fact, if I had to choose between:
A) researching Pole Dancers for Jesus
B) joining Pole Dancers for Jesus
I’d definitely choose the former.
And on that note, I’m afraid I have to sign off for today. I’d intended to bring you all up to speed on the recent developments in my love life (there’s a reason I’ve said so little for the past few days—a reason besides the fact that I’d been stressing about the paper I had to deliver on Friday morning…) but seeing as I’m sitting here with a former classmate and two of our professors discussing the possible religious symbolism of the pole (representative, perhaps, of the heavenly “ascent”?) I’m having trouble concentrating on more serious subjects, i.e. “Whatever happened to Date #7?”
Kat Echevarría Richter 
7 Responses to “Pole Dancing for Jesus”
Great blog title.
Sometimes it is hard keeping up with this postaday thing.
As for the religious symbolism of pole dancing, I am sure for many in the performance is an epiphany
Haha– “epiphany” Love it!
When I clicked on the video, a Google ad came up – “Want a boyfriend?” advertising http://www.zoosk.com. Ha ha!
I hope your heart is okay.
I’d like to state that the above video may in fact be dancing, with a pole, but in no way, shape or form is like pole dancing from a strip club (or similar).
If that was a ring (circus), rope or some other device (not a pole), no one would think it was anything other than a sexy dance by an acrobat, sending you home enriched.
In comparison, a pole dance in a strip club makes you think the pole caught a disease, gives you a hard-on (pardon my french) and sends you home poor, not enriched.
I think you’re well-equipped to establish your own academic discipline. Your debut paper could have the title: “Serial dating as a discpline: a manthropological study in numbers, with particular focus on the Prime number or “date #7” “. What do you say? It’s a … field… waiting to be explored.
LOL! Fantastic 🙂 I’ll be sure to cite you!
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