Tits Out for the Boys
Stripping for Work and Leisure in a Post-Feminist Age
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Photograph by Vivian Bruce
Welcome to the 21st
Century: Where the Stripper Rules
We live in a time where, by all
accounts, the stripper is winning. She is rich, she is sexy, she is fascinating
and she chooses her own hours. New stripping blogs are popping up almost every
day[1]
and are guaranteed flocks of followers; Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Strip Tease
DVD has found its way into the bedrooms of middle aged ladies all over the
world; and women are frequenting the strip club as audience members in droves.[2]The
stripper seems to ‘have it all’- money, beauty and men falling at her high heel
clad feet. No longer does society look down upon the stripper, but reveres her
as an icon of feminine success.
This contemporary idolization of the stripper is rooted in the post-feminist age in which we live, and is indebted to the sexual revolution of the 1960's. Helen Gurley Brown[3],
founder of the profoundly influential women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, argued for a sexual revolution for women in her taboo
breaking book Sex and the Single Girl,
a foundational text (and woman) for post-feminist thinking of the present. In her book she criticized society’s insistence
on the pure, virginal woman and asserts a new, sexually assertive and
successful feminine lifestyle. She encourages her readers to use their bodies
and good looks to get what they want from men, and from life; and if you don’t
have it, fake it. The stripper embodies Brown’s manifesto for the confident,
sexy single girl; her body is her success, men universally desire her and women
envy her. The stripper is not a victim at all, but an idol of feminine success
and confident sexuality, a figure for the common woman to look upon and
emulate.
Reality Check
Back in the present, in a dim and overheated room, a
young woman with long curly blonde hair and full round buttocks parades herself
on a pole filled stage. Eyes follow her every movement; hungrily, they consume
her image. Her movements are not subtle, there are no hints or suggestions. If
her dancing were a poem, it would be a very bad one; no metaphors in sight,
only one dimensional facts. It would be written in bullet points. What normally
remains behind closed doors is imitated, re-presented in the most public and
flashy way possible. Except, it’s not a whole representation. There is
something missing; an invisible other, an intended recipient for all her
grinding and shaking. I realise, not wholly comfortably, that this intended
other is me.
Well, not actually me, not exactly.
I’m not going to give anyone tips, and considering that we have just spent the
last half hour talking about her children backstage she probably knows this.
All that work, energy and effort has been for the three lone men who occupy
Dunedin strip club "Stilletos" at the considerably early hour of 10:30pm on a
Thursday night. I hope for the girls’ sake that the club fills up later; the
lack of audience makes the whole thing feel that much more sleazy. I've been
sitting in the audience for about 20 minutes when I realise that I have adopted
the same position the entire time; stiff, perched on the very edge of my seat,
hands folded over my notebook like a primary school student in their class
photo. Casually, I try to re-position myself into a more natural pose. How do I normally sit? I try leaning
back into the chair, with arms at my sides; I look like a body stoned
jellyfish. What about crossed legs? It feels much too prudish for the
situation. I slink back into the changing rooms where the dancers fluff about
with shoes and lacy panties; it feels much more comfortable back there.
The dancer remains on the stage.
When I met Lexie (her stage name) a few minutes earlier, I was struck by her
quiet and reserved demeanor During the tom foolery and back stage antics, she
sits in the corner clutching her black jacket closed and quietly smiling to
herself. With two young children (both girls), horse riding and working late
into the night, she manages to catch her sleep in fleeting afternoon naps. When I ask to hear more about her children I brace myself for the bombardment of
excited information that most breeders respond with when given permission to
discuss their kids. She tells me she prefers not to think about them when she
is here. Once she takes to the stage, it is not difficult to understand why;
when Lexie dances, it is not her depth that the men want to see. No children.
No horse riding. No life or personality. Just a body, an object, a thing to fantasize over. Possess. How, in any way, can stripping be positive? How can
being reduced to a husk of a human in the eyes of three grubby old men be in
any way enjoyable or empowering?
Sexual Liberation vs Second Wave Feminism
Second wave feminism, as you may
imagine, had a slightly different take on the stripper than Brown and post-feminism of the present. Important
feminist figures such as Laura Mulvey argued that women were the bearers rather than
the makers of meaning; their bodies represented the desire of men, not the
sexual agency of themselves. [4]. The
theory of the male gaze, that is a powerful and dominating gaze that fashions
women in accordance with male sexual fantasy and seeks to abolish their agency
by turning them into a fetishised object, saw the construction of women as a
sexual object as the underpinnings of sexual imbalance in society. The stripper
in second wave feminist thought was not a feminine idol but a symbol of female
oppression. The stripper fulfilled the role that patriarchy desired of all women; silent, sexual and
subservient to their demands. So while Brown and sexual revolutionists (the
other most notable figure for the sexual revolution in the 1960’s being Hugh
Heffner) saw women’s embracing of sexiness as the key to female empowerment,
second wave feminists saw traditionally sexy appearance, behaviour and
practices as the key to female oppression. And so the stripper becomes a dichotomised
and fractured symbol; she is either the ultimate good or the ultimate evil. As
the stripper gets tossed around from theorist to theorist, sexual revolution to
second wave feminism, where does the humanity of the stripper register? A
symbol has no voice of her own, no way to communicate her own feelings and
opinions of the complicated position that she occupies. It’s time to move away
from the stripper as symbol and approach this topic with a clear and distinct
knowledge that a stripper is a complex human, occupying a complex role for
complex reasons. So, too ,are the women who emulate her.
Hope you enjoyed the first section of "Tits Out for the Boys". Catch up next week for a look at Burlesque and Pole Fitness!
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