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 this 2-part 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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Welcome everybody to this edition of Conspirituality Podcast Listener Stories.
My name is Matthew.
This is the second in what's going to be an ongoing series in which we'll discuss your entanglements with conspirituality and cults, how you got into them, how you managed the difficult things, but also unexpected things that happened along the way.
And also, very importantly, how you pulled yourself out, how you recovered.
And today, I'm very happy to be joined by Jessica Hopper from Los Angeles.
Hello, Jessica.
Hi, Matthew.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah.
And, you know, I want to say that, like, this is just not an easy subject.
Today, you know, you have your own rich experience with S-Factor as an organization and everything that you went through with it.
And as a cult survivor and somebody who researches cults, I'm fairly familiar with a number of the red flags that you raise and that you've raised in our conversations before this.
But there's also like a gendered and political dimension to this story that I feel is a little bit above my pay grade, and so I'm going to do my best with it, but I just want to acknowledge that it's complex territory.
Maybe for you too, I don't know.
It is.
It's complex.
You know, I also approach it from, you know, having been through the experience with certainly my own privilege that was pointed out more and more as the company careened toward its spectacular explosion.
But yeah, I think I can speak to it at least from my own perspective with some sensitivity and insight.
Cool.
Well, we're going to be talking about several versions of you today, but why don't we just start with the present you?
How are things going?
What are you up to?
What's going on?
Things are pretty good.
So I live in Los Angeles with my family, my husband and my son and my dog.
I have to mention my dog.
I am still pole dancing, teaching, choreographing.
I do that under my own name now.
I got a business license.
I've also been just been hired by a new studio in Pasadena, which is about 15 minutes away.
And I'm just sort of, you know, Constantly trying to rebuild the community that I lost when I severed my connections with S Factor.
I'm also an actress, I'm still getting out about that.
My husband and I have written a project loosely based on my experiences in the group and his experiences telling me to quit every day for 12 years.
So, you know, we're trying to make the proverbial lemonade, I suppose, would be the best way to describe it.
Well, we can get right to it then, to the lemons part.
We were talking because you wanted to share the story of what it was like to be in the upper echelons of S Factor, and You've mentioned pole dancing already, but S-Factor is really a very prominent pole arts dance discipline organization founded by the former Hollywood actor Sheila Kelly.
And it crashed, as you alluded to, really at the height of its popularity just a few years ago.
And there's a really good investigative piece that was published in June of 2021 about S-Factor in the Hollywood Reporter and it's by Gary
Baum, Katie Kilkenny, and Rebecca Sun. We're going to link to it, but I'm going to open by
just reading the opening. And I just want to mention too that you were an on-record source
for this report. Okay, so it's called Stripped Down the Undoing of Hollywood's
Favorite Pole Dancing Studio. Nadia Mitri says it was her experience on the dance floor in a Hawaii
hotel ballroom with a veteran Hollywood actress that led to the darkest interlude of her
life.
In 2015, at a wellness retreat in Kona, Mitri danced to Damian Rice's Cheers, Darling for Sheila Kelly, a self-styled feminine embodiment leader who has acted in L.A.
Law, Gossip Girl, and Lost, and in 2001 opened the pole dancing fitness studio S-Factor.
A hundred women who, like Mitri, had paid several thousand dollars to spend five days under Kelly's guidance watched the pair.
By Mitri's account, Kelly's direction, which could be reckless when dealing with emotionally and otherwise exposed individuals like herself—Mitri declined to disclose the trauma she was processing in Hawaii—ended with her crying on the ballroom floor in her underwear.
But the humiliation she felt then was far from her low point.
Shortly afterward, she felt manic, and two nights later, she says, she began hallucinating.
This continued as she flew home to L.A., and her husband checked her into a psychiatric hospital for three days.
I could have died or hurt someone else, she says.
They don't place a hold on you unless they believe you could harm someone or yourself.
Mitri calls what happened in Kona a shattering.
This is a Kelly-coined term for an S-factor technique that some liken to flooding, a behavioral therapy method in which clients or patients are exposed to painful memories with the intent of better processing their pasts.
Kelly insists that shattering is physiological work, not emotional, specifically when chronic muscular contractions in your body have let go, although she acknowledges that it, quote, may be accompanied by an emotional release such as tears, laughter, surprise, unquote.
Former S Factor teachers say that if too few shatterings occur at retreats, Kelly may induce them in attendees, referencing private information about their vulnerabilities.
A history of divorce, a miscarriage, a private medical condition.
Kelly disputes this.
That is not accurate, she says.
Quote, I help the women that want to access their full potential of movement.
I just help them try and get there.
Unquote.
So many thoughts.
Yeah, and a parade, a Macy's Day parade of red flags, especially accumulating through that last paragraph.
So that's a little bit of the landscape.
Where were you in your life just before you ran into Kelly and S Factor?
I was in Los Angeles.
I was a struggling novice actor.
I had been lucky enough to get a day job in a commercial casting office.
It wasn't actually one specific office.
I freelanced.
I kind of bounced around amongst a group of offices, depending on who needed an extra pair of hands that day.
And I had done that for about seven, eight years.
I was really good at it.
I was always the lowest person on the totem pole in an industry where shit rolls downhill.
Right.
And I found myself as casting offices got busy being told on the regular, we're too busy for you to leave and go on your own audition today.
So I was there facilitating other people to accomplish what was my dream while being told, while you're doing this, you are not allowed to go pursue work that would actually come to you as an actress.
So I was fucking miserable.
Yeah.
I felt, you know, trapped.
I didn't know what else to do for money in terms of a job that would fit around my acting auditions, which was the idea when I started doing it.
Didn't turn out to be the case.
So, yeah, I was definitely in a place where I was really low.
Were you also away from home or did you grow up in California?
I am originally from California.
I grew up the first half of my life in the Bay Area, second half after my parents divorced down in San Diego.
Right.
Started college at UCLA and pretty much after I think two terms I started modeling while I was in high school.
I was tall and underweight.
It was a pretty good way to make money.
Got the opportunity to start traveling to other countries, which was honestly the main appeal of modeling for me.
I just always wanted to travel.
And so I eventually, after about two years, I left college because the opportunities to travel, it was like, well, you can either enroll in a new semester or you can go to Australia.
And I said, I'll go get my bag.
And I did that for a long time.
I spent about a year total in Japan, half a year in Australia, New Zealand.
I moved to Italy for four years.
And then probably stayed in Italy for so long because I got into a relationship with With an Italian man who worked in a business where he split his time between Milan and Los Angeles.
I would travel with him.
I had agents in both places.
And we were here when we broke up.
So this is where you landed?
That's how I ended up back in LA.
I was here when we broke up.
And what's the 101 on Sheila Kelly?
I would describe her as a, you know, very minor actress married to a much more high profile actor.
Her origin story for S Factor is that she got cast in a movie where she was going to play an exotic dancer and she had to learn the movements so she went to a strip club in Hollywood to get some of the dancers to teach her how to do the moves and then all her friends thought it was cool and wanted her to teach them and that was how she started teaching.
I find that story the tiniest bit suspect because unless there are two projects, and I haven't ever heard of there being two projects, the movie that she cites where she plays the stripper is Dancing with the Blue Iguana.
She's a producer on that project.
Okay.
So the idea that she was suddenly just cast in something sounds a little bit Like maybe there was more calculation behind it than that?
So but that the origin story is a Hollywood story.
I had to learn this thing.
But then as she learned it that that's very meaningful to her as well because the origin story also involves like this opened me up or this made me gave me a sense of empowerment that I'd never had or it gave me a sense of control over my body and my agency.
I was feeling sexy again after the birth of my second child.
Her story, not mine.
Yeah.
So all of that.
And you know, when I would pick up my child from school, all the other moms in the carpool line noticed I was glowing and they wanted me to teach them.
That was the terms that I learned that story in.
Now, there is a Puff-type film on Netflix about S Factor and Sheila Kelly.
It's called Strip Down and Rise Up.
And the director was Michelle Ohayon, I think you'd pronounce it?
I believe that's how you pronounce it.
Yeah, she had a breakout Academy Award-nominated film in 1997 called Colors Straight Up about a non-profit that brings theatre to inner-city youth.
And she brings that same sort of like, you know, coming of age and coming out of oneself and overcoming adversity theme to Strip Down, Rise Up.
And I've got a little clip parade here for us to listen to and for you to respond to.
And I say, I say puff film because, you know, I don't know if Sheila Kelly and Ohayon are best friends, but it was clear that Ohayon wanted to platform Kelly in her own words.
And I get the sense that this film is really that kind of peak achievement in marketing, that it's a documentary made by an independent filmmaker that is really a powerful piece of marketing.
And it really aligns with how Kelly, I think, wants to present herself.
I 100% agree.
Yeah.
I imagine that that will overlap with what initially drew you into her circle, this self-presentation.
Is that a fair premise?
I think so.
It's absolutely the way that she wants to be portrayed.
I don't know how her relationship with Michelle O'Hanlon began, but while they were filming, I was teaching at the studio at the time that they were filming.
I just happened to have a class scheduled across the lobby in the other studio space.
Michelle was taking private lessons from one of the most senior teachers at the studio.
You know, she was really being hand-fed this sort of myth of what this movement is and could do.
And it is very similar to what was enticing about it to me personally, absolutely.
You know, they show you all shiny parts.
Right.
And you don't realize that the shiny parts are wrapped in garbage.
Because they tell you, if you react to that garbage, that's your problem.
Well, let's start with the opening.
So I ask for truth and I ask for your erotic power and that beautiful desire.
So I want you to really bring it.
Don't forget that thing that's hard to show.
This is gonna provoke you and it's gonna make you surrender.
Thank you.
Thank you for being the first half.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for being the first half.
If you think about the society that we live in, women are trapped in the culture of the
masculine.
There's so much global abuse of women.
Body image shaming, sexual abuse and ego smashing.
There's a lot of shame that women carry because their body doesn't look like that body on a magazine cover.
Finding your erotic body.
More Tiffany, more!
More!
More!
Just because someone is dressing some way or looking sexy doesn't mean that they're inviting you to be sexual with
They're inviting you to be sexual with them.
them.
We've been shutting down the feminine body, curbing women's eroticism.
It is time for women to step into their power, and the time is now.
The way to step into that power is to move you.
I believe that taking the pole and reframing it allows for the personal reclamation of the feminine body.
We like to talk about how forward-thinking we are, but the truth of the matter is, the second you say pole dancing, they immediately think where men go, smoke cigars, drink, and women do lap dances for money.
And that's just a part of what it is.
It's the world of pole.
It's pole dance and it's pole artistry, pole fitness, pole sport.
It's different things to different people.
It's a journey of growth and self-discovery.
I wanted to get my mojo back.
I am in a war to help women reclaim themselves.
When you enter my world, you're gonna feel like you walked into Fight Club for women.
And if you judge here, I'm gonna ask you to leave.
Baby, this is not for sissies.
It's really a microcosm of the entire film, so I think it's a really great place to start.
I agree, there's so much in that clip.
Yeah, and just to be clear, we've got a lot of Sheila in the narration, but we also have a selection of students that we see featured in the film.
We have at least one She's telling on herself right there.
named Mama Gina, which we'll talk about in a minute, who gives one quote there in the beginning,
but I don't think she shows up at any other point in the film, which is a little bit odd.
But all of the themes are laid out, right?
I want your truth, I want to unleash your erotic power.
This will provoke you and it will make you surrender.
She's telling on herself right there.
She doesn't even realize she's doing it, but she's telling on herself right there.
She's gonna make you surrender.
Okay, so yeah, let's say a little bit more about that.
Pole dancing is going to provoke you, because of course it's going to apparently push against certain taboos you might have, and it might force you to acknowledge or question aspects about your sexuality that you haven't really investigated, or that have fallen flat, or that you have dissociated from.
But then, what's the surrender part about?
Um, I mean, honestly, I think it's what it becomes is she's going to push you in directions and any resistance that you have, you know, she's framing it as weakness.
She's framing your genuine reaction of something's wrong here.
She's reframing it as, oh no, no, no, no.
That just means, you know, you're a wimp, right?
It's, it's, she literally says it right there.
And if you judge anybody here, I'm going to ask you to leave.
And then she proceeds to judge every single person.
It became very, very obvious around the studio that Sheila was approaching every student from a place of, I know your body better than you do.
I know what's good for you even if you don't think that that's right or you resist it that's just proving me right and once you buy into that where how do you put on the bricks where do you where do you draw a line once you say okay I will surrender to this because you're going to Help me in some way by pushing me past this boundary, right?
It's something I've thought about a lot.
One of the inherent flaws of self-help is that you are accepting as given that you need to be helped and improved.
And the heart of this help, as framed in this montage but then throughout the film, and I think a lot of the things that you're going to go on to talk about today, is that people who engage with this material are going to be able to overcome abuse and shame.
And that is the message that we first hear in this montage from a woman named Amy, who is very heavily featured throughout the film.
And whose story of having had to or having been engaged in the porn industry as a very young person is actually a key point in the filmmaker's thesis that this is work that will help people overcome aspects of their past that they need to reconcile or they need to let go of or somehow integrate.
Yeah, so I didn't know people who know Amy before the movie came out but I've since come to know, you know, some students who take class in her studios, a teacher that has become a friend who teaches in one of her studios.
Amy's not affiliated with S Factor in any way.
The balance of the movie is very weird.
It's like 70% S Factor and then it touches on Amy's business up in the Bay Area of Northern California and then it touches on A very high profile performer in Las Vegas named Janine Butterfly, who when I say high profile, I mean like Cirque du Soleil type stuff.
Right, so there's these other things that are given sort of very short shrift, but I want to just emphasize that Amy is not affiliated with S Factor in any way.
And The director absolutely harps on her as calling her a quote former porn star throughout and harps on you know how victimized she is by having done this and I looked into it and I was like oh her parents threw her out when she was 18 and she did something for six months because she had no money and now she owns four studios in three different cities and is a successful business person but you want to talk about those six months when she was 18?
Like fuck you!
What's empowering about that?
It's so manipulative.
I guess it begins to fit into the framework of Pohl is a way of reconstructing a traumatized past or past or regaining ownership or agency because that is at the heart of the film and I think Kelly's message.
Yeah, I remember when the movie first came out and I watched it, one of the things I scrawled in the notes I was taking was, not everyone does pull because they're broken.
Now another person that we hear from is a person, an influencer named Mama Gina.
She appears as a talking head.
Just very briefly, and I want to point this out not because she plays a big role in the
film but because I've actually become aware of her because she is in a online program
that is hosted by Kelly Brogan which is called Faces of Fierce Femininity.
And, you know, I'm on Kelly Brogan's email list, and so I get all of this material, and I see this online conference, and Sheila Kelly is booked as a headliner, but also Mama Gina is.
But the thing is that the main headliner, the first listing, is Christiane Northrup.
Who's feminism, if you can call it that, has become intensely reactionary.
She has made her living as an alternative medicine specialist who caters to women's empowerment, or so she says.
And yet she, you know, rejects the HPV vaccine.
She has no real position about Roe v. Wade.
She has engaged herself in, you know, QAnon conspiracy theories over the last two years or something like that.
And so, I saw this conference and I was wondering about how many of the actual headliners were aware of each other's politics.
And so we can get into that a little bit later, but I just want to note that Both Sheila Kelly and Mama Gina are on this platform that is basically organized by an anti-vax activist and disinformation expert, Kelly Brogan.
And so I'm wondering, was that predictable to you?
Does that ring true?
Are you surprised by that?
Well first, I can tell you that the relationship with Mama Gina for Sheila goes way back.
Mama Gina and Sheila had studios in New York City at the same time throughout the early aughts.
Sheila's are no longer there, I don't know about Mama Gina's, but they frequently passed students back and forth to each other.
So that connection goes way back.
In terms of the anti-vax stuff specifically and knowing the politics of the other panelists, she likes to present herself as a contrarian going in that can change people's minds.
But she also, early in the COVID pandemic, she and her family caught COVID.
And the things that she was posting on her Instagram, I think I sent them to you, just kind of very finely walked that line of, you know, in the middle of the night when it's just you and your body, you know, the doctors can't tell you anything.
And I'm like, oh, wow.
She's courting that audience without saying it, is my impression.
And there's a kind of dovetail with the discourse of sovereignty and reclamation and empowerment, and it makes me wonder whether some people, you know, regardless of their positions in relation to public health or vaccination or evidence-based science, Some people, if they make their sort of brand centered upon an idea like sovereignty, or an idea like bodily empowerment, or the idea that you can heal yourself if you are free in your body or something like that,
That, you know, at a certain point, a certain personality will start to say, that is going to work for everything.
You know, it's like, if I was able to use, you know, embodiment and pole dancing to overcome childhood trauma, then why wouldn't I be able to use it to boost my immunity or to fend off COVID?
Sheila overtly stated it as magical thinking and that that could solve so many things in your life if you just believed in it.
I mean, I heard her overtly state that multiple times.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
She would use the term magical thinking but not in a critical sense?
The example I'm thinking of is at one of her retreats when a woman got up and worked directly with her in a way that was extremely provocative.
The way that, you know, the example in the Hollywood Reporter article about Nadia.
And at the end this woman said, I think Sheila thought they were done and the woman had one more thing to say, was, you know, I've done all the work and, you know, I come to these retreats and I still feel lonely and I feel despairing and I don't know what to do.
And Sheila recommended magical thinking rather than any kind of aftercare for Okay, well this is something we'll definitely come back to, because there's a real contradiction in this particular industry between, are you doing physical fitness, or are you doing women's liberation, or are you doing psychological repair, or are you doing group therapy?
It's never quite clear.
Yeah, I got into it thinking it was the first one, I was excited about the second one, and then the last two kind of clubbed me across the face with a baseball bat, and here we are.
Well, that's the thing, and by the time you get to the third and fourth ones, you're kind of so far in that it's hard to figure out how you got there, I imagine.
It's hard to figure out how you got there, and it's also, you know, you've seen the parts that are good, right?
I would say 90% of my social circle was people I knew from the studio, whether they were my colleagues, you know, my fellow teachers, whether it was students that I became friendly with.
LA is just one of those weird frickin' cities where you're always in your car and it's hard to meet people, and so if you're seeing somebody every week for a couple of hours, you know, you start to bond with people.
I'm still friends with a great many people I originally met at the studio.
So you see that sense of community, you see people starting to, you know, feel better about their bodies, maybe actually doing some of the reclaiming of, you know, like, oh, I was told to shut down my sexuality because I had a conservative upbringing or something happened in my past, whatever, and people are starting to feel better.
And then you start to see all of the high control stuff.
And my first reaction was, oh, they must just not know.
If I just tell them, they'll fix it.
And that turned out to not be true.
And then I thought, well, you know, the dogma here is all about standing up for yourself and taking back your power.
So that must extend to my conversations with management, right?
Whoops.
It just made me a target.
And, you know, then eventually I got to the place where there were other things going on in my life where I just didn't want to also be looking for a job, and I was like, fuck it, I'll just keep my head down and teach.
Not gonna go near the retreats, that's where all the bullshit happens.
But at the same time, here I am fucking propping up her brand, you know?
So there's a level of complicity to hanging your head in resignation.
It's complicated.
Changing the subject just a little bit, I'm sure we'll come back to that as well, but maybe the most complicated claim or premise that we hear about in this montage, and then it'll run through all of the rest of the clips, is this kind of, I would say, And this is where I feel I'm a little bit over my head, but this third wave feminist position on sex positivity and performativity as being a source of empowerment or anti-objectification.
And this seems to be extremely complex.
What's your first thought?
So I was looking for actual information from the company that would address that topic specifically and I found my good old training manual from 2010 which says that it must be surrendered upon request and to which I say from my cold dead hands.
But in the History of Feminism tab, it goes through, you know, the first wave being like the suffragette movement, the second wave in the 60s and 70s.
The third wave of feminism hasn't, I'm quoting, hasn't quite defined itself but seems to be pockets of women with some striving toward individual empowerment as opposed to social change.
Some striving toward global equality, and some striving to continue the journey of second wavers for social and legal change.
I believe there is a new kind of feminism that has arrived in the form of sexual empowerment for women globally with S-Factor.
It is driven differently from the other three waves as they were politically driven, this new feminism is more socially driven.
Oh my gosh, so she actually provides a kind of almost Wikipedia edition.
If you could add a section to Intersectional Feminism in Wikipedia, and she was an editor, she would pop S Factor in as sort of like the ultimate expression of something.
She, she, she, she, I did clip that sentence a bit, but, S-Factor, the vagina monologues, charities promoting the education and liberation of women around the world and the establishing of a global feminine culture.
You know, just that and the kitchen sink.
It all sounds very heady, right?
And when you're handed this manual and you're like, Oh, well, all of those things sound good, right?
Like the suffragettes, they were amazing.
And now it is becoming more global, you know, and, and, and, you know, the thing is in all of this, this manual here that I have that is, you know, two inches thick, um, She doesn't cite any sources.
It circles back around on itself.
It's very non-linear in its, you know, building to conclusions.
It just sort of states things as given.
It sounds like a yoga teacher training manual, actually.
It basically is, yeah.
In fact, I think it was modeled on yoga teacher training manuals, because when I went for teacher training, there was no manual.
It was basically, go stand by Sheila and hope some of it rubs off.
Let me drill down into, she is saying that S Factor's Globalized Feminism provides a model for empowerment through, did she say sexual agency?
Can you just read that again?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It is a new kind of feminism that has arrived in the form of sexual empowerment for women globally.
I can think of a few countries where it's not going so well, but you know.
But the form in which that takes, the form that that takes, Uh, is bound up in the aesthetics of pole dance and pole arts and exotic dancing and everything that we see in this film and everything that we see in the visual materials that are produced by, by, by her company and the culture at large.
And so, and so I, I'm wondering like how, because there's, there's this consistent drum beat within the film that This, that this particular type of sensuality and sexual expression is empowering, but I don't understand why, particularly.
There are a number of references to, like, the male gaze and to the female gaze, which we can get into, but what was your understanding of how the sexuality of Paul was essential to Kelly's idea of empowerment and liberation.
It was framed as taking back a symbol that has been traditionally thought of as, you know, where a woman is dancing as the object of desire for a man and doing it because it feels good in your body, it's fun, it is shattering that taboo because you might not be the type of person that someone would expect to see dancing on a pole, which we could unpack that for several hours.
And yeah, I also found in my manual a page called, Why a Poll?
My answer is simple, because it's fun.
Because it takes a patriarchal sexual stereotype that has been, up to this decade, considered off-limits to, quote, respectable women, and turns it on its head.
Using the pole in our workout is a way of taking back the power of something that the world has up until now only seen through the male prism and rightfully claiming it for our own.
Okay.
So that's how she framed it.
Okay.
I mean, I have some other thoughts about that, and I think I will put them on pause so that I can get through the rest of the points of this montage, because the next thing that she gets to is this extraordinary line, which is, this is like fight club for women, which I just found so incredibly interesting.
Did she say that a lot?
Yes.
Yes, she did.
And you pointed out something in our email yesterday that made me go, I like to think of myself as a smart person and the fact that I never put that together is just deeply embarrassing and also God bless you.
Well, I mean, I guess it seems to be one of those things that if it is wrapped up in the energy of good marketing, it can kind of slip by, right?
Yeah.
A lot of things did, right?
Like, well, what is Fight Club actually about?
Really?
Is that for women?
Well, that's the thing, is that Pahalniuk's book is about the absolute nihilism of Gen X men who have fallen into some corporate hellhole of, you know, personal erasure and, you know, suburban nothingness.
Who in the privacy of garages and, you know, I don't know, like cornfields late at night or whatever, are going to regain some contact with the earth by beating the shit out of each other.
Now there's some, and by not telling anybody else about it, by doing it as a kind of purely artistic exercise.
And so in that sense, Kelly's analogy really makes sense.
She's more right than she thinks she is, but it's not the analogy that she's throwing.
Yeah, she's right in some way, but the thing about Fight Club is that it is actually also tied up with a political trend that we begin seeing emerge around that time in what becomes the manosphere that ends up being extraordinarily exclusionary.
Toxic to women?
And toxic to women, and is really at the root of, you know, men have to be strong amongst themselves because women are going to take everything they possibly can from them, and there's an anxiety about, you know, the loss of status that's consistently put out by this particular book and it goes into some very
nihilistic places. And so that's why it's a very surprising analogy to use because I don't
think Kelly wants to promote nihilism at all. Except perhaps the nihilism of politics,
right? Which is, well, there's nothing actually to do out in the world. There's no way to
really orient yourself towards your economy or your political reality. So the best thing that
you can do is actually work on your body and how it expresses itself and liberate
yourself that way. And do it in secret in dark rooms with no mirrors and don't tell anybody about
it.
Except when there's a film, and except when you're going to advertise the retreats on Instagram and all of that stuff, yeah.
So lots and lots of contradictions.
Okay, so let's see.
Oh yeah, and then not for sissies.
This is not for sissies.
Is that something that she said a lot?
Toward the end, you know, the thing about the film is that that is not what class looked like.
That is not what weekly class looked like.
Even if you took class with Sheila, which when I first started taking class there, she was teaching a regular weekly class and then she stopped for a while and then she, you know, would occasionally teach one and whatever.
But that is not what class looked like.
What you see in the film is what she does at retreats, which is Go blow straight past any boundaries of what might be appropriate in regards to handling people's trauma and providing absolutely no aftercare of any kind, which is what ended up the story that opens the Hollywood Reporter article.
And in those senses, she would absolutely start to frame things as this is not for sissies, which is a hilarious thing to say two breaths after you've said, if you judge anyone here, I'm gonna ask you to leave.
Yeah.
It's the thing that gets you to shut down your sense that something's really fucking fucking wrong here.
It gets you, oh I don't want to be a sissy.
Maybe that's just my reactive socialization telling me that I want to run away from this screaming.
It's so interesting because sissy is not only a homophobic term and a sort of like term of Exclusion and you know what would you say like degeneration like you somehow you lost your moral fiber you know and you're not you're not able to perform adequately it's also it's also it's
It seems to be driving at, if you're gonna let your conditioning, sort of, your social conditioning, shut you down and repress you, then this is not for you.
And here's where I might want to get back to, okay, well, what does it mean to face down that social conditioning by strapping on, like, six-inch heels and Learning erotic movements that actually come out of a history of sexual performance.
Right, and sex workers often of color and all of those things, right?
The antidote to social conditioning is a form of social conditioning that is said to be sort of,
it can be inverted, it can be, its meaning can be changed.
And I think that's a very powerful argument, but I also think it must be very confusing at times.
It's very confusing at times and it's also exquisitely easy to constantly move the goalpost.
You know, this over here is a product of your social conditioning, but then this over here is you're not going far enough.
Because of your, it just, it always feels like...
It always felt to me like no matter what you did in terms of your teaching, in terms of your individual dancing, if you took class with Sheila and she was giving you feedback, There was no way to, quote unquote, complete the task because there were no solid definitions of anything.
She describes everything as, well, I mean, that's just linear and masculine.
This is fluid and feminine and you can't really define it.
But if you can't define it, then how do you ever figure out what the fuck it is?
Although, what is of value within the discipline and the discourse and what ends up being very highly commodified is this notion that the person who's dancing must have some kind of emotional breakthrough all the time.
Yes, and that it is also, you know, extraordinarily heteronormative.
You know, there are these, the type of acceptable sexuality and sensuality at the studio, especially toward the end.
There's a woman I've become friends with who was actually in the documentary class, who I met after everything ended, who was working as a stripper at the time.
And she said, you know, I heard about this class and I wanted to learn from Sheila because she has this reputation.
And I came in and the very first time we were going to put on clothes to dance, I was told, oh, no, you can't wear that.
That's sheer.
You can't wear that in here.
And she was like, well, this is what I wear when I'm dancing.
Isn't that what we're sort of creating here in this different environment?
And they completely shut it down and validated it.
It was a very, very negative experience for her.
She actually ended up quitting class because she was like, oh, you're just playing at this.
Well, this is a point I need to get to is that Kelly is very, very clear that S Factor distinguishes itself from sex work or any kind of sort of commodified erotic dancing.
So how does that work?
Because, you know, obviously, Because paying for classes commodifies it?
I mean, this is not an art form that emerges out of Esalen workshops.
This comes from a particular place.
It comes from a long history of erotic performance.
Which is where she learned it.
But it was important that S Factor was not considered within that discourse, that it was something different.
Extremely important, and in fact, if she found out as a teacher that you were dancing for money anywhere, you would be fired.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, yeah.
That was made exquisitely clear.
She, yeah, the whole way that it was framed there was sort of like, well, you know, we're taking it out of the strip club and we're removing the stigma from it.
But the whole way that it was framed as like removing the stigma from it required that you attach stigma to it.
You know, as opposed to one of the ways that I used to describe it, you know, and still do is, you know, if this bar was horizontal, you would grab on like you were five at the playground and you wouldn't need me to help you.
But because it's vertical, you know, we have to change up how we physically approach it.
To me, that just seems more of like a neutral way of describing kind of learning this very new movement.
Whereas hers was always, yeah, we're bringing it out of the darkness.
You know, we're, we're taking it out of the icky realm of the strip club.
She even describes In, I think this is in her book, watching this woman in a strip club when she was supposedly researching this role for a movie and how as she was moving, you know, she was just entranced by how beautiful this woman was and the way the curves of her body moved in this low light.
And then the song ended and the light came up and it was this grubby display of picking up money off the floor and it shattered the illusion.
Oh.
Yeah, it's pretty gross.
It's pretty gross.
It's so complex.
Oh my gosh.
It's so complex.
It's so complex.
Is she imagining, is the premise that you should be able to market pole arts without being paid somehow?
Or that if you get paid, you have defined it in such a way, through S-Factor, you've defined it in such a way that it's necessarily empowering and it's not dirty.
It's not transactional.
I don't know how she separates that.
Maybe because you're giving the money From a woman to a woman.
I honestly couldn't tell you.
She really likes money.
That's my opinion.
All right.
So let's, uh, there's a class that, uh, we get introduced to in this film and, uh, here's the, here's the introduction to it.
I'm Sheila and it's my life mission to help bring women back into their wholeness.
So we're about to embark on a six month journey where we'll reconnect with our bodies through sensual movement.
And we'll get to know each other even though we feel like strangers right now.
It takes feeling safe.
That is why there's no mirrors and there's no judgment.
I want to know your name, where you're from, and what you're seeking here.
Who wants to go first?
Does this remind you of your first class or how does it compare and contrast to how it unfolded for you?
Definitely having people go around and introduce themselves and just because people don't have the visual the way that classes are typically structured is everyone sits in the circle and either the teacher will be part of that circle or she will just turn as she talks to each person so that there's sort of this sense of community and also the sense that you are giving someone your direct focus.
In my first class, I would say definitely ask like, you know, what's your name and where are you from?
Sheila didn't teach my first class.
It was taught by us at one of the teachers at the studio at the time.
And it seemed to be much more just like it was acceptable to say, my friend has been doing this class and she told me about it and it sounds fun.
Which I believe is the sort of answer that I gave because that was true for me.
One of the women I worked with in the casting office had been taking class and told me about it and it took me almost a year from when I heard about it to when I got up quote-unquote the guts to go take the class because you know I was raised by Republicans and you know all the things.
But then, you know, my memory of my first class is it was much more about trying to figure out this unfamiliar movement, right?
Like it's based on a lot of things that she actually does attribute it to, like there's some kundalini yoga poses in there, there's some, I'm blanking right now on some of the other things that's in there, but like one of the things that I remember from my intro class that I Literally just gave up on it.
I'm like, I'll just lie here on my mat until they move on to the next move because my body won't do this.
Is pressing up into like a bridge pose where you're on your back, plant your feet behind your butt and you press your hips up to the ceiling and then they wanted you to make circles with your hips.
And for some reason my body was making like squares or triangles or something and it just felt weird and like I was going to fall and I was like, it's dark in here.
I'll just lie down until they change the instructions.
So it was, it was more lighthearted than that.
Um, you know, toward the end I would say, and I think as S Factor got much more of a reputation, cause when I started class it was 2006.
Um, so it was definitely much less of a high profile thing than it became.
Um you know I would start off class with sort of a simple sort of the same prompt like you know what's your name and what brought you to class today and somebody talked about having participated in uh the slut walk in downtown LA like the week before and hearing about pole dancing classes there and wanting to check one out right so it got a little bit deeper um After the movie came out, I learned the phrase trauma bonding, which I had not known while I was a member of the studio.
But I think that there is very much that thing of like, you know, it's almost like forming a new relationship with an actor that you're going to have to have like a makeout scene with, right?
We're sort of like, hi, nice to meet you.
Do you prefer Altoids or mouthwash?
Right?
Like there's this sudden forced intimacy and you surrender to it because In that case, because it's your job, but you surrender to it because everyone else is doing it, the peer pressure of it all.
And in a case like S-Factor, that opens the door to, oh, we talk about heavy things here, like right off the bat.
The sort of social aspect of that and the horizontal relationships that are formed are pretty clear from this part of that opening class.
You're going to hold each other accountable to not giving up.
Emotion is going to come up.
Fear is going to come up.
Judgment is going to come up.
You have to fight through it.
I'll tell you all right now, you're all going to want to quit.
Yeah.
You're all going to go, this is too fucking intimate.
This is scary.
And then if you are brave enough, you'll continue forward and reclaim yourself completely.
If you give in to it, you will drift off and live in a state of, where the fuck am I?
So listen, I want you to look across the circle at someone and catch the eye of somebody and then point to her.
Does everybody have somebody?
I'm going that direction.
I can't actually see.
Oh.
Is somebody looking at you?
Is someone looking at her?
Where's my girl?
Put your hand up.
OK.
That is your mirror for this journey.
journey.
She's going to keep you and hold you accountable.
And you're going to create a sisterhood.
First of all, randomly pairing people up to be their emotional accountability partners
is very Tony Robbins.
Surprise, surprise.
But also, the woman who says, I can't see in that moment is because just prior to that, Sheila has taken away her glasses because they are somehow restricting her in some way.
It's never actually entirely explained why she needs to Give Sheila her glasses, but as somebody who wears glasses and pole dances in glasses, what do you mean something's wrong with my glasses?
Like, that's like saying, like, take off your braces.
Like, it's just, there's no reason for it.
And it infuriates me to, to, to no end.
I mean... Like, what, do the people that are wearing contacts have to pop out their contacts?
Like, what are we doing here?
No, I think what she would ask in terms of the changing of accoutrements or what have you really would line up with whatever stereotypes are in the room about what is sexual and what isn't or what is sexually free and what isn't.
My impression from that scene was that she had very quickly identified The person who probably felt more awkward than anybody else in the room.
Bingo.
And the confession that that person made was that, and I don't know whether this was during the class or it was to the camera in a follow up interview.
But she described having been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and that she was in a lot of chronic pain from it, and that that had seized her up in a number of ways, and she was hoping that this class would make her more free.
And so, it's a very easy and very stereotypical thing to walk over to a person and say, well, your glasses seem repressive to me.
Right.
You look like a librarian or something.
You look like a librarian, you look like a little bit of a nerd, and of course you've got an autoimmune disease.
I mean, she didn't say that, but that's the impression I get, is that you're kind of, you are turned in against yourself, you're not self-expressive, you are not open.
And if you have that physical limitation because you're in some sort of discomfort or even pain, Sheila's gonna pick up on that.
A thousand percent, Sheila's gonna pick up on that, and she's gonna hone in on it.
Yeah, and perhaps give a kind of pseudo or quasi-diagnosis for it as well.
She also tells that person, you know, your hair should be shorter, it should be arranged differently, or it should be... She makes you go get a fucking haircut!
I just, like, can we talk about stepping outside the boundaries of what is remotely acceptable from any exercise or even self-help modality?
Like your haircut's not sexy enough?
Yeah, okay, so do you think, I mean, I'm not going to defend this at all,
but do you think it's very difficult in that particular context
for somebody like Sheila coming out of a Hollywood background
to not be looking at this person that they want to psychologically transform,
or at least intrude upon, and sort of size up every single detail
and say, you know, I'm going to give you a full makeover here.
This isn't just about pole dancing.
Oh, a thousand percent.
If we're able to get your hair to swing around like you're the real vixen that you know you are, I think she says at one point, then somehow you'll feel the liberation in all parts of your life.
If I get you to behave in another stereotypical way, this is kind of what I was getting at before, it's like if I get you to sort of switch tracks and go from what I think is sort of nerdy librarian with some strange, weird, complaining disease to somebody So somebody who can, you know, flip their hair and not need their glasses, then all kinds of things in life will open up for you.
I feel like it would be very hard for the untrained person to not make all those leaps, you know?
Also, there's a layer of...
Absolute hypocrisy in that because I happened to be teaching at the studio when Sheila booked Lost and she had fairly long hair at the time and for that character they had her cut it to like just above shoulder length and oh she bitched and complained about how much her erotic creature missed her long hair for weeks after that.
What do you mean her erotic creature?
Oh, sorry, that is a term of dogma at S Factor.
That is basically the sexual alter ego that is hidden inside every woman that S Factor's dance modality will free and allow you to express fully rather than it having been excised by your socialization.
Wow, okay, so it's a very Jungian concept that you have this, like... Is it?
I had no idea.
Well, in the sense that you have a hidden part that is unintegrated and disowned, and that if you have abused it, or you've shut it up in a box, that it really has to be let out, or else the rest of your being will suffer.
You'll be incomplete without it, right?
Right, and will you also change the world around you if we all just suddenly start expressing it?
That's where you sort of get into the, okay, so if I do that, then what?
Right?
Right.
All right, now here's Sheila on the fight for the feminine body.
Every woman has to take a journey into reclaiming herself and take back what is rightfully hers.
The biggest obstacle is the male gaze.
How do you change it?
It's battle.
It is a fight for the feminine body.
This is the only body we're going to get.
you We're not gonna let them own it.
We're not gonna be silent anymore.
That's what I help women do.
Oh my god, the sad violin.
Just kill me now.
It's very expressive.
It's very expressive.
Oh my god.
Just in case you didn't know what we wanted you to feel here.
So, there's a lot here.
There is, and I think this gets at How it can be so easily exploited is that there is a kernel of truth in that, right?
In that women face oppression because of their gender.
Women often are, you know, have trauma in their history that happened to them because of their gender, which opens the door to her saying, and I know the antidote.
I can fix it.
Right?
It's really, to me, that is the patient zero moment of everything that comes after.
She identifies the main obstacle to the reclamation of the body as the male gaze.
Was that common language?
Extremely common.
We even had a concept in our teaching manuals called he-sees slash she-sees and it would be something like, you know, if I reach out to the wall And slide my hands down and arch my back and take my hips side to side.
I'm feeling a lovely hamstring stretch and that's why I'm doing it.
And that is the female gaze.
And a man watching me do that sees me swinging my ass back and forth and thinks sex.
And that is the male gaze.
And so one of the things that I think there was even an illustration somewhere in the manual of like Just like a male head with like a very like cat-eyed pair of glasses with like long eyelashes inside it being placed on because you wanted to take these female gaze glasses and place it onto the male gaze of the culture to replace how people looked at things so that you could appreciate the beauty of another woman.
Whereas a man would just think, you know, I want to fuck that.
Wow.
Okay.
So.
It's very reductive and not that flattering for someone who claims to also love men.
It's also very tangled because my understanding of the term male gaze comes from, I mean it's coined by Laura Mulvey in her famous article from, it goes back to the 1970s, I think 1975.
She basically says in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, not that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, and so they see things in different ways through different glasses.
That might be part of the context, the general sort of discourse, but you know, there's a really good explainer in the conversation that I'll put into the show notes.
I can't remember the name of the scholar, but the title is, What Does the Male Gaze Mean?
And What About the Female Gaze?
And so the scholar writes, The male gaze invokes the sexual politics of the gaze and suggests a sexualized way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women.
In the male gaze, woman is visually positioned as an object of heterosexual male desire.
Her feelings, thoughts, and her own sexual drives are less important than her being framed by male desire.
It's a key idea of feminist film theory.
The concept of the male gaze was introduced by filmmaker Laura Mulvey.
Adopting the language of psychoanalysis, Mulvey argued that traditional Hollywood films respond to a deep-seated drive known as scopophilia, which is the sexual pleasure involved in looking.
Mulvey argued that most popular movies are filmed in ways that satisfy masculine scopophilia.
Although sometimes described as the male gaze, Bonfi's concept is more accurately described as a heterosexual masculine gaze.
And visual media that respond to masculine voyeurism tends to sexualize women for a male viewer.
As Mulvey wrote, women are characterized by their to-be-looked-at-ness in cinema.
A woman is a spectacle and a man is the, quote, bearer of the look, unquote.
I think what you're describing, Kelly, referring to is extremely simplistic because what Mulvey is trying to get at is that the entire structure by which bodies are appreciated and regarded in culture and technology is set up to enforce a kind of objectification that is very difficult to
get away from regardless of how the person who is being looked at feels
about themselves as they are being looked at right? It's a concept, it's a complex intellectual
concept that has been put into the wood chipper and reduced down to like simple shapes and colors.
Yeah.
And I mean, I mean, this is, I was trying to get into this delicate territory before, and I might as well just go for it here as somebody who has, I would say, like benefited from the structures of the male gaze as somebody born male and cisgendered in 1971, and I've grown up with the entire media environment that Mulvey is describing.
And I say that I'm a beneficiary, but I actually, I'm going to uproot that in a bit because I think it actually harms everybody.
But what I don't understand about the empowerment principle of the erotic as presented by Kelly is that At least when it gets to Netflix, or at least when she tries to market it as a form of empowerment, and that goes along with the visuals of actually performing and all of the stuff that goes along with it, what I encounter as a
male gaze viewer is a series of cues that automatically, and before I can even recognize that the person in front of me is a person, I am sort of driven and encouraged to understand what I'm seeing as an object of my desire, first and foremost.
Not a person, not a human being who And so, you know, I think it's a really tall order.
or somebody that I would form a relationship with, or somebody I would ask questions of.
And so, you know, I think it's a really tall order.
I've often described it as, I feel like my own media conditioning,
my gendered media conditioning from boyhood onwards, installed a series of buttons at the back of my skull,
near the base of my neck actually.
Near the brainstem.
Near the brainstem, that if a certain type of imagery When it comes into my visual field, whether I'm looking for it or not, those buttons get pressed.
And when those buttons get pressed, I have this very uncomfortable feeling these days, because I've thought about this a lot and I've tried to understand what it means to me and what it means in terms of my own gender politics and my own feminism.
When those buttons get pushed, I have this sense that I am being manipulated by something, and I want to be very clear here that I'm not talking about the kind of manipulation that veers off into the right-wing incel discourse around women are trying to tease and manipulate men and then they're going to withhold power from them.
That's not how I feel, that's not what I'm saying at all.
What I'm saying is that I can recognize that there are conditioned cues of eroticism that have been hardwired into my brain that I did not choose.
that were chosen for me by Larry Flint or Hugh Hefner or whoever
and not only were they chosen for me, they were chosen for the women that I grew up with who
spent an incredible amount of time negotiating whether or not
they should take them on or not take them on, whether they should reject
them, whether they should try to feel power through them. I didn't have to deal with
that complexity. I just had to sort of deal with the strangeness of, do I really know what is attractive to me?
Do I really know what I find erotic?
Because there's this point in this class that the film depicts where, you know, it's still introductory days.
It's early days.
And then at a certain point, Sheila says, okay, next time when you come to class, you're going to bring these.
Bang!
And she puts down on the floor in front of her these six inch heels that are like, they're made of glass
and they're like, I don't know, they look slippery and they just are total fetish objects.
And I'm like, oh, that's where those buttons are going to get pushed for me
if I keep watching this documentary, which is supposed to be about empowerment
of the women doing this thing.
And it's very, very complex.
Sheila is using all of the things that went into constructing those buttons
at the base of your skull to somehow say that those are not.
you Not only the most important, but almost the only available tools that you have to reframe this, rather than saying, well, I reject them altogether.
All right.
Right.
Right.
Like, for example, the student that presents as much more non-binary, I happen to know her, you know, and I care for her very much.
Watching Sheila convince her to become more stereotypically feminine was excruciating.
Because I know that's not true for her, and I know that from talking with her, you know, and talking to her girlfriend.
Like, she's, you know, it's not that she's not someone who lives by that heteronormative binary.
And I also, just talking about, so after Sheila slams down the pair of stripper heels, There's this scene where all of the students go off to Hollywood Boulevard to the stripper heel store.
And I had pointed out to me, I didn't even catch this moment, by people who have actually worked as strippers who watched this movie.
Because when it came out, everybody in the pole world watched this movie because people were excited that there was a movie about pole.
And then 90% of us went, what the fuck?
People were like, I liked the part with Janine when she was talking about, you know, how she got into it back in the day.
But even then, you know, real strippers were like, she worked as a bartender!
But people who have worked as strippers and as sex workers were like, first of all, that's the only scene in the movie where hip-hop music is playing, so take that for what it's worth.
And then they literally troop off to this store like they're shopping for Halloween costumes.
As opposed to, you know, and they barge in there with cameras and, you know, this is a place where women who need those shoes for their living, it's like where they go to get their uniform, right?
Like, you know, it's treated with an extreme othering.
And yet, it's also not doing anything to challenge the fact that this is the symbol, this presses that button at the base of a man's skull, right?
It's not like, well, what if you want to dance in tennis shoes?
What if you want to dance in flip-flops?
What if you want to dance barefoot?
Which is, to be fair, something that was presented in class that was not presented in the film.
I mean, I guess what is so confusing for me as a viewer is that, I mean it's no longer confusing because I sort of understand for myself that as I watch that imagery play out and I understand how conventional, how normative it is, and how it's presented as though it's somehow transgressive That's the thing, right?
If you look at Kelly's Instagram page, tell me that's not the male gaze.
On the day that the Dobbs decision came down, she posted a picture of herself in her underwear.
It's like one doesn't even relate to the other, and it's so reductive, and it's so stereotypical, and it's like...
On paper, we were encouraging people to find their own idiosyncratic natural body movement.
And yet, everything you see in her current social media and in this film is as stereotypical and as reductive as it could possibly be.
And somewhere in there, you know, two paths diverged in a wood.
As I'm thinking about my own coming of age and understanding my own sense of what would be attractive or erotic to me, there's a point at which, like, the image of female empowerment was really it's it was in the hands of somebody like Diamonda Gallus or it was it was uh in the guitar of PJ Harvey or it was uh it was it was Courtney Love screaming her guts out or it was um women not shaving their armpits or just anything that like signified transgression
that actually signify transgression.
But those things themselves can, of course, through capitalism be instantly commodified.
But there was a moment, there was a moment in which I remember seeing images of the performance artist,
Marina Abramovich, do a number of, she did a number of different things,
but one of the installations she did involved like carrying freshly butchered ox bones across a gallery,
moving a pile of them from one side to the other.
And what she's showing is not only her engagement with the history of her region, but also a kind of embodied strength that is coded female because of her dress
and it has nothing to do with the sort of conventional ways in which we understand beauty
and courage.
And so I'm always asking myself like where did those things go?
Like, they seemed to...I guess maybe I paid less attention to them, I don't know.
But it's very interesting to me that something like S-Factor emerges later in history, as though it's newly transgressive, as though it's something new, when actually it's pretty conventional, it's pretty reactionary.
It's very conventional and yeah very stereotypical and you know I think it I mean maybe that's where it started to go off the rails is you know initially there is something attractive about oh I'm gonna go learn pole dancing right and there's something transgressive about that and something that's you know slightly breaking a suburban taboo about that But eventually you're going to run out of people who are interested in breaking that taboo and then you've got to make it.
You know, mission-driven.
You know, Jessica, I think that's a great place to pause because when we pick it up next time, we can start to talk about the shift into that mission-driven, you know, zone.
Because for Sheila, S-Factor soon becomes inseparable from the unregulated trauma therapy industry.
So, does that sound like a good place to break for now?
Yeah, that sounds like a great place to pause.
Alright, thank you so much!
We'll talk to you next time.
Hello everybody.
Before we begin, I want to front-load some due diligence regarding one aspect of the story we'll hear from Jessica Hopper today.
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 three of the other participants on that call.
Okay, on to the show.
This is part of an ongoing series in which we discuss your entanglements with conspirituality and cults, how you got into them, how you managed.
The difficult but also unexpected things that happened along the way and how you recovered.
And today, Jessica Hopper is back with me again from Los Angeles to continue our conversation about pole arts, cultic dynamics, unregulated trauma therapy, and pseudo-feminism.
Hello, Jessica.
Hi, Matthew.
Listeners, if you haven't heard the first part of our conversation, I'd suggest going back and playing that first.
It contains a lot of delightful clips from an infomercial on Netflix called Strip Down, Rise Up.
This is the documentary that was made for Sheila Kelly's S Factor.
The company in which Jessica rose as a teacher and was professionalized for a number of years.
And in that first part, Jessica describes the company in general, some of its origins, her own exploration within pole arts.
And we also hear Sheila Kelly describe her vision for her company in her own words.
What else did we get into?
What was notable for you, Jessica?
Um, that sounds pretty comprehensive.
I have just really done a lot of reflecting since we did the first part of this interview about It's so interesting to hear your perspective as a total outsider and also someone who comes at it from a much more sort of intellectual perspective rather than an experiential perspective.
Yeah.
But the way that you arrived at, Sheila is not objectifying her students' sexuality, but she's objectifying their trauma has just really reverberated with me.
I want to ask, you know, for me to come at this content as a journalist and with some sort of cultic studies on board and not from an experiential perspective, I wonder what else I can do to understand just how attractive and I don't know, like, liberatory the art form itself can be because I think that's probably the thing that I'm most outside of.
Like, I watch the actual art form and I'm just blown away by the strength.
You know, the clarity of movement and like people really, really love this.
They really do.
I really do.
I think there is something.
I think I was drawn to it because.
I mean, my mom put me in dance classes when I was like four.
So just throughout my whole life, I've always enjoyed and been drawn to things that are based on dancing.
But I hadn't really found anything as an adult that kind of lit me up in the same way.
And I think it was a little bit of that sense of Sort of the total freedom of expression in the S Factor classes, which is definitely there in other pole modalities.
It's just that it's not so focused on sort of your internal emotional life.
But I sort of describe it as like a playground equipment for adults.
You know, you grab on and you swing and suddenly you're five again.
And then you realize, oh, I can flip off of this thing.
And now, you know, there's that kind of endorphin rush of doing something exhilarating.
I get the you're five again, but then the incredible control and discipline that you all, you know, have to Put together and able to be able to do even the sort of basic things is really kind of inspiring.
There's a couple of movements that I just can't kind of even grok in my own body or in my own, like anything that I've experienced.
And, you know, I guess I'm thinking mainly about when the turn around the pole in midair is incredibly slow.
I think the idea is that if it's done well, Um, that it looks effortless.
It looks like you're defying gravity in a way.
It looks like there is no gravity.
Yeah.
And it also looks like, um...
Yeah, it looks like there's no gravity and it looks like there's this, I don't know, like this contradiction between absolute stillness and fluid movement, you know, that just seems really incredible.
And I can see how much discipline and strength training and control must be going into that.
And then all of those things have to come together all at once.
It must be really amazing to feel.
It really is.
And I think one of the things that you're describing, I don't know, I don't think we've gotten into this level of detail about just the technicality of it, but the pole has two settings.
So sometimes the pole is stationary and you're moving around it.
And sometimes the pole itself is rotating and you are holding still.
Oh, I don't understand.
Like, I didn't see that second one.
How is it rotating?
So in the S Factor movie, it's not because their poles were only stationary at the time.
But most modern poles have what's called a spin mode and a static mode.
So in a static mode, the pole is stationary and you move around it.
And then when the pole is spinning, it's actually a lot of actually holding still while the pole rotates.
And then you find a new position and then you hold still while the pole rotates.
Yeah.
One other sort of just technical question about the practice itself is, do you wind up, like, with... What happens to your hands as you're doing, like, this incredibly powerful grip?
That also has to, like, you have to slide and you have to... Wild stuff.
Yeah, so it's very funny, especially coming, you know, in Los Angeles, we're just now coming to sort of the end of summer.
But we talk a lot about the pole dancer's dilemma, which is you slide when you want to stick and you stick when you want to slide.
Oh, right.
There is, you are constantly when you're practicing and when you're performing, wiping the pole down to sort of get the oils from your hands off of it.
So usually it's just a spray bottle with rubbing alcohol and like a towel or a washcloth.
Right.
And then I own at least three different kinds of what's called pole tack that are on any part of my body from like the palms of my hands to the backs of my knees.
Especially the bottoms of my feet if I'm going to do something where I'm like stepping on it because... So this is like a resin?
Exactly.
It's like when you see a gymnast chalking up before the Olympics.
So I do have some experience of that part of things because as a young baseball player we would use pine tar, right?
Yeah, we don't use pine tar but it's very similar.
You also don't chew chewing tobacco and you don't spit on the floor.
Very rarely.
Oh, there might be.
That might be a thing.
OK.
All right.
So, so... It would be a character choice if you were doing a very particular piece.
Right.
Right.
I could see that in burlesque, I guess.
Right.
Well, because I've seen people pole dance in everything from toe shoes to roller skates.
It can get quite creative.
Right.
Okay, well, I'm really glad that we opened here because I think we covered a lot of heavy material in the first episode, and I did want to reflect a little bit on just how attractive this discipline is because the thing about, you know, any kind of high-demand situation is that the doorway into it is Really appealing, and it can provide a lot of benefit for people at the outset, and sometimes for a long period of time.
And then, if with certain dynamics, with certain sort of leadership needs, with certain economic arrangements, a lot of that stuff can be lost.
And I often spend a lot of time speaking with people who used to be in high-demand groups Not talking about how much fun they had, or not talking about how much they actually really loved something, and how they long for it, and perhaps how they miss it, or how it's been sort of compromised by the social aspect of the experience.
So, I think this is a good place to start.
Yeah, and I can just say that, you know, even in, um, you know, I was very close and still am with a lot of the teachers who are featured in the Stripped Down Rise Up movie.
And one of the things that one of my friends said to me after the movie came out was that wasn't reflective of the entirety of the experience.
Like, we had a lot of fun.
We did, but the director specifically chose to include all of the days when Sheila was there and people were crying.
So I think a good place to re-enter the sort of curdled aspect of all of this is that we left off by talking about how at a certain point S Factor had to be, what did you say, driven by... Mission driven.
Mission driven.
It had a higher purpose somehow.
Yeah, so it wasn't enough that you were doing this incredible discipline, that it was exhilarating, that you were defying gravity, that you were either rotating around the pole or it was spinning and you were clinging and seemingly motionless.
That wasn't enough.
At a certain point, the mission-driven aspect of S Factor begins to commodify a kind of unregulated trauma therapy through the practice itself.
And so, we got up to this very special moment in which Sheila Kelly brings in a psychologist endorsed by Dr. Oz.
This is Dr. Laura Berman.
So, let's start by rolling what Berman has to say to a gathering of S Factor teachers.
Even though you're not therapists, you as teachers are providing an experience that is extremely healing in a therapeutic way.
But you want to be extra careful because if you're triggering PTSD reaction, call her over after class and connect with her.
Are you seeing a therapist?
To give you the support that we're not equipped to give you, but that you really need, not only to get the most out of the class, but to do your healing.
Sheila asked me to come in and just brief you, make sure you feel confident working with women who have a trauma history or maybe trauma is coming out right now.
I have a student in my class that had sexual trauma at a very young age.
So what are you seeing?
Hesitation, locked body.
The key with trauma recovery is shame release.
In the process of reclaiming your sexuality on your terms at your pace because the power was taken away from you and shame was put in that place.
Shame will hold you prisoner, but really all shame wants is to come into the light and be let go.
you no longer serve me.
This movement will bring you into such an incredible state of peace and ownership again.
Oh, where to begin?
Well, who's Dr. Berman, first of all?
So, Dr. Berman is a social worker who is not currently licensed in California because she is, as I've described her to you, one of those doctors who does TV appearances instead of running a practice.
And on her website, she is a self-described love, sex, and relationship expert.
She was initially brought to S Factor in 2018, which I believe is actually the year that this movie was filmed in.
At the Absolute demand on penalty of a mass revolt of teachers to try and get some trauma informed education based on what was happening specifically at retreats.
What was happening at retreats?
Yes.
Well, it was reported.
We have a report from Hollywood Reporter, but this is happening on a regular basis is that people are shattering.
Correct.
And they're shattering because poll is a is not only like incredibly strenuous, but it also is provocative in all of the ways that we've been talking about and also very confusing.
And also, you know, you're doing five out five days of 8 a.m.
to 10 p.m.
or later and you're getting exhausted and pushed into that place where you become more vulnerable, right?
Right.
And so teachers were demanding that Sheila bring in some sort of trauma-informed expert to advise us because we straight up said, We have not been trained in this.
This is outside our area of expertise.
We don't want to hurt anyone.
Help us.
And so we asked for someone who is an expert in trauma care to be brought in, and Sheila brought in Dr. Berman, who is, as far as I could understand, a friend of hers who would do it for free, and close enough.
Dr. Berman came in and did I can't remember if it was a phone call and some in-person stuff in the studio.
What I do remember is that typical of S Factor we were given like After asking for it for months we were given like two days warning and it was in the middle of the day on Wednesday so like half the staff couldn't even attend because they have other jobs.
And afterwards we were given this summary of how to care for people with PTSD by Dr. Berman.
Very sloppy, very haphazard.
And then again Dr. Berman is brought into this scene in the movie where if you look closely There are no students in the room during that scene.
They're sitting in the corner of the studio.
It's Sheila and Dr. Berman and three women, all of whom are teachers.
But they intercut it with shots of students moving around the same studio space.
So I think they're trying to make it look like that trauma-informed bare bones as it was, that trauma-informed information was provided to teachers teaching the class.
No.
No, not true.
So, there are a lot of people who are shattering during retreats.
Yes.
I have a definition of shattering that would interest you.
Does this come from the manual?
This comes from the handout after the training with Dr. Berman in 2018.
Okay, great.
Notes for S Factor teachers from Dr. Laura Berman.
S Factor definitions of and process for emotional releases.
Shattering.
A release of emotion, big or small, which feels like you've shattered into a million tiny pieces.
Much of the chronic muscular contractions in your body have let go and you are flowing.
This can sometimes feel intense and or frightening, especially for those who may be experiencing it for the first time.
And then it is contrasted with awakening.
Which is defined as a sudden emotional release which usually comes in the form of a big expressive emotion such as awestruck, tears, rage, laughter, etc.
This awakening is sometimes accompanied by a realization or a moment of confusion into realization.
An awakening is like a storm.
It has a beginning, middle, and an end.
I can't really tell the difference between those two things.
It sounds like shattering is a little bit more intense and non-linear.
And Sheila is desperate to describe it when she's being held accountable as not anything to do with Emotion or trauma.
It's a physiological thing.
She's desperate to describe it as that because that keeps her safe.
Because it allows her to?
It allows her to plausible deniability that she is doing any kind of unlicensed, untrained work with people's trauma.
Well, no, it's just a physiological release.
Yeah.
Also known as a trauma response or a stress response or?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then she turns right around and and says, you know, something later that like, you know, this is a deeply, deeply held You know, thing where trauma is being released from your body.
And I'm like, after this movie came out on their website, they now have a trauma waiver.
That if you click on any of their events that you have to sign, which I can't imagine would actually protect them from any potential legal ramifications, but there you are.
You sent me a communication that you found in your notes from around this time that Kelly was becoming more interested in this connection between intense bodily movement and, you know, psychological pressure and shattering.
And it featured an administrator for S-Factor writing to, I think, a group of teachers, quoting an article about the yoga teacher on a forest that was published in Yoga Journal.
And the article is called, where is it here?
The article is called Yoga for Emotional Trauma and it's by Rachel Brahinski and so this, you know, is probably published somewhere in the 2010s or something.
Yeah, it was sent to me in 2011, so that gives it sort of a ballpark.
And so what Brahinski has done is she's written about how Anna Forrest views, and this is Julian Walker, my colleague's yoga teacher.
It's written about how Ana Forrest views her particular branded practice as being kind of like a vehicle for trauma release.
And that, as Julian has described it, she viewed her yoga center as being a kind of magnet for people who had to engage in this mission of recovering and releasing past trauma.
And so, you know, Brahinski has written a fairly straightforward reflection on what Anna Forrest says she's doing, but the S-Factor admin has passed it along to the staff and basically said, you know, if you switch the word yoga out or Anna Forrest yoga method, out of this article and you just put in S-factor class,
it's basically what we're doing here as well.
And so I guess my question is, what you're talking about in terms of
peak intense breakdown experiences in a group setting, this has a long history going back over the last 40 years
into the first iterations of the human potential movement.
movement.
It's what Tony Robbins does to people.
It's everywhere.
But it's very prominent within the yoga world that this combination of physical intensity and psychological self-awareness and dealing with feelings of shame or inadequacy And doing that all at once might provoke some kind of breakdown and that if you can nurture that, if you can get through it, if you can let it happen, if you can let it happen in public and then be welcomed back into the community as kind of like a somebody who has triumphantly journeyed to a foreign land and come back, then
Then that will be really, really good for everybody.
That's highly valued.
Did Kelly get this idea from anywhere in particular that you know of?
Because it's certainly not original.
Not that I'm aware.
When I stumbled across that article the other day, it took me a second.
I had to Google conspirituality on a forest.
I was like, I know this, I know this.
Oh my god, oh my god, it was Julian's teacher.
The way that that article was presented to me was that the head of the teacher department, the head of the teachers and teacher training was also, had also done at some point a yoga teacher training.
And so I think, you know, she was following Yoga Journal probably because of that.
And it was sent to us in the spirit of, you know, look at all the beneficial properties that Our modality shares with Otta Forrest's method of teaching yoga uncritically and as if this is the greatest thing in the world.
Whereas almost at the same time, that same person who I won't name her, I still am friends with and care for this person deeply and I think we all have our own very, very complicated relationships with S-Factor that we are untangling.
But this teacher taught at a retreat And missed her flight home because she was having a breakdown of the kind described at the beginning of the Hollywood Reporter article that the teacher who was there as a student was having.
I finally got asked to staff a retreat.
They started around 2009, I think.
I finally got asked to staff one in 2016 because she was basically running out of warm bodies because she kept getting mad at people who were not meeting her needs appropriately.
And I was like, you know, fuck it, I'll get paid to go for the weekend.
But when I was being prepped to go teach that retreat, one of the things I was told is to give the name and phone number of someone in your life to our retreat coordinator.
Because should you not be in a mental state where you are able to return home on schedule, our retreat coordinator will call your loved one to make arrangements so that you can be returned home at a time when it is safe to do so.
Meaning they saw that all of the machinations happening at retreats were causing these kinds of breakdowns, not only in the students, but in the teachers.
And their reaction was not to make it stop, but just to make sure that you had a family member to call.
The next of kin strategy.
The next of kin strategy.
Yes, exactly.
Here's Sheila on the necessity of releasing trauma and how maddening it is when it doesn't happen.
If a woman is feeling like, I can't dance, I feel too awkward, too clumsy.
It's maddening because it's not like a dance on the beat kind of thing.
No, it's all about releasing deep, deep pain and deep trauma in your body.
Literally what she swears she's not doing when she's asked if that's what she's doing from someone who is holding her accountable to doing unlicensed group therapy.
You know what occurs to me, and this goes back into the territory of who is the dancing, who is the movement, who is the pole for, and what does that have to do with the gender politics and the male gaze and so on?
It occurs to me that one of the paradoxes at play is that Pohl is seen conventionally as a site of objectification and oppression that can be reclaimed And that, you know, if the person who engages with it earnestly gets beyond that stigmatization, that they will be free, they will be doing it for themselves.
But what I'm hearing consistently about this group, about S-Factor, is that While the male gaze might govern the way in which the politics of pole dancing emerges, whatever Kelly is doing, it involves extracting or objectifying the emotions of the people that she's teaching.
It's like, it's not enough.
It doesn't really sound like it's enough to just do the movements and to have whatever experience you're going to have.
It sounds like in order to be successful, In this particular environment, you have to show some kind of emotional value.
You have to give up some kind of emotional energy in order to prove that you've been there or that you've done it well enough or that You've gone deep enough.
It's extractive in that way as well.
It's like, all right, well, men go to strip clubs to gain access to this stimulation.
Well, it feels like in this particular discourse, the students, the clients are actually there to provide a kind of emotional supply for the leadership and for perhaps the teachers.
They are absolutely, well, they're providing it almost It's being objectified in the sense that whoever's being worked with and the emotion is being extracted from on stage, it's being extracted from them for the benefit of the group that's watching.
Not for their own benefit, not for their processing.
And in terms of you saying that it's a kind of supply, I'm sure you're familiar with the term and analogy, narcissist supply, which is absolutely what it's feeding into, in my opinion.
You know, it reminds me of this story about, I'm not going to use the name because I haven't corroborated it, but I 1000% believe that my sources, there's a famous charismatic male yoga teacher Who would conduct very large-scale workshops and a very sort of high-end, multi-level marketing organization that he created that was very, very skillfully marketed and organized.
And so people were spending thousands of dollars to go to this training and that training and to upgrade and to become this level of teacher and that level of teacher.
And one of the things that he was really good at was at picking somebody extremely vulnerable out of a crowd of hundreds and putting them on stage and encouraging them through coaxing but also stern demands and pep talks that are also concealing a little bit of an edge of, you know, you should do this and not be a sissy.
And there's one story of how one woman came to this event and she had recently gone through a round of chemotherapy for a particular cancer and she had lost her hair.
She was wearing a headscarf and he singled her out and he brought her up on stage and And he said, you know, I would like you to do this particular posture that was probably beyond her, you know, ability.
It was beyond her range of motion.
It was going to be a challenge for her.
But it wasn't enough that he asked her to do the posture.
Once she started to get into the posture, he said, Take off the headscarf.
Was this yoga teacher Sheila?
No, no, so I'm talking about somebody different.
Yeah, no, no, I know, but I'm saying, yeah, it's so familiar.
It's so familiar. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
No, no, no, but I mean, I guess I'm glad I've brought it up because it's resonant.
Because what happens is that this person is completely stuck.
They have invested in this program.
It probably has given them a certain amount of benefit, a certain amount of bodily confidence.
That's very important for them as they go through the recovery from cancer.
They probably are deriving some pleasure from the posture.
It might be that they feel a little bit gratified by the attention that they're receiving.
They don't want to let down other people in the group.
They are suddenly on stage and then somehow he gets it into his head that he's going to expose some deeper level of shame that she could navigate as though she wasn't doing enough already.
As though she wasn't risking enough already.
And that if he got her to do that, that she would have no choice but to take off the scarf and melt and surrender into an experience that would be interpreted by the group as a breakthrough instead of a graceful way of dealing with humiliation.
And so that happened over and over and over again, and it was continually interpreted as, you know, this teacher is able to take
people out of their devastation and show them that they are actually still, you know, divinely
connected or whatever bullshit they would say. And, yeah, it's it was it's just, I mean,
what he was needing evidently was the emotional peak expression of this person's crisis
that that had less to do with whether she could do the pose or look good in the pose or,
you know, express her her courage or whatever. But the crisis of am I going to lose
my shit while somebody asks asks me to do something that's actually really wrong, it's
really intrusive. And the person doesn't. What they do is they are able to manage the
situation with a certain amount of grace, which of course is what women are doing all the
time. So there's that gendered aspect to it as well. I mean, it was just so insane to hear
about this happening over and over again. And this is why I have to imagine that
Sheila has got some influences in the yoga world, unless people all sort of figured out
how to monetize humiliation and call it personal growth all at the same time.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I would probably guess the organization that you're referring to, just like the whole crossover with Anna Forrest.
I think that, you know, especially here in Los Angeles, these worlds are very incestuous and overlapping.
So there could be some influence there, whether it's conscious or not.
But the way you've articulated that it is all about it's objectifying their emotional spectacle for the benefit of the spectators and not for the person going through it who's being told this is for your benefit.
That's where the ultimate cruelty of it lies.
It's accelerating it too, right?
It's not on the person's time.
It's not according to, like, are you ready for this?
It's like, you're ready for this, or if you're not ready for this, this is the moment to do it.
The pressure is kind of amazing.
Yeah, it truly is.
It truly is.
Now on the recovered memory front, we look a lot on this podcast at how this notion that digging trauma out of the body is really very closely bound up in the phenomena of things like the satanic panic.
And, you know, it seems like in S Factor, we have this emphasis on finding things to disclose and confess.
And I'm wondering if you ever heard an overlap or anything that got close to the territory of, oh, we are, because this is what happened in, according to Julian in Anna Forrest's group, is that We are getting close to uncovering what really happened to you, and it's more horrible than you can ever imagine, and really, something must be done about it.
I never heard of anything that approached the territory of recovered memory.
There was definitely certain classes that were geared toward the point where it was almost just an emotional workshop rather than a movement class.
I mean, I had people refuse to come to my class because I taught too much pole.
And didn't give them what they were looking for in terms of the emotional provocation and feedback.
And you know, if I actually walked into, like, someone's class, people would, like, audibly sigh and roll their eyes sometimes.
Like, it was just, it was a culture of, like...
What are you doing here to teach poll?
And I'm like, well, these things aren't just here to hold up the roof.
Like when the fuck do you think these are here?
You know, and I mean, if I had somebody in my class who suddenly had an emotional release, I would deal with that to the best of my abilities, which I frankly told Sheila once to her face, you know, not putting it on her, but I said, you know, I feel like if we were to judge my comfort with dealing with this on a percentage scale, I'm in single digits.
Like I don't feel safe.
She got very upset about that.
Is that because the implication is if you've gone through her training, you should be able to do what she does in terms of holding this kind of faux group therapy space?
I think so.
I think so.
And I also think that, you know, Honestly, it didn't happen a whole lot in my class.
You know, sometimes it would because people have days where, you know, you move the slightest bit and emotion releases from your body, but it wasn't the sort of thing where I was constantly pushing people to this place of traumatic objectification.
I was part of the system there because I taught at the company, but I stayed in a place throughout.
Even when I was pushing myself, when I still bought into the journey more, I maintained it as like, I came here because this is fun.
And I always, and still am, drawn to the more acrobatic side of pole.
Like, you show me a flip and I will screenshot that shit and slow it down frame by frame and try to learn how to do it, right?
As opposed to this thing where people were constantly coming out of a class looking like they'd been to war.
You know, just hair askew and mascara streaks down their face.
And so I was like, every week, this can't be fucking good for you.
Whereas if if people are rolling their eyes when they come into your class, because you're actually going to teach techniques and it's going to be there's going to be strength building and there's going to be learning.
I mean, I do have to say that the actual art form I find completely extraordinary.
And so and just it's so It's still surprising to me.
Yeah, it's still surprising to me.
That wasn't what I was expecting from it, but thank you.
I appreciate that.
You mentioned earlier that there is some sort of grain of truth in what's being marketed, and you can see it when you watch the absolute strength and self-control and expressiveness and adventurousness and sometimes danger that this kind of like You know, acrobatic and circus arts form art form is giving people
And then that, I don't know, somehow for the brand, it's not enough.
At one point, Sheila discussed taking the polls out entirely and just going ahead with the emotional movement.
This was toward the end, I think, when, you know, they were trying to figure out how to keep the company viable because it was always in financial distress.
Yeah, at one point, she straight up was thinking about taking the polls out and just having it be the emotional movement, which I think would have been At least a more honest way of approaching it.
It also would have probably caused me to quit Farseer than I actually did, because especially by that point, like, that was my niche.
I was the person at the LA studio who taught the hard pull tricks, because half of the other teachers couldn't even do them, let alone teach them.
And that was because they had chosen the other path.
And so I was like, well, fuck it.
No one wants this chair.
I'll take it.
Right.
We've got one more clip.
Yes.
All right.
And this is so difficult to get through.
We've saved the best for last.
This is a what the fuck is going on here?
This is so incredibly cringy.
I've titled the clip in the show notes here as Sheila has manly men hold space.
And just to set it up a little bit, this is later on in the training.
This is close to the end.
And what I think the premise is, is that the students are going to be introduced to sort of random enlightened new age guys who will sit in the room and kind of engage them with intrusive eye contact.
And we'll see how that goes.
What I'm talking about is an entire paradigm shift of how we live together, masculine, feminine.
I think you all know that I've invited some masculine energy here.
I think it would be really, really helpful for you to confront a male presence.
These are heightened conscious men.
They cultivate that ability to hold the space for the feminine.
And whatever comes up, emotionally, is what comes up.
Thank you for coming.
One of the things I love when I bring masculine presence is for you to hold their gaze with not just love, but the feeling of I would kill for you.
Whenever you're ready, I'm gonna lead you in and just find that flow.
Their one goal is to make you feel loved and seen and protected.
Whatever you need, they're holding a masculine presence.
These men do exist.
This masculine entity does exist.
Can I touch?
Ask him.
Is it okay to touch?
Everything above the belt.
LAUGHTER This can be incredibly healing if you choose that.
It's a good thing.
You feel what it feels like to truly be seen in all your feminine splendor.
I miss him.
I miss him a lot.
Can you ask him to show you love?
I never got to come out to my father while he was alive.
That's it.
Mainly because my mother didn't think he could accept me.
So I got to have that feeling of acceptance by a man who represented him.
Can you feel a man who can protect you?
Oh.
I'm gonna go.
Bye.
Bye.
Jessica, I think I'm going to cut it here because we're just both squirming and 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 guys sitting on fucking chairs.
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 at least one of them is a Manosphere type who is cooking up bone broth and wondering about whether or not everybody's turning into a soy boy and whatever, and he does private security or whatever.
So there's also this intersection with men's movement stuff, 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 an 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.
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 10 people, not 5, 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 Wanna 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, like 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 Pull 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?
Yes, it was.
I think a lot of it was, you know, at the beginning, I think it was a much more unsaid unless people chose to share that they had had some kind of trauma in their background.
Physical trauma, sexual trauma, And any of the things that it could be.
And that sense of reclaiming was perhaps if they had shut down an expression of their sexuality, sensuality out in the world in a response to an assault, that the studio was sort of a safe space, if you will, where they could reconnect to that just for their own enjoyment.
And you know, in the presence of women and a teacher who was holding space for you, making it, making you feel safe, you know, a way that you could reconnect to it.
But then, um, It was, I'm trying to remember back, it was things in the studio were already starting to get, there was a lot of turmoil as the Me Too movement came out.
Like that was right around the time that Sheila brought in Dr. Berman in response to basically a teacher uprising saying, you keep delving into these areas where trauma is being surfaced and we're not trained.
Like, please give us resources, train us.
And so it was kind of, it was sort of all folded into that turmoil, but she, I think, absolutely did kind of lean in and try to basically capitalize on those moments.
Like, oh, there's this big cultural uprising now about all of the damage that's been done, all of the trauma that's been inflicted on women.
Like, you know, we've been here for years, come join us, you know.
This pivot where, you know, people who are professionalized into the organization say to the leader, you know, we're really underqualified for topic X, and the leader says, oh, okay, let's Bring in an expert, which really kind of amounts to a patch, right?
Yeah.
A temporary patch.
It's such an interesting sort of familiar structure for me because I just remember from working in yoga teacher training programs for years that You know, something very revelatory would sort of erupt into the general social media landscape of yoga culture, right?
I don't know.
The one thing would be, oh, you know, biomechanics might prevent more injury.
And are we overstretching?
Oh, let's get a physiotherapist in to give a three-hour lecture on Then it would happen with, oh, I'm hearing some daisy Indian practitioners in the diaspora talk about decolonizing yoga practice.
I think that's a really important issue.
And very earnest people would go to the, you know, studio leads or to the, you know, YTT director or to, you know, It happened a lot.
this and so they'd hire somebody to come in for three hours on that.
Well, it happened a lot.
It happened in our training when they would bring in someone from the outside to give
you a two-hour lecture on anatomy and physiology as if you're going to be able to call that
up when someone is saying, you know, my hamstring is seizing in a particular stretch.
This is an interesting question.
So I imagine people are getting injured all the time in pool.
Yeah, it happens.
It happens just in generally in pool, I think, especially the higher level stuff that you
get to and it happened at S-Factor because frankly a lot of the movements were in.
Improperly taught to all the teachers because, you know, Sheila learned from one or two dancers in a club.
And then as I was there, the longer I was there, I ended up becoming one of the teachers who specialized more in sort of the, what they call the advanced pull tricks, the more physically demanding, complicated pull tricks.
And I noticed when I started to train at other places to get that knowledge that, oh, we're teaching this wrong.
And I would come back and say, like, for example, the pull climb.
We're teaching this wrong.
I understand when Sheila learned it in 1999 that that's how they did it, but it's evolved since then.
There's a better, easier way to do it.
It's more accessible, that's less likely to injure, et cetera, et cetera.
And deaf ears, because that wasn't the focus anymore.
The focus had long since gone from teaching people actual pull vocabulary and was instead full-on, you know, unlicensed group therapy.
So it went from one unregulated sort of discourse to another.
It's so interesting how this is so familiar.
Right?
It's like, oh, the attention is here.
Look over there!
Look over there!
Shiny!
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I mean, it's it really kind of it's it's kind of a tragic outcome of the aspirational educational environment in which there's no real accreditation for anything, you're learning how to do something, you're going to professionalize into it, but and if the leadership and the sort of the method itself is promising that it will, you know, cure all ills, then it naturally kind of, you know, gives itself over to, oh, you know, the smart students saying, oh, but we're not learning enough about
The specifics.
We have become real generalists and we're using, you know, sort of, you know, aphorisms and bromides to talk about almost everything.
You know, we don't really know enough anatomy and physiology and we don't really know enough trauma therapy and we don't really know enough.
It's very interesting.
Yeah.
It's very much, I think, yet another example of constantly moving the goalposts so that you can't be held accountable for a shortcoming anywhere.
It's like, well, oh, we're not really focusing on that anymore.
Now we're doing the deeper emotional work.
Well, I think the structure of the aspirational training, embodiment training, is that it effectively hides what the product is.
And the product isn't pole dancing, the product isn't trauma therapy, the product is like the mood of connection with the leader.
I mean, the goalposts can change except that if the center influence goes, there is no organization anymore, right?
So, the techniques are being taught, but because the focus isn't on perfecting them or making sure that they're biomechanically sound or getting an expert in for injury prevention, that can't actually be what the company is saying that it's focusing on.
It's always going to be something else.
It's always going to be about the feeling sense of bathing in charisma.
Yeah, I think that's very accurate.
And I think one of the things that started to trouble me greatly the longer I was there was feeling in any sense like As a teacher, I was suddenly, you know, rather than Sheila as the leader, that all the connection on some level was to this idea that I was suddenly like a surrogate for that.
And that really squicked me out.
I was very uncomfortable with that.
I tried more to be of a mindset of like, you know, Everyone is working on whatever their next step is.
And, you know, I might be further down the road than you, and my teacher might be further down the road than me, but you should just be focusing on what your next step is and not, you know, trying to get to some undefinable goal, right?
You know, what I'm also hearing from you is that, you know, you could see that you could carve out a niche in this company by doing the more athletic or advanced pull tricks.
Absolutely, that's where I felt comfortable.
Okay, so you could do that, and that gives you a little space within that landscape.
But actually ascending through the company into real leadership means that you would have to take on more and more of that charismatic persona.
Because the point of S Factor isn't that Jessica Hopper can teach advanced pole tricks.
It's about sort of All of the other feelings and aspirations that are on offer.
So, yeah, and I think that I'm realizing that I've met a lot of people who, and I've spoken to a lot of people who, as they professionalized into the yoga world, they realized that, or in any wellness circumstance, that because there were no benchmarks for real achievement, because, you know, you couldn't really prove that you were a good yoga teacher or anything like that.
What it was really about was showing that you were growing in your capacity to be a charismatic influencer.
And for people who realized that that was gross, that they didn't want to do that, that it felt inauthentic or manipulative, they tapped out.
And for the people who didn't, for the people who wanted to mimic the leader, they hung around for longer.
Yeah.
And maybe that turned out okay for them.
Maybe they got, like, knocked off the top seat at a certain point.
But the only real pathway for ascending in an unregulated discipline is by mimicking charisma.
It's not by, you know, showing your sales benchmarks or whatever.
I mean, that would be a factor, but it's not.
You can't, like, prove that you are doing the pull tricks in the best possible way, you know?
That was absolutely my experience.
And I think eventually that niche that I carved out for myself became a place where I was just completely isolated because I didn't want to participate.
You know, I taught.
Oh, and all the other stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
Like I taught at one retreat and came home and said, I will never teach at a retreat again.
That was an extremely disturbing experience.
Because in the retreat, you can do your pole tricks, but then you got to show up for the group processing session later.
And I mean, it was horrifying.
Whereas if you're just going to the studio for classes, it's like you show up for your class and then you leave.
Yeah.
And instead, the very first morning of the retreat, you know, I was at a big group thing and I was told we should stand around the edge and hold space.
And if you see someone having a shattering, go over and help them breathe through it.
And I walk up to this woman, my team lead taps me and points to a woman who was clearly having an emotional upheaval.
And so I go over to her and I gently place my hand on her shoulder so she knows I'm there.
And I said, you know, can you take a deep breath and describe to me what you're feeling?
And she says, I am a world-renowned, her medical specialty, which I'll just call that for her own privacy, people keep coming to me because they think I can help them and they just keep dying.
And then she collapsed in my arms and I was like, I'm supposed to give this woman deep breaths and hip circles?
Like, get me the fuck out of here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But then I came home and I said, I won't teach at retreats anymore.
I didn't quit because I was so enmeshed.
Well, because the class times were still open.
I'm imagining you get paid per class and that's working out.
Well, yeah.
And I just, I kept trying to say, okay, but this part is okay.
And it's like, you start out with a whole pie.
You start out with a whole pie and eventually realize that like, if the slice is so thin, you couldn't even pick it up with a knife on its side.
And then you're like, I don't even like this kind of pie.
Why am I here?
It's a very facile way of describing the whole experience, but just the slice is getting narrower and narrower.
Let's just go with that.
No, I think it's a good way because I think the realization that most people have when they are coming away from a high-demand situation is that the pie is getting narrower.
If they were able to carve out a niche for themselves and make it work for a while, it was according to their own wits, it was according to their own skills, And to the extent that they individuate or isolate themselves with that, they get shut out more and more, and it becomes more and more uncomfortable to participate in the group activities to sort of buy into the entire pie.
I think that's a great metaphor, actually, and I think it's a model for withdrawing from a group that I've never actually heard talked about, so I'm really glad to sort of flesh it out with you.
Oh, yeah.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, it's cool.
Okay, but we were talking about politics and, you know, the way in which Me Too discourse found its way into this company.
Now, did Sheila Kelly, was she overtly feminist about her ideas about rape culture and accountability?
Was that like an overt part of discussions?
I heard the phrase rape culture mentioned more in the era of after the, you know, when the Me Too movement came out was sort of when I started to first hear that phrase.
And it was my understanding of it was it was sort of folded into, well, yeah, of course, that's what we've been doing all along is standing up against this.
But it wasn't really ever presented as, you know, Here's this concept.
Are you aware of it?
It's being spoken of more.
Here's how it relates to the work that we do.
No, it was just sort of like, well, yeah, it was again, one of those things that's squishy and not defined.
Well, yeah, of course that's what we've been doing all this time.
We're so culturally relevant.
Okay, so next aspect of the politics of S Factor, the Netflix film, it features the stories of several Black women who participate in S Factor, but as reported in The Hollywood Reporter, which I referenced at the beginning of the first part of our conversation, Sheila Kelly faced a lot of backlash against some of her practices during the George Floyd period.
So, can you fill that out for us?
What did that look like?
Yeah, that was actually the catalyst to all of the studios shutting down.
It was three months after the lockdown order started here in the States, but we had been teaching online, you know, just obviously the stretching and the movement part of classes, and they were much shorter.
But I think, you know, it was partially a way for Just teachers in the studio to keep teaching and to keep having, you know, a tiny income that was possible in those early days of COVID.
And also a way for, you know, people to keep exercising and keep moving and keep connected to, you know, their fellow classmates and all of that.
So it was about three months into that when When George Floyd was very publicly murdered by a police officer, and so many companies came out and put statements out about, you know, we stand with the black community.
You know, to not paraphrase further than that, but S Factor put out a statement and a reply was posted by one of their, I can't remember at that time if she had recently left or if she was still an employee who left at this time.
Sorry, it's a couple of years ago now, but I actually, I have those statements and I can read them to you if you're interested, just to give you like complete context.
It's just two short paragraphs.
Yeah, sure, for sure.
So this was the S Factor global account on Facebook and it says,
beautiful courageous women of S, as we hold space for the grief and pain of our diverse sisterhood,
we are working diligently to carve through a thoughtful path forward to ensure that we are
best supporting the women of color in our community and providing a safe welcoming space for healing
and growth. We will issue an official statement tomorrow, but know that we hold you in our hearts
and minds and providing a space and community for you to thrive matters so deeply to us.
Heart emoji.
And then a colleague of mine, one of their teachers, who's a black woman, replied, don't make a statement because you feel you quote, have to.
Make it because you are truly dedicated to changing your own racist practices from Sheila on down the company and in the movement.
Black people don't need white saviors to hold space for them.
Black people need white people to take a deep look inside themselves and stop perpetuating racism and be actively anti-racist.
Get uncomfortable.
Allow the white women that give you over a million dollars in retreats and events a space to unmask their denial and face their own racism.
It is not up to black people to stop this or to teach you.
Do the work.
Stop enabling.
Start changing.
Black lives matter.
All right.
Which I personally interpreted as an extremely blunt but also extremely professionally worded statement.
It wasn't an ad hominem attack.
It wasn't full of profanity or anything that you could point to like that.
And so in their first act of solidarity with black women in about 10 minutes, they deleted that comment and blocked her account.
Oh, right.
And because that's how the internet works, it went away forever.
No, just kidding.
So the woman who posted that, the teacher who posted that, Posted it on her own Facebook page and said, they just deleted me and blocked me.
Let's have this conversation here.
And it exploded.
Hmm, okay.
And what was brought up?
I mean, because it is a professional statement, it's in the sort of the diction and the mood, certainly, of that time, and we see that kind of language and activism now.
At the same time, it is generalized.
Right.
So I'm imagining that when people started commenting, they started pointing out specific things about S Factor that could change.
They absolutely did.
And I know that this is a fight that that teacher had, and I'm not naming her just because I haven't asked her permission, so.
But this is a fight that that teacher had been fighting for quite some time.
Two examples that she gave in further communication that went around the company was, there was one retreat that she was chosen to staff, where I believe she was the only black woman who was part of the staff.
I don't know if she was the only person of color, but she was the only black woman.
The theme of the retreat was exotically sexy, and the pitch deck they sent out to prep for it about, you know, activities that they were going to invite students to do was to dress up in their most exotic garb, and it included pictures of You know, what appeared to be a Middle Eastern woman in a veil, dark-skinned women with, you know, tribal-looking, in quotes, paint marks on their face, an Asian-looking woman in a kimono.
Oh no.
And this teacher pointed that out at the meeting, said essentially, like, this is othering and cultural appropriation and I can't be a part of that.
And my understanding, third-hand, from talking to her afterwards was, Sheila dug in her heels.
The group was divided about 50-50 between, yikes, you can't do this, and no, it's fine.
And she eventually noped out of staffing that retreat.
So did that go on then?
Did people show up in indigenous garb?
You know, indigenous garb and...
From what I understand, it was, it was, it morphed into dressing up as, or, you know,
inhabiting the spirit of exotic animals and plants, which to me just sounds like kind of a quick band-aid
that they slapped on it because somebody didn't want to redo all that work.
My interpretation, allegedly in my opinion.
And one of the other things was just there was constant language.
I don't know.
Is that worse?
I don't know.
There's something, there's something like, okay, well let's like take the humans out of it then.
And then we can keep the exotic stuff.
We didn't really want to offend the humans, but we want the exotic part.
So how can we represent that with plants and animals?
Well, large cats can go fuck themselves.
Oh, man.
So much, so much cringe.
And at that point, like, you have no excuse, right?
It was already in the culture.
You should have been, we should have been culturally aware enough.
And people were.
And like I said, but the one person whose mind you couldn't change was Sheila's.
And then there were lots of other things like, for example, themes and assignments kind of every other week at the studio for the Higher level students where if they weren't necessarily learning new pole movement or technique, which had long since gone by the wayside, it would be like, well, this week's theme is, you know, 60s music or this week's theme is like, you know, the Wild West or something like that.
So you would pick a song, pick an outfit and dance with that and see how it made you feel.
And there was the one that I remember specifically was Latin Lover Week.
Oh, man.
The email description that went out to everyone, teachers and students alike, I believe, to the best of my recollection, started with the line, No!
No!
I don't want to hear any more of this.
I won't.
I won't tell you any more.
No!
It's hilarious until... It's a parody.
It's a parody of itself.
It's hilarious until the feedback comes of, you know, this perpetuates really harmful stereotypes.
Absolutely.
Others... But there's something else, which is that the White demographic of this company is being asked to enjoy the transgressiveness of non-white sexuality in some way.
Yes.
And that gets into, isn't this the deepest issue involved in the racial politics of S Factor, is that people start to understand that, hey, wait a minute, this art form comes from erotic dancing, it comes from sex work, It comes from women of color.
And we have taken it and turned it into a self-development project, and then we're selling it to each other for a lot of money.
We're selling it to rich white women, yeah.
Yeah, right.
Okay, so how does that play out, and who starts to really hear that first?
I imagine that that argument is first articulated by black women in the group?
By black women and women of color.
So this is all around, like, I think the very first or second of June of 2020.
And it blows up big enough on S Factor's social media and then the social media of teachers and students as well.
People chiming in to say, I also had an experience that was really shitty that I believe was related to my race that was not handled appropriately to people saying, you know, You're a shit teacher and you always were a shit teacher and you're just bitter.
I mean, it was getting really ugly.
And so they called, four staff, they called an all hands on deck meeting.
I think this was around June 6th of 2020 for, you know, teachers from the different locations scattered around the country.
So two in Southern California, San Francisco, New York.
The licensed teachers that were scattered hither and thither wherever they happened to live and work.
The management team, Sheila was there.
And basically it was, what are we going to do?
This is a PR disaster.
It came out in that meeting that the GM of the company is the one who yanked the post down and blocked the teacher.
She just saw it, panicked, and did that.
She didn't consult anybody or It was just someone was insulting Dear Leader and we couldn't have that.
It was about 20, 25 minutes of conversation back and forth of people throwing out, okay, obviously there has to be an apology.
Is it going to be a public apology in general?
An apology to the specific teacher for how she was treated?
Should it be written?
Should Sheila do a video statement?
Everybody was kind of batting around these different ideas.
And that went on for about 20, 25 minutes.
And then finally Sheila spoke up.
She hadn't yet.
And I, at this point, I was like, is she just sitting here to like keep people from saying what they really think?
Cause that's usually what happened when she participated.
And she finally spoke up in that Zoom meeting and she just wanted to thank everyone for their great ideas.
But I just need to point out that what that teacher posted was so, so violent and so harmful.
And I interrupted and I said, Sheila, if you can't handle this level of professionally worded feedback about what is an obvious, horrible mistake, then I don't know why any of us are on this Zoom meeting right now.
Like, I really don't see what the purpose of this is.
But the fallout of that meeting was that 14 of her teachers resigned within the next week.
That is why the studio closed.
The studio did not close because of COVID.
The studio closed because she couldn't bring herself to reply.
You know, just to return to the structure of charismatic leadership for a moment.
It feels to me like this sequence kind of slam dunks the purpose of the organization, because to respond to that particular Facebook post In that way, to not be able to even do the cynical and pragmatic thing.
Right.
Of bringing in a PR consultant to say, okay, this is how you want to sort it out, this will cause the least amount of blowback going forward, and I mean, the instinct is not self-preservation in a business sense, it's self-preservation with regard to charismatic authority.
With her ego.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
The last sort of political, social landscape I wanted to ask you about was in the category of disability studies and ableism and specifically the issue of fatness.
So several subjects in the film talk about the shame of being fat, of wanting to lose this amount of weight or that amount of weight.
And on one hand, there is an encouragement that comes from Sheila or seems to towards self-acceptance.
But on the other hand, in one example, we watch Sheila counsel one of her teachers in the attempt to lose a hundred pounds, which is like fucking insane.
There's no research that shows that an attempt like that has any kind of stable process or evidence-based method that would produce a sustainable and healthy result.
Like, this just doesn't happen.
It does happen, but then there are ramifications for it.
I mean, regardless, she's not a dietician or a nutritionist or anything like that.
So, what kind of impact did anti-fat bias have within S-Factor?
I mean, it was it was certainly there.
And I'll speak in a moment to the scene that you're referring to in the film.
But I mean, it was just always laced throughout, like all of the promotional materials, even all of the internal materials.
You know, the imagery that was provided was always, you know, a skinny white woman with large breasts.
And then, you know, around In the last couple years, around 2017-2018, they started to use
More women of color, employees, basically, a much more diverse swath of employees in the internal advertising, but then they would continue to use those people after they had quit in disgust over something, which I always thought was really kind of questionable.
But the anti-fat bias, I mean, you know, the fact of the matter is that We were never taught as teachers in particular how to more effectively, safely spot larger bodies.
Since breaking away from the company, I have started to Follow people who are well-known in the poll community, and I will give her a shout-out.
There's this fabulous teacher based in New York City who goes by Roz the Diva, who one of her biggest things on her platform is how to teach and take care of larger-bodied students.
It can be done.
It has been done.
There wasn't a drop of that at S Factor.
Now, to be fair, as a new industry, we can expect that that concern would take a while to surface and be addressed, but was there any kind of sensitivity towards it at all?
No, and I think, you know, okay, but the studio started in 2001, so when do you figure out that different bodies have different needs?
Right?
Right.
You know, I went to, with S-Factor, I went to, there used to be two, now there's one, but I went to a poll convention in 2016, I think? 2015?
And I went on the floor to hear a friend of mine who was giving a talk in the main hall about nutrition for recovery post-workout and stuff, just because I wanted to support her.
And as she was finishing up, I saw this woman standing, waiting to go on the stage next.
And beautiful woman.
She had a microphone tucked under her arm because her arm stopped about mid-bicep.
One of her arms did.
And something just struck me and I was like, I need to hear this woman talk.
And she got up and talked about how to speak to different bodied students.
And she's like, I live in Australia.
I had to move to London to get somebody who could teach me.
Anything circus related because I couldn't find anyone at home who could.
And I remembered at that moment having had someone in one of my intro classes who only had one arm and the poultry guy was teaching her.
I knew how to teach it to people with two hands.
And on the fly, I failed her and I know that she left the class disappointed.
And so just hearing that woman's perspective again, just sort of blew the doors off.
My mind in terms of what I thought was possible and what I knew was possible.
But I was like, again, at that point, the studio had existed for 15 years.
Like how long does it take you?
How many people have to come through the doors who have these different bodies of whatever kind, where you start to realize that if you are truly teaching a movement modality and you, part of your slogan is for every woman, like, do you not see the disconnect?
Yeah, well, the disconnect, I think, is going to be enforced at the threshold of the building by the self-selection that occurs because, you know, the disabled person is just not going to see themselves represented in the marketing.
The fat person is not going to see themselves represented in the marketing.
It really, it's like something has to happen where The person who is marginalized in that way has to say, you know, I want that and I'm going to want it enough that I'm going to walk up the stairs and I'm going to feel out of place and then there's the question of, well,
You know, are we going to try to be inclusive or try to understand what other bodies need?
Are we going to try to create some kind of openness or accessibility?
Do we really stand by what we say?
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, it was further, I think, underscored at the studio by, they stopped eventually, but when they used to sell merchandise, you know, tank tops and shorts for dancing and whatnot in the lobby, like it was small, medium, large, period, end of sentence.
And there were plenty of people who didn't fit into that absolute basic sizing.
Anybody who wanted to be aware that there were things that needed addressing didn't have to be there for more than a couple of weeks to look around and say, like, hey, these people aren't being served.
How can we do it better?
And it just wasn't it just wasn't focused on.
And I will cop to, you know, I am a Conventionally attractive, cisgendered, white, middle-class woman.
I absolutely floated by on a cloud of ignorance for far longer than I should have, and it's one of the reasons why I speak out so much now, is I feel like I have a lot to atone for.
Honestly.
Atoning is one thing.
I find that, like, It also just feels incredibly enriching to my inner life to recognize
the reality of these issues and to see what it does to my own sense of empathy.
Absolutely.
I think we can become impassioned about this stuff as fairly, you know, normie-presenting people in the world if we understand the capacity for wanting a better society that comes out of recognizing difference.
Yeah, there is a lot of atonement, but there's also, I find, just a sense of freedom involved in recognizing that, oh, my world can be less hierarchical than it has been in the past.
Absolutely.
That wasn't good for anybody.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, just to speak from my own experience to that, you know, I had two things especially that profoundly affected My, let's say, visceral understanding of that rather than just my intellectual understanding of that.
And one of them was that in 2013 I got pregnant.
And as my body changed, especially as I gained weight, the first thing I stopped being able to do was climb because all of a sudden I didn't have the upper body strength to lift this additional weight in my lower body.
And all of a sudden I was like, okay, you've been preaching Understanding and acceptance and letting it go slowly to all of your heavier students and bigger bodied students for all this time.
Well, this is what it feels like, bitch.
Right?
Um, so that just, that brought an incredible awareness I hadn't had again, viscerally to it.
And then, um, I think on the opposite side of that, you know, one of the things that I had, I can't remember if we spoke about this on the, on the first step, the first session that you and I did or not was that long before coming to S factor, I had an eating disorder.
And I was just absolutely, absolutely obsessed with making my body as physically small as it could possibly be.
It lasted for about 17 years.
And I credit Pohl with breaking me out of that with slowly, slowly, slowly getting into my brain.
And instead of having me laser focused on what my body looked like, pivoting me to what could my body do.
And I felt like that in a certain way did give me empathy with students in larger bodies because I felt like I was just on the other side of the mirror of having issues with food and being frustrated, you know, whether it's because you're too heavy to do something or you're too fucking weak to do something.
There's a parallel that can be drawn there and there was an empathy that I could find to where I felt like, you know, I felt incredibly honored when people whose bodies looked nothing like me found their way to my class and wanted me to be their main teacher, that they trusted me, that they felt like I was listening and teaching in a way that made them be like, okay, she's okay.
I can, you know, I can deal with how she's presenting this to me.
So you made a distinction.
You talked about the shift from a laser focus upon how my body appeared to a focus upon what it could do.
And that's kind of extraordinary, given everything that we've said about the context of pole, especially within the landscape of S-factor, having all of these issues around performativity and objectification and who's looking at who and It's wild how it worked out, it seems, that you actually were able to go into an environment that might have exacerbated all of the things that you were trying to change, but somehow the other thing happened.
Somehow there was enough pieces in there, and honestly, to be perfectly clear, I don't credit that to Sheila because I didn't work with her as one of my principal teachers.
Really ever.
I credit it to the women whose classes I happened to find myself in and taking to heart what they were communicating, you know.
And then also your own work at home, I imagine.
Yes, I mean, I, yeah.
Which is hours and hours and hours, right?
To quote somebody, you know, that I think is very funny who was talking about this, she says, you know, I, I, I don't, I'm not fabulously wealthy, but I make enough money to have a one bedroom apartment in New York City.
And if therapy was free, I'd have a two bedroom apartment in New York City.
I was like, I deeply relate to that.
Okay, we have to talk about one more thing, which is our podcast project has studied the ways in which high-demand environments and aspirational yoga and wellness disciplines have seamlessly fed into the Medical and spiritual libertarianism of COVID contrarianism and anti-mask shit and anti-vax BS and whatever.
Now, one of the things that's happening currently as we speak is that Sheila Kelly is headlining an online conference Organized by Kelly Brogan, who has recently, or at least over the last year, taken up pole as a kind of, I guess, expressive discipline for herself.
Oh, she has?
Kelly Brogan?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you check out Instagram, she is quite skilled at it.
It's a big part of her life.
But the other main personality on this slate is Christiane Northrup.
Now, both Brogan and Northrup are honorary members of the Disinformation Dozen, which means that, you know, when that report was published in 2021, in the summer, I think, it was shown that they, together with 10 other people, are responsible for producing about 65% of the total online anti-vax propaganda.
Truly mind-boggling.
Okay, so Sheila Kelly, I think the conference is called The Fierce Feminine.
That sounds on-brand for her.
Very much.
But is it on-brand?
Is it surprising to you?
Is it contradictory to you that she winds up sort of being co-platformed, which actually also means involving herself in co-promotion with people like Kelly Brogan and Christiane Northrup?
Um, not at all.
Um, as just a brief bit of sort of coincidental backstory, you know, the teacher training manual that I read from a little bit in, in our first session, one of the things included in there is an extremely long reading list of recommended books.
And one of them is, uh, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Christina Walker.
Um, this, you know, this was well before all of the, well before COVID.
So I don't know what Dr. Northrup's position on vaccines was at that time.
Back then, she was raising, I would say, ill-advised alarms over the safety of the HPV vaccine.
Oh, okay.
Gardasil has its own little microchapter in the latest edition of her big text, yeah.
Oh, fun times.
In terms of being platformed with Brogan and Northrup specifically, my impression is Sheila is delighted to have that large of a platform.
She has, I've noticed, really tried to thread a needle in terms of, like, just recently, Sheila posted something to her Instagram where she was, like, on a plane going somewhere, yeah, I'm still wearing a mask, I know, eye roll, can you believe it?
Like, she's sort of like, she's trying to be on both sides of that line.
But on this same conference, the Fierce Feminine is an influencer named Kim Anami, who came out after the repeal of Roe v. Wade to basically say that women complaining about the loss of their human rights were crybabies.
She published a screed to her blog and to Instagram called Roe v. Wade, Do I give a shit?
And you can imagine her answer.
So what about this?
Would Sheila be on board or would she want to distance herself from that or how does that work?
That is a tougher one and and I was unaware of this Kim Imani person before you sent me that um and I looked at her publicly available you know social media website and just like oh gee she seems fun like just kind of I mean to me it just looks like shit posting for attention.
I imagine that that one would give Sheila pause if only because you know On the day the Dobbs decision came out, she posted a picture on Instagram of her, like, in her underwear.
She did the same when the invasion of, I think, Ukraine started, where she posted a picture of her flipping the bird in lingerie.
And just last week at the midterm, the day of the midterm elections here in the States, she posted about, you know, her fierce inner bitch bird, I think she called it, you know, voting to not be treated like a child and have bodily autonomy and whatnot.
But again, in my opinion, Sheila would never in a million years turn down an opportunity to have such a large platform to reach so many new people.
I find it's just tragic that the influencer sphere Offers this poison chalice, really.
Absolutely.
Absolutely it does.
Of structures of, you know, viral influence and in which everybody can kind of cut their own deals with regard to what's acceptable and what isn't acceptable and who they're going to stand with and beside.
The networks all kind of function together.
It is one of those things where, again, I just think that the chance to monetize is the ultimate goal.
And also, you know, I think I mentioned Sheila's involved with this online platform called Mindvalley, and now she's doing the Kelly Brogan thing.
She is reaching out to all of these new audiences that have not been exposed to her before because Her reputation is so shit in the ones that she has been exposed to.
I don't think she'll ever open a new poll studio.
She's going to keep training teachers because she can nail them for $5,000 a pop for that training, if the pricing hasn't changed since I was involved with it.
There's no coming back.
From the reputation she had over the years to especially after that movie came out.
I mean, the whole, everybody involved in pole was so excited that that movie was coming out because it was like, there's going to be a Netflix movie about what we do.
And then they watched it and they were like, that's not what we do.
Well, Jessica, it's not what you do anymore.
No, it's not what most people in the poll world do, right?
And you get a little taste of that with the stuff that focuses on Amy Bond and her companies and Janine Butterfield and her history, right?
Well, I am very glad that you have seen your way through some of this, and also that it sounds like you've really grasped what has been valuable about the experience.
Not only You know, physically and in terms of discipline, but also it seems like all of the political issues that your involvement with this company raised really set you on a learning path that has been really beneficial.
And I think it sounds like it's led you towards some understandings of your art form and perhaps of the other things that you're going to go on to do in your life that are just going to feel more informed and more exploratory and more liberatory.
Absolutely, and I feel really privileged that that's where I have landed in all of this.
I know that a lot of people Some of this may have been influenced by just the accessibility of being able to keep, you know, keep dancing during the length of COVID.
But, you know, I know a lot of people have fallen away from pole completely because they just can't separate it from sort of the traumatic experience or just the bad experience, even if it wasn't specifically traumatic.
At S Factor, but I think I count myself really fortunate to have found myself connections to people and experiences and teachers and communities that I think are much more valuable.
You know, I've connected with people via social media who Do pole dance because they used to do it for a living and now they teach.
And it's like, well, it's much more important for me to take a workshop from you than it is to take it from somebody who's appropriating it.
You know, I have, yeah, just connected with a lot of people in different countries who are similarly minded or who pursue it because, like we were talking about at the beginning today, who love it for the athleticism and, frankly, the sense of community.
You know, one of the things that was isolating about S Factor was I was told that, you know, you definitely don't want to go take class at any other studios.
Like, they're really competitive there and it's really, it's going to be, they're going to be mean to you.
And then I actually... They're not going to hold your trauma in a communal sisterhood space.
They're not going to do that.
Well, I decided to try anyway at one point, which was the initiation of me breaking away.
And I went and started taking classes in order to prepare for a competition at another studio.
And the first one I ever did.
And there were three women total in my category.
And backstage, before the first of us went up, we did a group hug.
Like I was like I was told you would be mean and not nice to me and you're hugging me so I think I was given incorrect information.
All right, this is a good place to end.
You go to a new type of training, you're about to compete, and you meet new people outside of this high-demand environment, and unexpectedly, you embrace.
Start to see things of value that are not what I was told was valuable, which has been life-saving, honestly.
