joanna bujes wrote:
> >OK. I'm very willing do be educated. Please explain to me how a
> strip club
> >is liberating for either the performer or the audience.
Ok, let's look at how it *can* be liberating, because any situation can be both liberating or smothering, depending on the circumstances and the individuals involved. And again, I'm limiting my conversation here to feminism and women (of all makes and models) as both stripper and strippee.
The strip club can be liberating as a tool to open and explore sexuality and gender expression, first of all. Kel was correct in assuming that what I am getting at is that gender expression is a fluid continuim, an evolution, as it were, for both individuals and the societies in which they live.
Kelly wrote:
> If gender expression is fluid, slipping along the signifying chain,
then
it's not so easy to put people into boxes and "cut into their
psyches"
>("you will find I'm done before starting with you" -- Imperial
Teen).
Exactly. Once you put the individual in the "box" you have disallowed their potential to move beyond the point they are at. Some will choose to stay, but others will choose to move on. Limiting that ability is not liberating.
I mentioned this conversation to some other crones at work, both hetero and lesbian, a combo of plaintiff/litigation law firm personnel that included associates and paralegals. Except for those with religious beliefs disallowing anyone stripping anywhere except behind a closed bedroom door, the overwhelming consensus was that there is no one singular "correct" reason or cause/effect for what the strip environment allows or disallows. Certainly there are strip environments that have high incidences of drug abuse, kickbacks, prostitution or sexual abuse, but the same could be said of some law firms, schools or churches. One associate admitted her room mate in law school stripped, and it paid her way thru school and led to a lucrative and respectable career in family law. Another woman pointed out that if everyone assumes the stripper is always the "victim," then they should rethink just who has the most power in a strip club. It is the stripper, after all, who is controlling the client and manipulating them to put money in the g-string. All agreed that stripping, or to go to a strip club, was an option, not a mandate. Take away the option, however, and you've created a mandate, a mandate to not explore down that road and a judgment on all who choose to do so regardless of gender.
Let's not assume that the strip experience is always a repetitive compulsion, either. A woman many go into a strip club one time in their life and it be an incredibly liberating experience if they come away from the experience less inhibited about their own sexual or gender expression. I know a woman who went into a strip club as a litmus test to see if she was really gay after having doubts after a break-up. One lap dance later and friendly conversation with the sympathetic dancer reaffirmed her identity and confidence. If she'd gone to a sex therapist, we'd probably be having a different conversation, but why? And why not?
The opportunities for both stripper and patron, then, are as varied as the individuals involved. And that involves choice, which I believe is the mantra word for most forms of liberation, including feminism.
>Which brings us to something Deb said, which is probably another fundamental premise which makes having the conversation pretty difficult. If you think that sexual objectification is bad and that it defiles the the act of sex, then you end up putting yourself in the position of trying to define when, where, why, how objectification is acceptable. What's the demarcation point?
Again, right on point to what I'm arguing, but I'd go one step further and add that I feel there is also an underlying assumption that having sexual power is assumed to be bad and defiling, and I think that is, once again, too general a sweep of the hand. If the gaze (of sexual objectification) is wrong, then doesn't that assume that an invitation to the gaze is wrong, as well? I don't think so.
And participating in the strip act requires both active and passive participation and an exchange of power as one participant willingly allows the other to manipulate them.
"Power" however, has bad connotations with some feminists, and one assumption is that dominance over another individual invokes the ghosts of the male patriarchal system. But if gender expression is fluid, this assumption is hogwash, because "power" comes from both ends of the gender spectrum. Years ago, in _Shakespeare's Division of Experience_, Marilyn French contrasted the stereotype of female "power" of giving life, nurturement and intuition against the male's "power" to destroy, hunt and kill and then applied both characteristics to both male and female characters in Shakespeare's plays. (Oversimplification of the thesis, but I'm running short on time here.) I'd suggest that same cross-mix of gender power occurs in the strip club, grocery store or even S&M parlor where the dominatrix is wielding the female uterus (as opposed to the lesbian phallus?) over her charge.
MOre later...Etheridge tickets just went on sale online...
- Deborah R.
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