[lbo-talk] sex at the margins

Philip Pilkington pilkingtonphil at gmail.com
Thu Mar 12 22:00:22 PDT 2009


I'm sorry to go to fundamentals, but...

I remember running into something with a sort of similar argument to this a while ago. It was an essay by an American (female) sociologist who actually became a stripper for a while. What really struck me was not so much the "overturning of morality" implicit in the essay (which seems to correlate with this study; I haven't read it, but this seems to be the angle it goes from) - that was, by contemporary hyper-sexual standards rather unimpressive - what really struck me was the conclusion of the author. She figured - and again, if I understand correctly, this is essentially the point this author is trying to make - that the women in these clubs held a certain amount of power over the customers (of course the violent criminals running most of these rackets weren't mentioned in the study I read, nor was the connection between hard drug/alcohol-dependency and the sex industry).

I mean, has contemporary feminism really come to this? From the construtivism of De Beauvoir and Kristeva to an extremely cynical variety of power politics.



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