cirquedusammy

Another point of view, I don't identify fully with nerd/geek/cosplay culture but I'm very into partner acrobatics/circus arts and have to say that I find it encouraging that Ren faires provide an outlet to circus performers, it's really a perfect place for people to perform and the public to be exposed to what is actually a very active but perhaps slightly hidden community of practitioners (that you don't really see outside of going to a big Cirque du Soleil show). For me, the more people who attend and are exposed to it, the better, whether they're nerds or hippies or bikers or suburban families.

I know guys who do pole but they're all hairless. I'm a hairy guy. I find this makes things difficult not because it hurts any more per se, but because it's so much harder to get friction on hairy skin, the pole slides much more easily. Do you have experience with hairy guys doing pole, or can point to any online (eg on instagram)?

Not OP, but have studied heat-related illness and death in Arizona. There is some truth to this but also presents a bias which is not always helpful in research. What we found was that there may be a significant burden of occupational-related illness and death associated with extreme summer heat which is/was potentially under-addressed and under-studied because many people working on public health policy are thinking about recreational heat exposure due to the same bias. Given a choice, people will tend to do outdoor activities when it is not extremely hot. People who work in outdoor professions, however, often do not get a choice of whether they expose themselves to extreme heat.