Stripping and Sexual Liberation

I knew someone who worked as an "exotic dancer" years ago. She was in college, taking 17 credits, active in the drama department and working on plays, working as a dancer, and also in ROTC. She was also a dominant and was a part of the club we briefly ran on campus. I'm not sure when she slept, and I have to wonder if she was on meth or something.

She invited me, along with my friend from the club, to her birthday party, at which a male stripper friend of hers performed for us, as her birthday present. We all brought singles to tip him. He put on a very nice show for us.

But one thing I remember is that her apartment was very bare. She made dinner, which consisted of a few sad slices of zucchini and some hastily thrown together spaghetti. She seemed to lack any kind of private or interior life. Everything she did revolved around her excessive commitments. She was also enthusiastically naive about her ability to extract favors from people on the basis that they shared an activity. She was sure that the theater department would happily throw together a banner for the club and even met me and my friend on campus to show us their set decorating workshops. It all came to nothing, which was pretty much what I expected. She never spoke a word about it again, and dropped out of the club shortly after, never to be heard from again.

Mistress Matisse writes very eloquently about her experiences working as a stripper, a prostitute and a professional dominatrix. She seems to have come through it unscathed, and knows women who have done the same. On the other end of the spectrum are the women in the documentary "Stripped", most of whom did not come out unscathed. Dr. Faust and I suspect that Matisse is an exception, and that she has maintained her sanity and dignity mostly through moving into pro dom work, which is so specialized and highly paid that one really can call all the shots. Further, she has a level of intelligence and creative talent that most women do not possess.

The women in the film express very similar litanies of problems. They have Daddy issues, low self-esteem, body-image issues and a seemingly endless supply of unexpressed creativity. They long to make a living doing something truly interesting and creative and find ordinary jobs to be stifling, underpaid and unsatisfying. Some of them, when given a chance to express themselves, really do have talent, and some, sadly, do not.

Several of the women in the film had plastic surgery. One of them went into a coma after complications with hers. One of the women in the film wrote about her experiences and subsequently went missing. All of them, after working as a stripper for a period of time, were psychologically damaged. Their attitudes about men became more harsh and their self-esteem only got worse. They described stripping as an "addiction."

The reality, in my estimation, is that strippers provide for their clients much more than a performance or a glimpse at something nice to look at. Strippers confirm the customers' most base beliefs about women; they confirm that women are whores and will provide for men's sexual needs as long as the money is good; they confirm that it is men's privilege to demand that women conform to their expectations and desires, and that men are entitled to judge women on that basis and express that judgment monetarily; they confirm that women are more highly prized for providing a sexual outlet than they are for doing legitimate, productive work; they confirm that women's livelihood is connected to their sexuality and that it is more proper for that livelihood to come directly from the men who benefit from it, rather than belonging to a woman in her own right.

Men who patronize strip clubs, according to the film, are very demanding of the performers. They hold the performers in contempt even as they patronize them. I see this reflected in the double standard held by many men that women who have casual sex are not respectable, and that the woman who doesn't put out is suitable for dating and marriage. In the long run, this is bound to turn out badly, since they will likely marry a woman whose interest in sex does not match his and will then turn to affairs, prostitutes and strip clubs to meet his needs. This is a behavior pattern based on deep-seated misogyny and male insecurity. Women who buy into it are likewise contemptuous of other women and treat their friends poorly.

Some people argue that men require these "extra" forms of sexual release. I don't begrudge them the opportunity to enjoy themselves, and as Dan Savage says, all men look at porn. Dan's assertion has been confirmed by the men I know. But I don't know men who regularly use strip clubs or other live sex workers. If they do, it's pretty much as a novelty, but to a man they assert that they don't enjoy the dynamic in those places, and find the other patrons objectionable. And being a lustful woman, if they're with me they're not likely to be undersexed. I'm not saying that to brag - I just happen to have a high sex drive, and few inhibitions. It seems to make sense to me that a man who is comfortable with a highly sexed girlfriend would also find these public displays of misogyny distasteful. I just wish more men felt that way.