Yesterday a friend of mine who knows me pretty well sent an email asking if I would ever consider allowing my 7-year-old daughter to take a pole dancing class. Since I know this friend just as wella s they know me I could sense the rhetorical tone in the email. My immediate response was “you know me well enough that I don’t even have to answer that” My friend then told me to go look at her Facebook wall. So this morning after going through my daily routine I finally got around to looking at the wall and THIS is what I see. A young child performing some sort of pole dancing routine while being filmed by an adult who I assume was left to take care of the child. It could be a parent…It could be a babysitter..It could be a family member…Who knows?!?!? I don’t know who filmed the video, but I do know that whoever did it is grossly negligent and should have their rights to be around children permanently revoked and have their head examined.
As the father of a young lady, one of my mottos about parenthood is that I want to “keep her off of the pole.” I constantly remind myself that many strippers and exotic dancers come from a place where they feel they did not receive any love from their father or have a positive male figure in their life growing up, and that’s just not the mentality that I want my child to have. I want my daughter to strive for excellence using her brain and not her body. So as I’m trying to keep my child away from dancing and simulating sexual acts for money, some people think that teaching a child to dance on a pole is something that is acceptable. Let me just say this, not only is this video unacceptable, it is also IRRESPONSIBLE. I mean really what person in their right mind would put a child through this. The things that are put on the internet are ever lasting, and folks need to be more responsible and think about the long term consequences that their actions will have on their babies.
So after watching the video in disgust on my friend’s Facebook page I noticed that there were actually people who defended the person who filmed this video by saying that pole dancing is a sport that requires training and a certain degree of athleticism. Okay so I immediately gave this one commenter the “blank stare from hell” as I read these words from a woman who condoned this video and compared it to other activities such as gymnastics and figure skating. What this woman didn’t seem to grasp was the fact that pole dancing even in it’s purest form (oxymoronic I know…) is something that is done with a sexual undertone and should not be performed by a child. As I read on and on the comment thread stretched to 79(probably the most comments I’ve ever seen on a facebook post) and this woman still didn’t get it. Reading her comments made me realize that some people just don’t understand how real it is out here. As a parent you should want to preserve the innocence of a child as long as possible. If I could freeze my little girl right now and keep her in a bubble that repels the ills of society I would. But since I can’t do that I have to keep her as innocent and oblivious to the things of this world such as sex, drugs, and pole dancing for as long as I possibly can. This attitude that our society has that it is acceptable to do certain things just because “times have changed” or because “it’s a new generation” has got to come to an end. It’s time to get back to some old fashioned values by using new age common sense.
I don’t down any stripper, escort or exotic dancer for doing what they do. What an adult chooses to do with their body on their time is their business. To each his/her own. But I don’t know one father who thinks to himself “I don’t want my daughter to be a doctor or a lawyer, I want her to be a stripper.” And if any father DOES think that then he is just as dumb as the people who shot this video and posted it on worldstarhiphop. I mean really, why couldn’t this be a video of a young girl spelling supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or something like that. Why is the person who filmed this video celebrating this child’s ability to do a trick on a pole instead of her ability to count to 100. As the old folks would say this don’t sit right in my spirit… I hate to see children taken advantage of. And that is exactly what this video is. A young child is being taken advantage of simply for the sake of some hits on a website. Shouldn’t the innocence of a child be valued at a higher rate than the number of hits a web site receives? I would hope so, but in a society that continues to lose a little bit of moral fiber with every blog post, youtube video and new TV show it seems as though our kid’s worth is no longer based on what we teach them, but more so on how we can pimp them.
