The Psychological Benefits of Pole Dance
Trigger Warning: Mention of Eating Disorders.
In this week on The Evidence Based Pole Podcast we are joined by pole dance researcher, Dr. Kelly Cuccolo! We connect to discover the links between pole dance and body image, depression, anxiety, eating disorder symptoms, and the impact on our gender identity. We dive deep into the world of body image, specifically with eating disorders, sexulaization and objectification of pole dancing, men in pole dance, underrepresented populations, queer pole dance representation, and emodiment. We found interestingly that pole helps the mindset change from worry about how the body looks to how the body feels which aids in the process of eating disorder healing.
More of Dr. Kelly Cuccolo
Dissertation: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2550274352
Link the sociology compass paper pole new world: https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/soc4.13142
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cuccolo_lab/
The Evidence-Based Pole Podcast aims to help pole dancers feel better on and off the pole by talking with experts and diving into relevant scientific research to find evidence-based insights we can apply to our pole journeys. It’s a production of Slink Through Strength, the inclusive, evidence-based online pole studio, which can be found online at slinkthroughstrength.com.
Transcript (this one is a bit rough, apologies!)
hey pole dancer welcome to the evidence-based poll podcast my name is Rosie boa I'm a pole dancer poll teacher and personal trainer and I've started this podcast so that we can learn together talk with the experts read the research and feel better on and off the poll so if that sounds like something you're interested in doing let's go welcome to another of all the types of episodes are my favorite types of episodes but I do really enjoy the ones where I get to talk to researchers who are working on holding up to the research subject um and today we are joined by Dr Kelly cucolo um who is a researcher who works on pole dance uh and also a pole dancer uh and yeah it would be great if actually first of all do you up to you whether you want to start sort of like talking a little bit about your poll Journey who you are and you got here um or uh maybe a little bit of a very high level overview of some of your your research on the subject yeah of course thank you so much for having me first of all I'm so excited to get to nerd out about this stuff um it's just it's really fun so I think those two questions kind of dovetail nicely into each other because my experiences kind of led me to want to do research which I think has drove a lot of things but I think in the whole world where there wasn't a lot going on I was like having these really powerful experiences and I was like wanted to see if if there was a pattern there like am I the only one having these really great experiences or is this something really common um and that'll kind of get into some of my specialty which is on like body image and eating disorders so I was a grad student in a PhD program for experimental psychology and anybody who's you know in school or in that type of world knows like you do not have a lot of time for yourself like you do not have a lot of time to take care of yourself and I really felt like that was starting to take a toll on me and so I wanted to try something new and different and I found a pole dance studio an hour away from me and I was like worth it I'll drive like I'll do it I was in rural North Dakota so like already like there's not a lot going on um but I was like I'll give it a try and immediately was hooked um and then I think like the researcher part of me was like well is there anything out there on like what I'm experiencing and everything that I was Finding I think was like really kind of theoretical really like from a more uh feminist framework of like answering these kind of broad societal questions about pole dancing and I think that's really important I think that's part of the conversation when we talk about the individual benefit but I was really interested because of my background in like eating disorder research like well how does this play into somebody's body image how does this play into somebody who might have had an eating disorder their symptoms like what does this look like on kind of the more mental health level and so I was like well I'm gonna make this my dissertation and I just went for it um so really broadly my research and poll kind of focuses on the psychological aspects of it how does it impact body image how does it impact maybe depression anxiety eating disorder symptoms and then also recently I've done some more stuff by collaborating with people in the sociology field of more of the how does it influence our gender identity how does our gender identity interact or play into the way we approach pole dancing yeah definitely that's how I I came across you as I got like I have a system of alert setups whenever anybody publishes Paul dance research I get like it's happening yeah it's getting you to the library yeah um and I ran across uh your paper I was like I cannot access this in any way so I emailed you and I was like also would you be like yes and you were like yes so okay yeah definitely so um we are not gonna cover everything that goes on in a dissertation in this uh this podcast um so and the dissertation is open access I believe so folks are interested you can just you can just go read it um a little little light reading uh but I as I was reading through your research there were a lot of terms used in sort of like formal psychological sense that I think also tend to get bandied about quite a bit in um I'm gonna call it the wellness face broadly uh and one of the things that I think uh is important to me as someone who's doing evidence-based instruction is really being um you know concrete and specific with terminology and if you've ever you know done researcher learned how to do research you will uh have done a lot of time and spent a lot of thought on specific terminology and what does it mean and how does it like interact with um different ways of looking at the same problem right so with that in mind I picked out a couple terms that I think people may have heard but may not necessarily know much of the scholarship around or may not know sort of what do we and sort of like the empirical space know about these things uh and you know I think body image is a great one to start with um and you know I think when often when we think of body image we think of dysmorphia uh and particularly you know that might be genders more there's more for you but I think size dysmorphia particularly again in the Fitness Wellness space tends to tends to come up so do you want to talk a little bit about that what is it how does it affect people um how do you know if it's something that's maybe negatively or positively affecting you question mark yeah I think this is a really good question so I would just boil body image down to like very simply how you feel about your body and most often it's specifically referring to like how your body looks um and so like you said that could be size is a really common one and there are even like specific scales you can use to make like measure how people feel about certain parts of their body or certain aspects of their body like muscularity or thinness um but just very broadly it's like how you feel about your body and particularly the way it looks um there are lots of different kind of body image movements like body positivity right trying to emphasize like positive aspects of how you look and really find like some empowerment about embracing all parts of you um and then body neutrality is more like well you don't have to really even think about your body at all like you can just exist and not have a particularly strong reaction to the way you look or certain parts of you and kind of like take it off your mental plate um I would say like negative body image is when you feel poorly about yourself and really when a lot of like the obsessive thoughts the nitpicking starts to happen the what we call Body checking starts to happen so like you know you look past yourself in the mirror and maybe you're really insecure about like your hairline and so you're trying to sit right you walk past and you're trying to fix it immediately or like when you sit down maybe you're insecure about your stomach and so you're immediately repositioning yourself that's when I would say we're starting to head into like having a more negative body image and when we might start to want to you know unpack that or look into that a little bit more yeah and I think um it's important for folks to note that the recommended course of action here is to perhaps go see a therapist and not necessarily immediately try to change your body in some ways yep yep and that's I mean not to get too far like ahead of ourselves but that's something that really like came out in my dissertation that I wasn't expecting um because I looked at like just the experiences of women who pole dance collected some Quant you know quantitative data about how they felt about themselves but also like I had some open-ended questions about like what does poll do for you like why do you continue to pole dance and overwhelmingly it was like this has helped me move away from focusing on like how my body looks to like how my body feels and one thing I mean one response that really just made me like stop and rethink how I even thought about it was like you know this person was like I was forced to look at the parts of myself that I didn't love and like because you know when you're pole dancing you're not wearing very much clothing like there's no room to hide and there are often lots of mirrors and she was just like and over time I just stopped caring like I got so you know desensitized maybe not the right word but like so habituated to seeing myself and was able to move Beyond like focusing on that and critiquing myself and like I was like you know she was like look at all this cool stuff I can do why would I care that I maybe don't love this one particular part of my body um so I thought that was like really powerful too lovely yeah kind of reminds me I think mock hearing their own voice on a recording because bone conduction means that your voice sounds very different to you than it does to other people because they're they're not wearing your skull which is good maybe we don't really want that um but uh you know listen if you hate your voice listen according to your voice you want to get over it may I recommend editing a podcast with you and eventually yeah you know the hundredth hour of just like closely listening to your own voice it's eventually it just becomes like another noise that is fine um yeah that's really interesting uh so I was when I started pole dance it was in a situation with no mirrors and I still don't use a mirror although I teach online and I take online classes so I can't see myself in the recording so there is definitely more more visual feedback there um but yeah it is interesting how the the experience of being in a mirrored space can really uh over time in a way that's you know you feel emotionally supported can really uh change your your connection what's what I'm looking for yes yeah like your perspective and I think that part that you hit on is really important the support aspect because right if you are in a class maybe it's all people who really look a certain way that might be damaging more so than supportive like because there's that comparison but like I don't know if you've had this experience but something that I've experienced and I was common among the people I've interviewed is like those spaces are so incredibly supportive like when you learn how to do something when you land a trick for the first time even if you fail people are clapping people are like complimenting you and I think that's what makes the difference and like allows you to maybe step outside of your own kind of negative bias or voice and and really move past maybe some of those things that you didn't feel so great about yeah I think it's a who is listening has had that me too uh and so another another term that I think gets used a lot uh again with sort of a meaning of varieties behind it um that I know you've worked on quite a bit is embodiment um and I mean in the trivial sense we're all embodied because we all have bodies that we're in uh but I think that's not generally how it's used so do you want to talk a little bit more about that and maybe some of the scholarship around it yes um I agree like in the general sense we are all embodied but in like kind of the psychological vernacular the way we use it is to refer to like we do kind of describe it as like feeling quote unquote in your body but in the sense that like you feel connected to your body and you feel like you can meet your body's needs and take care of your body um you are not just simply inhabiting it as a vessel but like you are truly looking out for yourself and for the needs the needs that you have yeah so I think of things like um I'm always a little bit worried when a student who I'm working with mentions that they have really great pain uh tolerance because that tells me that what they are really good at is ignoring signals from their body and not necessarily you know the psychological rigor to continue to push through something that's uncomfortable exactly like knowing where your body is in space like kind of feeling like you have good body awareness like listening to your pain signals listening to your hunger signals their signals things like that especially because it's so often used in connection with like eating disorder research or body image research right like we want to see like can you can you recognize what your body is telling you and then respond in a way that like um is respectful like or appreciative right like okay like this hurts I'm gonna back out like in yoga they always tell you the pose shouldn't hurt right like you don't want to push it too far so like knowing that knowing like okay this is starting to get painful and then backing out or easing up a little bit would be like a good example of embodiment yeah definitely and you know noticing differences in Sensations right so in poll in particular if you are learning a pulse it there will be some discomfort but doing like okay this discomfort is because I'm putting pressure on a muscle right it's like massage discomfort or this discomfort is because there's tension on the skin and it's sort of like a a stretchy discomfort this discomfort is like in the joint or like this discomfort is nervy it's sort of like shooting and zingy which are not in the sort of normal realm of uh doing a pull move um so even just like being able to like not just notice that you're in pain but like specifically what type of pain um yeah I think is really important just like a human skill right like the thing that we should be working on and like related to that too when you do spin pull for like maybe the first couple of Thai or forever if you're mean you never figure it out um but like right that like orientation that dizziness knowing right when to kind of stop take a break and move on and like what kind of your threshold is try to respond and also like when you can kind of like what isn't quote-unquote normal for you as an individual yeah all great points so we've talked about body image we talked about embodiment um and another two things I know you've worked on quite a bit uh that I'm gonna bring up together because I think they're often discussed together is sexualization and objectification I think it is no surprise to anyone listening the poll can be sexy and for some people part of the draw of pull is being able to be sexy um like certainly for me I don't always want to dance super sexy but yeah it's also really nice to have a space where I can be like yes I'm enjoy this yeah how many of like the people that I you know worked with for my dissertation said that exact thing like you know I I like having the choice of like today's gonna be sexier or not and like or today's gonna be a sporty day or today's just gonna be like a see what happens kind of day um so in my dissertation I would say oh this is these are I think the hardest ones to unpack because they are so closely related but also I think they're really layered and not used consistently so I would say like I specifically looked at like self-objectification in my dissertation which was basically like a person's tendency to look at themselves from a third person's perspective so it can kind of be thought of as like the opposite of embodiments and so focusing on how your body feels you're really focused on how it looks and particularly kind of how it looks to other people like it's almost like you're well at least this feels weird to describe it this way but it's how I've kind of explained it for a while it's like if you're a little video game character like when you make an avatar of yourself right like and you customize like that's what kind of self-objectification is you're looking at yourself as kind of from an external point of view um and then when we think about sexualization sexualization is more of like you know treating somebody or viewing somebody as more of a sex object or so objectification can be viewing them just specifically as like an object or as like you know viewing yourself from an external perspective sexualization is specifically focused on somebody as like a sex object or reducing them down to their sexual components um and when I first like started thinking about my dissertation that was really all that there was in terms of poll research was like is pole dance we sexualizing like and is that harmful for women and you know like kind of thinking about the male gaze and like that being harmful for women and that is uh g-a-z-e for those of you who are not familiar yes yes that's a very important distinction um but like and and it kind of being I think a lot of the discourse was like this is an activity that women do that's packaged for men something that I didn't really feel like was the frame of mind that most people I knew were going into it with definitely in the recreational space for sure yes if you are you know if you are a professional stripper then I think the the conversation is a little bit different but um even if you are a stripper right if you're going to pull class that's a different environment and you're approaches really different exactly yeah yeah and we talked a little bit about this um was it the most recent episode was it two episodes ago anyway there's an episode where we talked with a uh a sex therapist and um she talked about that sort of like observing from you know a third-party perspective and how that can be really harmful for you just like having a nice time and enjoying yourself doing sex yeah no I mean that's like one of the you know biggest things that I think like I'm not a sex therapist but I did teach human sexuality for a while and that was like one of the the commonalities when we talk about why people go to Sex Therapy it's like well it's because they're not able to be in the moment and it's detracting so much from that intrinsic like experience and I feel like for a lot of people and maybe women in particular sometimes we do get taken out of the Moment by realizing either somebody's looking at us right and evaluating US based on how we look like objectifying us or sexual or sexualizing us depending on the context or you know you're doing something and you catch yourself thinking about the way you look and it can really you know detract from the positive experience you're having and it was just really interesting within my dissertation to see people you know be like yeah first I was really uncomfortable you know or like At first I went to class and I was in uh workout leggings and a T-shirt and then it was shorts and a t-shirt and then it was pool shorts and a bra like you know you just see I think this growth and pull with your confidence and also with your ability to kind of shut that part of your brain off and really focus on how you're feeling how you're moving and like the intrinsic kind of value of the physical activity and the movement itself yeah definitely and that's something that I have very much noticed a sort of a growth curve a lot of dancers who've been doing it for a while um particularly if they I shouldn't say this I think that there is much more room for that in poll than there are in for example a lot of commercial dance disciplines where the focus is again commercially because that's what you're selling how you look very much and in a very capitalism in a very extractive way right where I don't care if you feel good if you can hit all these beats and fit in this costume yeah no it's I think pull more so than other types of dance is very individualized like there is really something for everybody like you don't have to you know and a lot of my participants said this too like I always wanted to dance but I didn't get started early enough and or I wanted to do gymnastics but like you know or I was a gymnast but like you can't there's no adult gymnast classes and like this is such an entry point for so many types of different people to come together and find their the things that they like find their strengths and really just be able to cultivate god um and that was like that's I mean a consistent theme throughout my research is I think pole dance really kind of meets like our psychological need for like competency and for growth right you are setting goals for yourself you are reaching them or reevaluating them and like you can keep moving like this is not something you can always progress in some way shape or form and I think for a lot of people being able to do that and being able to do that when surrounded by people who really are rooting for you just makes such a difference in their mental health and their well-being yeah definitely um and also just I mean we are getting off topic now but also having a third space whether it's physical or digital um of faith that does not work and not home to interact with people and uh just have a nice time yeah right um so you mentioned uh gender and I know your most recent paper is on specifically Min hoopo and it was you and a co-author whose name is Trenton Holcomb um I did not write it in my notes my bad and I will I'll link the um uh the sociology Compass Link in the show notes but if you are not a member of a library that has a subscription unfortunately it is closed access but so we've been talking a lot about um specifically the experience of women in poll um and I think we're just going to sort of not focus as much today on you know nine non-binary gender non-conforming you know gender fluid other folks and that sort of not as rigid category because I think most of your search has been on CIS folks um but do you want to talk a little bit about Min and Pull and your findings and just sort of some patterns that that came out of your research yeah absolutely so I will give you a little bit of a background on how this project started so Trenton Haltom is the co-author on the paper and he's um in sociology and on psychology I was on Twitter and Trenton had published a paper on a male baton twirler so men who did the time traveling and I was like this is really interesting I've kind of been wanting to do a study on men who pole dance like I reached out and then ended up being like a really kind of Perfect Blend of both of our interests he kind of focuses more on like the sociology of gender and Sport and then I'm a little bit more on the psychology side but our new paper is called um a poll New World maneuvering masculinity and sexuality among men who pole dance so we love a good pun um but really kind of like a lot of the research that we had kind of faced this off of is that like men who enter women dominated spaces or spaces traditionally dominated by women right tend to kind of very strategically navigate those environments in ways that where they're kind of like it's kind of like a push in a pull like they're bringing some things in that they think are beneficial from these spaces but also distancing themselves from certain aspects of the spaces that might be more like stigmatized for a man right traditionally more feminine aspects of their environment so we kind of just wanted to explore like how do why do men engage in this space what draws them into this space What are what essentially how do they navigate it once they're there um and so this paper that was just published is kind of like just some preliminary findings we're not done yet we're still recruiting so if anybody's listening to this and thinking oh my goodness I would love to talk about my experiences as a man who pull dances absolutely and while most of our participants have been CIS like we're just if you identify as a man you are welcome to participate um as long as you're over 18 years old so really there were kind of do you want me to jump into what we found yeah absolutely um if you're interested in being a participant maybe pause and like talk to Kelly first and then come back and listen to the rest of this pause and then come back exactly so we don't bias um you too much but um so we kind of really broke down so we did semi-structured interviews just again exploring like why they got it started and pull how they got started in poll why they keep coming back to it and how they navigate the space and particularly kind of like any potential gender differences or ways they thought like the expectations for pole dancers were different for men and women um and so there were kind of like three broad findings the first was that men made like really strategic disclosures about their pole dance participation um and a lot of that was grounded in their belief that other people kind of stigmatize the activity which I don't think is surprising to anyone but particularly for men they reported um which I didn't see with with when I did my dissertation with women was that it was considered something that only gay men did the straight men straight men didn't pull Downs um but then we also saw kind of stereotyped or stigmatizes uh being connected to sex work and also being something that women did and it was like hypersexual so most of our participants kind of approached the topic with caution um they might have like for example called it Pole Fitness instead of pole dancing or started off by telling people who are more who they thought would be more accepting and not disclosing to people who might have a particularly negative reaction so lots of telling friends but not family um participants who were in traditionally very masculine jobs or jobs kind of dominated by men they typically have the strongest reaction or I'm just like yeah strongest reaction to disclosing um and that they wouldn't disclose it to their colleagues because they you know if you know their belief was that if their co-workers found out they did this their jobs would be made harder because they would get made fun of um and particularly a lot of that being make fun of was grounded in like misogyny and homophobia of like they're gonna think I'm gay and then the gay jokes start and then I can't do my job anymore um so so they were very careful some people went as far as like making fake social media profiles so that their co-workers didn't find them to to Really distance themselves um from from the activity so which I thought was really interesting um and there was a difference between our participants who self-identified as straight and gay and are gay are gay men really reported um kind of having less hesitation for disclosing because a lot of them already had some of those stigma management strategies ready like they've you know maybe come out and they're like well I know how to field these questions or I know how to field these assumptions and like talk about them or like you know whatever it is um whereas a lot of the straight participants because I mean they had like more of that masculine status they were more kind of grounded in traditional masculine kind of culture and norms they had more to lose right by their friends making fun of them or the stigma attached to the activity so that was like the first big finding um the second one was how they talked about pole dancing once they did disclose it or how they framed their participation um and you really kind of again for a lot of the participants distinguished between what is expected of women and what is expected of men um men were expected to be strong and powerful and explosive they were not expected to be good dancers we had a lot of participants who were like I ordered my toes and they were like you know shocked and um and how women were expected to be very flexible to not have as much upper body strengths and to be more like dance oriented and so when they talked about their participation it was still kind of grounded in like stereotypes about and like gender essentialism of how men and women's bodies are very different and inherently different and even the movements are different um and they tended to really emphasize like their participation as being like more competitive or more Sports based things that kind of again with that like push and pull analogy brought it more back into the sports world than like the Dance World um I would say and that wasn't true for all participants again a lot of like our um participants who were gay men were like no I danced and I'm gonna you know be fluid in my movements I'm a trained dancer or I'm this and like I'm going to bring that out that was often surprising to a lot of people um because they don't expect that from a man um kind of again bringing those stereotypes in and then finally the last kind of big finding we found um was that men were very self-aware of their presence in these spaces um they were very aware that they were potentially stepping into like a safe space a woman's safe space and they were very mindful about how they presented themselves in that space because they didn't want to come off as creepy was the work that they use um they didn't want to come off as creepy and they didn't want to discourage people from being in that space they didn't want to discourage women from being in that space and different men had different you know ways in which they they enacted that but that was the General takeaway um and we also found that men learned a lot from being in these spaces they you know I don't want to say became more open-minded because I don't think that's the right way to freeze it but they again kind of with that push and pull analogy they brought in knowledge about particularly women's experiences um and I think like one worth highlighting was we had a participant who Community was really positive Community was really supportive they you know did things outside of the studio they were friends on Facebook outside of the studio um and somebody had posted a woman had posted about an incident of harassment and like he felt because they had cultivated this good relationship comfortable asking her like what do I do if I see that happening to a woman what should I you know like he was open to learning about those experiences and you know trying to approach it in a way where he wanted to learn more about what he could do and what he can you know offer or um kind of help with I guess so that was kind of the last core finding and then we also taught we heard a little bit about kind of like the big the men refer to it as gatekeeping but like Studios who didn't allow men um and what that felt like for them which is kind of a different was a different experience I would say than a lot of them have previously had um and so they did talk about like how that made them feel and the ways in which they want to see more men in pole and bring more men into pull and see it grow um and they they ultimately viewed it as like something that had a really positive impact on their life in a multitude of ways yeah I think that's uh a really a really rich tapestry of uh of people's different experiences yeah I was just taking notes for things that like really uh popped out at me so the thing I noticed and I don't think this is at all uh restricted to you know particular genders but I definitely noticed that there is a strong I have noticed that when folks really want to distance themselves from sex workers um which I think if that is a goal for you maybe pole dance isn't for you they really do focus more on the the fitness aspects uh and it it's interesting to see that pattern like specifically um with men and I don't know to what degree this is necessarily all conscious on on each individual's behalf or individual's part um but yeah I think that is part of a definitely a larger a larger Trend I'm thinking particularly of like the uh um you know the folks who are trying to get poll in the Olympics and they do not want to hear from strippers they are not interested in maybe that's just mine I mean I hope so because it really is like I mean I'm definitely of the perspective of like that's where poll originated if you are not going to be supportive and open to that then I think you should choose different activity interestingly I guess to kind of maybe draw a dichotomy like the men did distance themselves the women in my dissertation really talked about how pole dancing helped them like I want to again not become more open-minded to sex work but like view it more like reduce the stigma they had initially associated with it a lot of them were like oh I realized that like I was really insecure and like now that I feel better about myself I like don't you know I'm very like supportive of sex work and I was like that's a really kind of powerful and I don't again know if that's because that was qualitative how representative that is I think it really depends on the studios you're at but I thought was really important because there is kind of you know a lot of discourse about sex work recreational whole and like the way in which those communities interact and engage yeah definitely and I I mean I think it's obviously people who like follow me on Instagram or know me personally but I am uh strongly in support of um particular course having the best time they can in life in general that's my it's my desire probably yeah also something else that you mentioned that came up is that like bio essentialism that like this is one of my least favorite things personal trainer hat um is the idea that women are if you have a lot of estrogen you are more flexible that is not the case there is a flexibility advantage in one place and it just the lower back and it is related to the presence of relaxin and what relaxin does is it loosens your joints not your muscles um so so interesting yes um so if folks tell you that like oh you know I'm a CIS man I cannot be flexible there there is no Advantage there um to we never tried you know what I mean because it's not some and that's what really gets me is like people will say oh I'm not flexible well how much time have you spent you just had this idea and it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy right like yes anybody anybody who is medically cleared for it can train flexibility and gain flexibility and um you know your hormone cocktail will have a small amount of effect but it's mostly going to be on the joints and not on muscular stability so so interesting and it is it is frustrating to me when that uh comes up because I think it also you know frankly uh devalues the efforts of people who are doing flexibility training who aren't CIS men uh and I think that that is unfair yeah absolutely I agree uh also I am again just as a person not a huge fan of Bio essentialism uh genetics is not Destiny and a lot of the effects are I think a lot subtler and a lot smaller than people give them credit for I think many people could do with more rigorous education on effect size just like understand that even if there is a very reliable effect if the effect size is small in your day-to-day life it's just not going to matter that much it's not practical yeah it's not going to impact you and I think too like the research a lot of research just traditionally has been on like white CIS men and they're the ones who are doing the research into like we might not even be asking the right questions right the appropriate the questions that are going to open us up to possibilities outside of what we think is true what we know is you know what we think is true yeah and even like broadening it out further right lot of the research I'm sure folks are I'm sure you are folks may also be familiar with weird which is a problem in Psychology where most of the research has been done on see if I can get them all Western industrialized educated rich and then D is Democratic Democratic that's right but this was on my qualifying exam so I'm like I can tell you all about this with only a little bit of trauma thoughts um but exactly like we are not like oh God what's this statistic it's like 96 of all psychology research is done on 12 of the population come on like you know that's just not if you're talking about reliable and valid like we're supposed to be a science of human behavior 12 does not right equivalent to the whole human population so yes right I think that's my PSA I think it's really important to keep in mind um and I'm not saying right like I I have a research doctorate like clearly I think that uh research can be a very helpful useful and valid way to help us you know reduce our uncertainty about the world is how I prefer to talk think about it yeah but just because we have reduced our uncertainty about some people does not mean that we have you know reduced uncertainty about everybody and I think you know this this recent study um is a really good example of sort of a population that's I mean a pole dancers are really not studied in great depth um unfortunately and I think that most of the studies that have been done have been primarily on CIS women uh yeah so I think it's it's important to really dig into other folks and other experiences as well yeah absolutely because then in those bigger studies you know what to focus on you know just as we plan to do more research so sometimes like right these are all stepping stones and like like you said it's about reducing uncertainty and like looking at patterns one study is part of a bigger tapestry a bigger story that we're hoping to tell yeah definitely and that's I think that can be something that can be frustrating if you are someone who's trying to engage with the body of research for the first time is that um nothing exists in a vacuum it's all part of this large web and you sort of have to like Scuttle around the web and like sample a bunch of different things and be like okay given all this this seems reasonable um but it's a skill but it's a skill yeah and it's being critical and like you know a lot of um the sexualization research like you know hindsight's 2020 when I think about most things but like in my dissertation we used a measurement of like enjoyment of sexualization so how much people enjoyed being sexualized and you know engaging in sexualizing experiences but that research was all Norms on um you know women who were romantically and sexually attracted to men and so when I did my dissertation I was like oh none of this really applies to like my sample because my sample was largely non-heterosexual women and so it was like well they don't care you know it just is not transferable but when you're looking at research right like those are the types of things you want to pay attention to and be critical of so yeah definitely I think that's a a great point of the you know the whole being um underrepresented in research spaces yes but it was so cool to see like just so many queer like this my sample was largely queer and it was just like so exciting to me I was like this is great like because you're right they don't get and especially like you don't hear those stories talked about positively a lot of the time so to get to talk about these women and these queer women who are like I feel great about my body I'm so happy and I was like yeah hell yeah that's great like that makes me feel really good too to get to tell that story yeah I have a lot of thoughts on the pathologization of queer experiences overall and um yeah I think that those can go into other podcasts um but uh this has been really wonderful talking with you and I do want to make sure you have some chance at the end um to let people know you know if they wanted to keep up on your research if uh you know they wanted to be a participant um particularly if you know any of you all who are men who want to be involved in the study um how can folks keep in touch with you I'm not pulling my Instagram um so first you can if you're interested in participating in the study or just interested in like future studies you can email me at kugalo c u c c o l o k m gmail.com and I can put you on like a little uh mailing list that we have for when we do new studies or you can follow me on Instagram and my handle is kokolo [Music] c-u-c-c-o-l-o underscore lab that's just a lot of psychology and also cast so what's up yeah some pole dancing sprinkled in as well so all right well this has been a wonderful conversation I hope everyone listening has learned a lot uh thank you so much for joining me everybody listening thank you so much for joining me uh Dr Google and I will talk to you later thanks so much for joining me today pole dancer this podcast is a production of slink through strength the inclusive evidence-based online poll studio so if you're looking for a place to train either off pull conditioning and flexibility or learning pool tricks and refining your poll movement you can find us online at slinkthroughstrength.com
