Enjoyment of sexualisation and positive body image in recreational pole dancers and university students

The study aimed to investigate the construct of enjoyment of sexualisation and how it relates to positive body image. In addition to undergraduate university students, a sample of recreational pole dancers was included to demonstrate how results might generalise to an activity identified as representing both the potentially negative and positive aspects of enjoying sexualisation. Participants were 162 heterosexual Australian women aged 17–30 years from Adelaide, South Australia. They comprised 71 recreational pole dancers recruited from local recreational pole dance schools, and a group of 91 undergraduate students who were not currently participating in pole dance. Participants completed measures of enjoyment of sexualisation, self-objectification, embodiment, and positive body image. For recreational pole dancers, enjoyment of sexualisation was positively correlated with both self-objectification and embodiment which were, in turn, respectively negatively and positively correlated with positive body image. For university students, enjoyment of sexualisation was positively correlated with embodiment which was positively correlated with positive body image. Recreational pole dancers scored higher on embodiment and positive body image than university women. It was concluded that enjoyment of sexualisation is a multifaceted construct with both positive and negative aspects. Further, the sexually expressive component of enjoyment of sexualisation, in the case of embodying exercise such as recreational pole dance, may be beneficial for women’s positive body image.