Just when you think there isn’t a darned surprise left in the world, here comes the news that there’s a nightclub that’s starting to use robots as pole dancers. No, that’s not the surprise. The surprise to me is that this is happening in France, rather than in Japan.
France, of all places. The French try to retain language purity, but they don’t even have words for pole dance. Pole dance in French is pole dance. Mon Dieu!
France, of all places.
The country that gave us Cyrano de Bergerac, the poetry of Rimbaud. Jules and Jim, A Man and A Woman, Let’s Make Love. Not to mention Charles Aznavour, Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel.
And let’s not forget champagne, the Eiffel Tower, the bateau mouche, lovers smoking Gauloises in boulevard cafés, and, of course, Apache dancers.
Yikes! The French practically invented modern sex and romance.
Jacques Brel is definitely not alive and well, and I’m guessing that he’s rolling in his grave.
The robots will be deployed at a nightclub in Nantes which is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Nice touch: each r
And while they may not have much by way of their heads, you’ll be delighted to learn that the pole dancers are wearing high heels. Sexy, no?
The bots were the brainchild of British artist Giles Walker, who has overlaid their metal bodies with parts from plastic mannequins.
Referring to their CCTV camera heads, he said the robots aimed to "play with the notion of voyeurism", posing the question of "who has the power between the voyeur and the observed person”. (Source: Sky News)
It’s art like this that brings out the philistine in me. Truly, if those CCTV cameras were trained on me, they’d see a head of a philistine on my body.
When I started reading this story, my first thought was a bit of worry for the pole dancers of Nantes. Were they going to lose their jobs at France’s version of the Bada Bing?
I’ve been doing a bit of research on the future of work, and what robotics/AI/machine learning are going to mean for us working stiffs. And what it’s all going to mean is that a lot of working stiff jobs are going bye-bye, to be replaced by TBD.
But there’s good news on the Nantes pole dancer front. The robots are augmenting, not replacing, the 10 human pole dancers the club employees. Instead, the add of the robots is a “way of honoring the technology.”
Honoring technology is a pretty odd concept. Shouldn’t we be honoring people, not things? Let alone things that are out to replace us?
I don’t frequent clubs where pole dancers are featured. I don’t frequent clubs, period. That said, decades ago, I did go to what my husband recalled as a NYC jazz club which had turned into a NYC strip joint. We stayed for a beer, but what struck me the most was that the dancers – there were no pole dancers, back in the day – looked colossally bored. And that they kinda of resembled me and my friends: not much make up, decent looks and bodies, but nothing knock-out-y.
Other than what I gleaned from The Sopranos, I don’t really know what pole dancers look like, what expressions they have on their faces as they dance around their poles. Are they bored? Robot pole dancers wouldn’t be. Do human pole dancers spend their twirling-whirling time faking it for the tips? Robot pole dancers wouldn’t feel compelled to fake anything, but if they did want to fake it, surely that could be programmed in.
The robot pole dancers, by the way, don’t appear to be wearing G-strings either. So where does a patron tuck a bill? Inquiring minds…
All I know is that the world keeps getting weirder and less human-as-we-once-knew-it.
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I doff the Pink Slip cap – and that is all we’re doffing – to my friend Valerie for sending this story my way, knowing full well that I would post about it tout de suite. Merci, V.
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