Got Pole? “Yes, but It's Gone Limp and Will Likely Remain Limp for Some Time. Thanks, Grandma Schotanus”

Pole dancing, once exclusively the province of exotic dancers, has flared up as a much-hyped Hollywood exercise craze, and has seeped into the collective unconscious through shows like “The Sopranos” and “Desperate Housewives.” A variant called motorized pole dancing, which occurs in stretch limos, has raised eyebrows as far away as Britain, where some female university students pole-danced as a fund-raiser for testicular cancer. And mini-poles have even been spotted as dance props at over-the-top bat mitzvah parties in suburban precincts.

Now the pole—think ballet barre turned vertical—is the new star at racier versions of Tupperware parties in well-heeled (if high-heeled) areas like this one in the northwest hills of Morris County, about 33 miles from Manhattan. Billed as “femme empowerment,” such at-home pole dancing lessons are taking place in the realm of book clubs, with mothers—and grandmothers—learning slinky moves for girls' nights in, bachelorette send-offs, even the occasional 60th birthday celebration …

Some say exercise that echoes the acrobatics done by women who take their clothes off for a living is exploitative rather than empowering. But Ms. Shteir and Joan Price, the author of “Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty” (Seal Press, 2006), see a clear difference between middle-class, middle-aged women choosing to give parties in their homes and women pushed by poverty into potentially dangerous or demeaning work …

Yolanda Matos-Moran, 49, said she was sore the day after attending a pole-dancing bachelorette party for a friend of her daughters in West New York, N.J. “I said to my daughters, ‘This is good; there are muscles you haven't used,’” Ms. Matos-Moran recalled.

You were sore afterwards? Um, Yolanda, I don't think you were doing it right. Next time, swing around the pole, instead of, you know, mounting it. I think you'll feel much, much better the next day.

Better yet, why don't you leave this demeaning and dangerous work to the lower class twirling, trailer trash you so abhor for their inability to transform this empowering activity into emancipatory political action, the way you and your bourgeoisie better-than-you sisters do?

If only they could, they'd be able to free women from the shackles of their male oppressors in no time flat, those Martin Luther King Jrs. of the stripper pole:

“WHAT DO WE WANT?”

“FREEDOM!”

“WHEN DO WE WANT IT?”

“RIGHT AFTER ‘POUR SOME SUGAR ON ME!’”