Bonus Sample: Leaving S-Factor pt. 2 (w/Jessica Hopper)
Those who fly high, fall hard. Pole dance company S-Factor crashed and burned in 2021 amidst a stack of complaints. Detractors said the company was conducting unlicensed group therapy, cosplaying enlightenment by co-opting the labour of sex workers, and whitewashing issues of racial equality.Created by former actor Sheila Kelley, S-Factor monetized pole dancing as a path of feminist and spiritual awakening.In Part 2 of this Listener Story, Matthew speaks to Jessica Hopper about her 13 years learning and teaching in the now-defunct company. Hopper paints a picture of a confusing, high-demand group, and tells us how she made her way out.
NOTE: During our discussion, Jessica recounts a tense all-hands S-factor staff meeting to discuss PR strategy at a crucial moment as the company cracked-up over issues of white fragility. I wasn't able to secure a recording of that call before my interview with Jessica, or since. But after we recorded, I did confirm what Jessica reports about it with 3 of the other participants on that call. MRShow NotesStripped Down: The Undoing of Hollywood's Favorite Pole-Dancing Studio —Hollywood Reporter."Strip Down, Rise Up" | Official Trailer | NetflixFaces of Fierce Femininity—online conference organized by Kelly BroganVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema—Laura Mulvey, 1975
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Jessica, I think I'm going to cut it here because we're just both squirming.
So what's going on is that these students in the documentary, who we are now identifying with because we know a little bit of their stories, are being given intrusive eye contact and kind of Hugs and knowing gazes by just random guys that have been invited into the studio to watch them come in doing the s-factor walk.
Most of them and there's a lot of tears.
There's a lot of What seems to be integration and reconciliation, but it's very abstract because it's set up as, you know, I've brought masculine energy into the room and there are three dudes.
They're just guys sitting on fucking chairs.
They're just guys.
They look like they're kind of, you know, new agey nice and they're probably polite, but Then you dig a little bit deeper and you find out that they're kind of, at least one of them is a Manosphere type who is, you know, cooking up bone broth and, you know, wondering about, you know, whether or not everybody's turning into a soy boy and whatever.
And he's doing, he does private security or whatever.
But like, so there's also this intersection with kind of men's movement stuff.
Yeah.
But it's very abstract.
And so there's one, and actually there's one very moving and awkward moment in which one of the subjects, who we understand has been a survivor of Larry Nassar, Who actually has been able to go to court and give her impact statement, which is an incredible thing.
And now she is in this program, and you realize that Sheila is now the conduit for presenting her with a safe masculine figure in this abstract sense who can somehow heal something.
And it's a very strange ritual moment.
Like, what do you make of that?
And did that happen when you were around?
It is so far out of bounds of anything I had ever seen before, anything I have seen since, and it actually did happen once.
So one of the things we haven't talked about is somewhere around 2015, 2016, Sheila decided that she was going to take five teachers under her wing and train them up to do media appearances in the event that, say, Sheila was already engaged and someone wanted to interview someone about S Factor.
There was an application process.
I applied.
I was rejected.
She ended up taking ten people, not five, because she just had to have them.
So she created two tiers.
An apprentice was the higher tier and a protege was the lower tier.
And each protege was assigned to an apprentice.
And in their development workshops, one of the things she did was bring in some of these same guys to sort of present them with that.
All I knew when it happened at a workshop that I was in as just a teacher not participating in this secret C-Org organization.
My husband and I literally used to call it S-Org.
All the abuse for half the pay.
Was I walked into this, now I had been told that they were going to be there, but I walked into this, what was supposed to be just a class for teachers taught by Sheila.
And there were these four dudes sitting in the big cushy armchairs.
And I froze and I was paired in a group.
We were sort of dancing, you know, four at a time, one of us in front of each of these chairs with these guys sitting in it.
And Sheila, for my group, put on the song Closer by Nine Inch Nails.
I want to fuck you like an animal.
Oh God.
And I sat there just in terms of my own personality and style.
I didn't dance to that song when I was happy alone by myself in the studio.
It's much too of a provocative song for me.
You know, kind of love the song but not to dance to.
Right.
And I just basically froze and just kind of sat still on the floor and tried to move a little bit because my boss was watching.
The idea that she would spring something like that on brand new students who had been doing this movement for less than six months is a level of horrifying that I can't even find the words to articulate.
I mean, I had been at the company for over 10 years as an employee by the time that she threw it at me and I froze.
I can tell you from having talked to students who were in the room that day that even though it is presented in the film as this cathartic moment that, you know, it was just what these women needed and at the end everyone hugged, actually when they were told that this exercise was taking place, a lot of the students chose not to show up that day because they just did not want to be confronted by that.
And a lot of people in the room, I am told, were horrifically uncomfortable.
I honestly don't know how Michelle shot around what I'm told was actually taking place in the room.
But it was not as universally well-received.
And again, having someone talk about how she never got to come out to her dad, which is one of the bits of the clip that I think you mercifully cut short.
In what context is this appropriate?
It doesn't look anything like any pole class I've taken in any other studio, and I've taken a lot of classes in a lot of other studios now.
It doesn't look anything like any kind of dance class I have done.
It doesn't even look like any kind of therapy I have done.
And at least when I am speaking with a therapist, it's because I chose to go to a therapist and talk about things that I would like to process and work through, not because I thought, gee, that looks fun.
I might want to learn to do that acrobatic thing over there.
It horrifies me on a level that I have a visceral response to it.
It makes me so angry.
It makes me so angry.
It feels like there's a betrayal of purpose that you bought into one thing and you were actually sold another.
I can understand being angry about it and also like being angry about just the intrusiveness and the presumption and the overreach because it's a lot.
It's a lot for Somebody who positions themselves as a dance instructor to begin to infiltrate so many aspects of their clients' lives.
Yeah, it felt very bait-and-switch.
It felt like something that no one had signed up for and as somebody who, you know, as we've talked about already, very much harps on transforming this dance form into something that is for the female gaze to then bring it in and expose it, spur of the moment surprise, to the male gaze just feels like something that you couldn't possibly be prepared for that was only going to result in provoking extreme reactions.
Right.
Okay.
Let's turn to the politics of the organization.
One of the things that I noticed in the film was that there was a real powerful mobilization of Me Too energy with a lot of the subjects describing P.O.L.E.
as a kind of gateway to recovering from abuse.
So was that consistent with your experience and did that play out all the way through your tenure?
