The Australian Sex Party Candidate for the Bradfield by-election Zahra Stardust, aka Marianna Leishman, has won the Open Pairs category of the Australian Pole Dance Championship in Melbourne with her doubles partner Stacey.

The inaugural Australian Pole Dance Championship is the first competition of its kind to offer a men’s category, which Ms Stardust says ‘provides a long-awaited place for Australia’s talented male pole dancers to demonstrate their strength, artistry and skill, and rebut stereotypes that pole dancing only ever occurs in the context of female performers and male audiences.’ The Championship offered four divisions, including both men’s and women’s categories, a pure pole division, a couples division and an artistic freestyle division, and aimed to give voice to the varied styles of pole dancing occurring around Australia, from the circus kind to the dance-based, fitness-oriented and striptease styles of pole. Ms Stardust said that these categories ‘afford greater creative licence to all performers to express themselves on the pole the way they choose.’

Against common stereotypes of pole dancing, the pairs’ winning video game show featured the music of Mario cart, Pacman and Tetrus and a psychedelic, technicolour world in which their robotic characters malfunctioned and rebooted. Ms Stardust, who performed a French revolution narrative to Beethoven with Foxene the previous year and a voodoo ‘living dead doll’ theme to classical music and heavy metal in the finals of the solo category this year, said that ‘Australian pole dancing has become renowned for its execution of all things magic in combination with theatricality, artistry, flexibility, agility, technique and superhuman strength.’ She continued, ‘Patronised by an overwhelmingly female audience, pole dancing has been embraced for its fluid aesthetics and theatrical narratives along with its ability to engage audiences through the emotive language of dance.’

However, Ms Stardust used her win as an opportunity to speak about the number of competition rules, both domestically and internationally, that continue to be imposed upon pole dancers to reduce, regulate and police the types of female expression that are represented onstage. ‘Despite the plethora of imaginative demonstrations of what pole can be, competitions both within Australia and internationally continue to impose rules defining what pole dancing should look like, what types of pole can be represented onstage, which shades of pole are thereby allowed to emerge, and which brands of pole are publicly validated’, she said.

Further, Ms Stardust noted that many of the rules regulating pole dancing are largely inconsistent. On the one hand, it is now a requirement of Miss Pole Dance Australia for all competitors to wear ‘high heels’ (with further rules dictating the exact type of heels that are acceptable), reducing an ever expanding genre of performance into a particular and narrow mould of feminine and sensual pole display. On the other hand, the World Pole Dance Federation renounces any involvement with the sex industry and bans the winner from accepting any contracts that are erotic in nature, effectively reinforcing stigma against that same female sexual display that Miss Pole seeks to endorse.

Ms Stardust lamented that the high heel requirement imposed from 2009 will ‘severely limit the creative licence and mobility of the performers.’ While performers who involve Chinese pole tricks in their shows will no longer be able to rely on the soles of their feet against the pole, other performers may struggle to make high heels a relevant to their costuming and theme. Moreover, the rule will significantly disadvantage the more athletic pole styles, ‘try back flipping in 6 inch stripper heels!’ Performers who specialise in adagio, acrobalance, contemporary dance or gymnastic style shows will be less likely to perform their acrobatic floor combinations in stilettos.

Ms Stardust maintained that ‘if high heels are hardly a staple for competent pole tricks, hardly the sole marker of an entertaining show, hardly a core ingredient for female intelligibility, (and if anything, probably a danger rather than a preventative measure in terms of Occupational Health and Safety!) the requirement becomes an arbitrary one that confines the expanding sport to a narrow brand of pole performance and visual aesthetic- pole becomes varying degrees of one and the same. Stripper heels can certainly be extravagant, magnificent and wonderfully wicked, but they are certainly not the be all and end all of pole dancing to the extent that they should be codified, compulsory and enforced. And as for all us high heeled shoe fetishists, let us wear our six inch PVC heels out of choice, not obligation.’

While in Miss Pole Dace Australia high heels have become a requisite for pole recognition, on the other hand, perpetual runner up of the competition from 2005 - 2009 Suzie Q was prohibited from competing in the world championships because the World Pole Dance Federation, whose motto is ‘pure sport and art’, reject any association with the sex industry. If she chose to compete Suzie was asked to give up hosting mainstream lifestyle event Sexpo and told that the winner must decline any contracts or endorsements with any company that were erotic in nature. Ms Stardust commented, ‘While pole dancing has incredible things to offer the world in terms of its athleticism, strength flexibility and gravity-defying displays of artistic delight, and while this has made pole dancing particularly accessible to the mainstream, it is harmful when the fitness benefits of pole are promoted at the expense of stigmatising other types of pole dancing (including the high heeled or erotic versions), and by extension, stigmatising other types of women. In a world that continues to divide women into categories of Madonna or Whore, can pole not become an industry where women unite in solidarity to celebrate all kinds of female expression?’

Whether forcibly requiring dancers to wear a specific kind of shoe, or condemning erotic kinds of pole dancing in favour of fitness brands of pole, both Miss Pole Dance Australia and the World Pole Dance Federation police the ways in which women can express their bodies and sexuality on stage, and ultimately putting limitations upon a genre that is ever expanding and vast, said Ms Stardust. She noted that this issue was illustrative of a need for further sex education about gender and sexual variance, identity and expression, and the need for more comprehensive anti-discrimination laws and respect for people working in the adult entertainment industry. ‘As much as many of us live in a beautiful rainbow bubble in which pole is perpetually celebrated, many of us still suffer varying degrees of stigma about our beloved activities.’ She added that in NSW it remained illegal to sell X rated films and that such antiquated attitudes to sex and gender issues as seen from major political parties contributed to stereotype and stigma, hindering open discussion about and steps towards equality, freedom and harm for all individuals.