And yet asking the big questions remains important if for no other reason than, as Berson points out, “More women are employed in exotic dance than in all other dance idioms combined.”īerson was pressured during her research and writing to take a firm stance.Īs I have presented this work at conferences, many feminist scholars have demanded that I take one side or the other - that I confirm their understanding of stripping as empowering or degrading, nearly always the latter - while they look me up and down with the coolly judgmental gaze that only one woman can turn upon another.Īnyone who supports sex work and considers themselves sex-positive, while recognizing that there are problems with the industry, especially with the treatment of the dancers, will feel similar pressures. A strident for or against stance doesn’t account for the nuances. Throughout the five years I danced there were ups and downs - times I felt empowered and times that I felt the opposite. Sometimes every man I encountered seemed misogynistic. Sometimes every man I encountered seemed thoughtful and respectful - at those times, I believed I had the best job in the world. This is the same conclusion I came to as a stripper: I found the experience both empowering and disempowering.
Both groups are right, and both groups are wrong - the binary is false. Many more traditional feminists demonize exotic dance, sex work, and many kinds of sexual experience as oppressive and objectifying on the other hand, many sex radical feminists celebrate these same activities as empowering and transgressive. Whenever a feminist has taken one side or the other, Berson argues, the argument never feels convincing: She’s smart not to answer these extremely complicated questions.
She says she wasn’t sure when she was a dancer, and she isn’t sure now. But exotic dancers continue to be stigmatized, and Berson addresses this with age-old feminist questions: Is stripping empowering or disempowering? Is the fact that stripping can feel empowering really just a ruse, one that buys into patriarchy in a can’t beat ’em, so join ’em kind of way?īerson doesn’t answer this quandary, and doesn’t pretend to.
The massive global strip club chains that have developed, like Spearmint Rhino or Rick’s Cabaret, have attempted to brand their product to seem both more wholesome and more businesslike - just good innocent fun. The main premise of Berson’s well-researched book is that strip clubs have become branded entities and, as a result, are no longer seen as the dirty underground businesses that they once were. Her work is thus much more compelling than texts by researchers that maintain their distance as outsiders, or even those who dabbled in stripping for research purposes. JESSICA BERSON, author of The Naked Result: How Exotic Dance Became Big Business, worked as a stripper for approximately one year to help make her way through graduate school, and only after that decided to research and write about stripping as a business.
0 kommentar(er)
