The Professional

We tend to put people in boxes based on their professional lives. We think we know what they should do with their free time. But real people, I’ve come to find out, aren’t always so predictable.

Eve was fourteen when she decided to join the army. She remembers seeing soldiers in the street in their uniforms, and asking her mum, “What do they do? They look really cool.”

When she first tried to follow her ambition, a few years later, Eve was quickly shut down. The recruitment officers  looked at her predicted A-level grades and suggested she was too bright to be a soldier. She’d get bored. Training to be an officer would suit her much better.

In retrospect, they were probably right about getting bored. Before she even started the officer training, Eve gravitated to a new passion: pole dancing. It began as just a way to make some female friends during her gap year, but she quickly fell in love with the sport.

When I met Eve five years later, she was finishing up a degree in mechanical engineering, President of the university Pole Dance Society, and well on her way to becoming an army reservist. I asked the obvious question: “How do you do it all?”

“I have my schedule, and I stick it,” was her straightforward answer. “My calendar is booked, so I know what I’m doing up until, I think, July.”

Unflappable, unapologetically herself, and an insanely talented pole dancer to boot, it seemed like there was nothing Eve couldn’t do—or at least fit on a calendar.

For all of Eve’s sheer force of will, though, no degree or qualification can shield her from the fact that she operates in a series of male dominated fields.

Most of the pole dance studios in London are owned by women, and Eve’s experiences as a pole dancing instructor have been overwhelmingly positive. When she’s dancing in clubs, though, it’s a very different world. Men dominate as managers behind the scenes, as well as in the audience, and that creates a power imbalance that shapes Eve’s performance long before she even steps on stage. “You definitely feel like you have to play up a certain part of yourself to fit the role they are wanting to book,” she tells me. Sometimes it’s a part that “maybe doesn’t even exist.”

Pole dancing clubs are hardly the only working environments shaped by gender, women made up only 15.9% of Army Reservists. Eve occupies a similar statistic within of the engineering workforce, in 2023 only 15.7% of engineers were female, according to Engineering UK, and that reality has shaped Eve’s experience as she embarked on her career. “When I’m talking to men,” she told me, “I tend to lower my voice.” It’s just one tiny example of how she’s had to change herself to meet the expectations of the men around her.

Whether it’s the masculine way she presents herself in the professional world of mechanical engineering, or the hyper-feminine persona she was expected to have when being booked by male talent agents, it’s the same archaic patriarchy demanding a performance. Soldiers, I’m told, put on “war faces” to psych themselves up for violence. Maybe the other masks Eve wears are something like that, too?

Eve isn’t convinced. “This is like therapy,” she laughs.

One thing that’s changed since Eve started pole dancing is her attitude towards the world of sex work and the women involved in it.

There’s a concept, she explained to me, called “the whorearchy”—a sort of scale of value among sex workers, according to how close they have to get to customers. It’s really a scale of vulnerability, and it should come as no surprise that trans women and women of colour fall disproportionately at its more dangerous end. According to the whorearchy, pole dancers are a rung above strippers, and pole fitness is a different thing again.

When Eve started out in the sport, she was anxious not to be confused with a pole dancer, or anyone else on the scale. I remember her once calling someone out, at a pole class, for referring to her shoes as “stripper heels.”

Part of the issue is that, as a reserve officer, there are strict rules keeping the two worlds apart. Eve can class pole fitness training sessions as part of the mandatory exercise regime that all reservists have to undertake. What she absolutely can’t do, as far as the army is concerned, is advertise any paid content or sex work.

Over the years, though, Eve’s perspective on the whorearchy has shifted.

Rather than trying to build walls between the women who use pole dancing for fun and fitness, and those who use it to make money, she’s found that it’s better to embrace the diverse choices women make. Always a strong advocate for poles as an inclusive and safe space, she has begun to use her voice on issues that face all kinds of pole dancers, without judgements about their motives or status.

Eve thinks the professional pole space is getting better, too—safer and more inclusive. “I’ve only been in there for five years. I know people have been in it for like 15 or 20. It’s definitely come a long way, and I think it will keep going.”

Eve doesn’t see her different roles as equally important. It makes sense to prioritise her most reliable source of income and fit everything else around that. Her engineering job comes first, the military second, and pole dancing third.

“I don’t see myself becoming a pole dancer full time,” she says. “I think it’s a great ambition but the people I know who do it full time find it quite stressful. And it is quite a lot on the body.” Just because she has made one set of choices, though, doesn’t mean that she looks down on those who do things differently.

Eve still feels like she faces judgement in her professional life, in her 9-5 she faces glass ceilings and stifling male-female ratios. In her creative pursuits she dances around issues of patriarchy and maltreatment, but a woman doesn’t live her life as Eve does without becoming resilient.

The worlds that Eve participates in are so different, and yet so similar—tied together by power and patriarchy, and by the masks women have to wear. Eve manages it with little more than some pole chalk and a digital calendar that she ensures is always backed up to the cloud. Some might say that she’s a real-life Wonder Woman, but for her every day is a new opportunity to grow, to create, and to improve upon the things that really matter.