I Taught Pole Dance for Six Years Before I Owned a Vibrator
“You talk about this all the time. Why don't you just do it already?” My friend had a good point. I had been watching pole dance videos on YouTube, feeling in awe of the graceful strength of the performers, and apparently, I couldn't shut up about it. In particular, I couldn't stop re-playing a video of Felix Cane, the winner of Miss Pole Dance Australia in 2006 who performed to a slow song about the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.
After her win, Felix Cane was famously invited by Cirque Du Soleil to give a solo performance within Zumanity and a Cirque tribute show in Las Vegas. She was a legend in the early days when pole was becoming mainstream as something you could do as a fitness class, not just for strippers. A quick Google of her history brings up blogs about others having gotten into pole after watching YouTube videos of her work as well.
That's how it began for me. With a background in ballet, a love for dance, and a desire to try out every dance form I could, I had to try this beautiful, graceful art that I had been ogling over. So I looked up classes, found one small studio in my hometown, and went to a class.
Although I worked out exactly zero times as an 18 year old, my youthful stamina allowed me to learn and advance quickly. Within approximately three classes, the studio asked me if I would teach. I absolutely did not feel qualified for this, but I said yes anyway.
This was one of the first big plot twists in my life.
From purity ring to pole teacher
Up until that point, I had been a shy, awkward homeschooled kid from a big conservative, religious family. At age 18, I had never had a boyfriend (who is there to date when you are home schooled?), and I had been wearing a purity ring for at least a couple of years leading up to this pole dancing chapter.
Looking back it seems like an enormous leap to go from purity ring to pole dance teacher, but somehow it didn't seem like that big of a deal at the time. I wasn't going to be a stripper after all. I was just going to try out this strong, graceful dance form because I loved dance. Knowing that a lot of ballerinas went into pole dance gave me a respectable line of thinking to rationalize this with.
So there I was, an 18 year old teaching women how to move their bodies sensually.
Teaching women to perform
The studio was very informal about training, it was the early days of mainstream pole as fitness classes after all. So, the homeschool kid that I was, put my self-study skills to good use and researched, found my own resources to learn, and very quickly I was able to offer these newfound skills in class alongside pole tricks and spins.
Women came to these classes usually for one reason. To learn how they could perform for their partner and spice up their date nights.
I loved working with women to feel more powerful in their bodies and more confident in their expression. I'd watch women walk in timid, with closed body language, and emerge from the class with a wide smile, a bright bubbly energy, and an excitement about their new collection of sensual moves.
One woman was so delighted with what she'd learned and how well it went over when she brought it back to her partner, that she returned to class gifting me with wool leg warmers and hand lotions. I'm not sure those particular items had significance, but I felt the genuine appreciation behind them.
I continued teaching for about six years, including teaching private home bachelorette parties, working on my own through referrals after leaving the studio, getting literally all of my friends, sisters, and brothers, into the sport of pole.
But something was starting to feel uncomfortable for me.
The moment I felt the gap
One experience illuminates what was going on. I had a student who had a different reason for coming to class than the usual, “I want to learn some sexy moves for date night” reason. She was about to try out to be a stripper and was working on building skills for that. She asked for my advice on what to wear to her audition. I had never been to a strip club so I really had no advice to offer her. To me stripping and pole dance were quite separate things. I'm there for the statuesque, ballet-adjacent, graceful strength reasons, right?
But the connection to stripping was not what was uncomfortable to me about this.
What I was starting to recognize was that I was teaching women how to perform sensuality, while I was still figuring out what that even meant for me. I knew how to look sensual. I knew how to make flirty eye contact, how to arch my back and puff out my chest and wear a sexy little outfit. But by this time I had been dating, and my intimate experiences were not sending me into orgasmic bliss.
My own intimacy followed a script
My sexual experiences at the time typically followed a predictable pattern: a few minutes, if that, of foreplay, and then intercourse. I learned to read my partner's cues and fake it, with some well-timed sounds or extra dramatic arches of the back right as things were scaling up. My partner would come, and we'd go on with our days. It never felt as satisfying or romantic as I'd always heard sex was supposed to be. But I continued on with it anyway, because this is what couples do. Maybe eventually something would change?
On some level, I could feel that I was performing there too.
Growing up in a household where sex wasn't discussed, I was trying to figure everything out on my own. I wouldn't talk to anyone about sex, because I didn't have a language for it. I didn't know how to bring up what I was experiencing and was too shy about the topic to discuss it with anyone.
Pole dance seemed like as good a place as any to embody my sensuality. Fake it til you make it, right? But over time, I realized that performing sensuality in a dance studio, and feeling connected to your pleasure in the bedroom, were two very different things.
Leaving pole, and ten years of discovery
Eventually, I left pole. In part because it wasn't fitting my lifestyle anymore, but also because I was beginning to feel like an imposter. Who was I to guide women in sensuality when I was privately feeling like something was wrong with me? Was my body broken? Why wasn't I having the satisfying sexual experiences I saw on TV or heard other women talking about.
Over the next ten years, I was on a journey of discovery.
Instead of watching DVDs to learn how to give a strip tease, I started reading books, listening to podcasts, taking workshops to understand my own body and pleasure. I experimented with vibrators.
That's right. I taught pole for six years before ever buying a vibrator.
It wasn't until my mid-twenties that I finally explored self-pleasure and had my first orgasm, with a vibrator.
This illuminates something that I think is so deeply ingrained in our culture. Just like the women who came to my class to learn how to perform on their date nights, I invested years in training and teaching sensual performance before ever considering that my own pleasure had a place too. That my own pleasure should be prioritized and explored.
Pleasure as a lifelong practice
Now, ten years later, with a whole lot of learning about pleasure, sex, and orgasm under my belt, I see things so differently. I see pleasure as a practice just like pole.
I'm often asked when my sexual awakening took place, and the reality is that it's like an onion, with new layers that get peeled back over time as I move deeper and deeper into a practice of relating honestly and curiously with my body.
One awakening was at age 18, when I let go of my purity ring and stepped up to a dance pole, claiming sensual expression as something I could participate in, even if I hadn't connected to my own sensuality yet.
Another awakening was in my mid-twenties, when I had my first solo session and tried out a vibrator, realizing that women, too, could experience orgasm.
And another layer unfolded in my early thirties, when I set aside the vibrator and the goal of orgasm, in favor of learning the language of my body.
I had started to realize that I still wasn't experiencing orgasmic bliss in my partnered intimacy. I couldn't figure out how to translate my experience with a vibrator to my experience with a partner. So I committed to a slow, mindful pleasure practice. It was through that consistency and attention to my own experience that so much opened up.
The night of the ear and neck orgasm
There was one evening in particular that stands out to me. It was several hours into an intimate session with a partner I felt very emotionally connected to. There was an ongoing flow of rising momentum and settling into cuddles and back up again. So much pleasure was built up in my body that eventually the smallest, laziest movements of my partner's hands on my ears or neck would send me into orgasm. Ear and neck orgasms. My younger self could never have imagined this.
And I know there's still more my body hasn't yet discovered. To me, pleasure is a lifelong pursuit. The more you learn your own body and prioritize time for experiencing it, the more embodied, powerful, and confident your sensual expression becomes.
What I guide women on now
This is what I now guide women on. Not performing their sensuality, but actually feeling it. For themselves first, and for their partner, if they wish.
If this got you curious, I'd love to go deeper with you. My free intro lesson, on the truth about arousal and orgasm that no one teaches you, is the first step inside my course, Pleasure Ed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you teach something before you've fully experienced it yourself?
Yes, and it's more common than people admit. Delaney taught pole dance, and the performance of sensuality that came with it, for six years before she had her first orgasm. Skill and embodiment are two different things, and one can precede the other by a long time.
What does it mean to “perform” pleasure instead of feeling it?
Performing pleasure means reading a partner's cues and acting satisfied to bring an encounter to a close, rather than staying connected to your own sensation. It's a learned survival skill, not a character flaw, but it keeps you disconnected from your own body over time.
What is a self-pleasure or embodiment practice?
It's a consistent, unhurried practice of learning your own body's arousal and response, independent of a partner, so you have real data about what you actually need rather than guessing.
What is Pleasure Ed?
Pleasure Ed is Delaney Matthews's online course on women's arousal and orgasm, built for women who want to understand their own bodies instead of continuing to perform satisfaction they don't feel.
