An article has been flitting around recently, discussing the supposedly astonishing finding that women in the UK who work at strip clubs have a one in four chance of having a degree. The intense interest in the article baffles me. I'm not sure whether it's part of the popular cultural narrative where it is felt we must race to any conclusion that ultimately vindicates and affirms the legitimacy of the sex-industry or an actual astonishment that people who dance are often as likely as about anyone else in more industrialized and developed nations to have a degree.
The first thing that struck me about the article itself was that the writer seems to be an alumnus of the Journalism School of Belaboring the Point. Honestly, ever other psuedo-paragraph the idea is hammered home that dancers are not "coerced". My issue with the article isn't with the findings reported by the study, but with the interpretation and emphasis of the writer. It is the allegation that "Women [are] motivated by career and economic choices, not coercion," that seems insipid.
To understand the banality of the statement, one must be able to peel back the layers of the society in which we live. The simple fact is that men in our culture, in our world largely, still seem to believe and accept some sense that they are entitled to women's bodies. Whether they are anti-abortion crusaders, clothing-fanatics, slut-shamers, or simply among the many men who prefer to commiserate and evaluate women among themselves in a possessive manner; men are largely socially conditioned to fight for their "right" to do these things. Even when it's not their rights that are being called into question, but their wisdom. We are so hopelessly inured to the dogma that this is natural, normal, and unavoidable that most of us who have the capacity to know better are willing to perpetuate it. Why? There are many hypotheses, my personal favorite being that consistency and predictability in society have become commodities, but that's the subject of another post.
When viewed through this skeptical lens, the article becomes yet another in a series of breathless attempts to justify the ownership of women by men. At this stage it should be noted that there is nothing inherently immoral, impure, or indecent about someone revealing their body. About titillation. About sex, and those things and ideas that are derived from it. In fact sexual repression seems to do little but inhibit the progress and well-being of society. But, the question isn't whether or not there will be stripping. Let someone else have that tiresome and directionless debate. The question is whether or not stripping will continue to take a place in the cultural landscape where the consequence is the continued objectification of women.
Unemployed new graduates - mainly with arts degress - were also dancing because they could not find graduate jobs and found that lap dancing paid much better than bar work....and yet that's not considered coercion? In any other circumstance, for any other behavior that we desire to demonize, or otherwise denormalize, or even describe in morally neutral terms- this would count as coercion. If someone started selling drugs because they could not find work with an arts degree, or if someone did do "bar work" we would describe that as a form of coercion, as evidence of a dream deferred. However, we are told by one dancer interviewed,
"I enjoy a proper strip show. I get to choose my own music, my own clothes and perform my own show..."We are being enthusiastically encouraged to believe that all of these women truly enjoy and are satisfied with the work. I don't dispute that. Far be it from me to tell someone that they secretly tell lies. I think what bothers me is the expectation, the sense that they're not supposed to, or that this is somehow bound to be a source of shame. Of course, that will get put back on the skeptics- that is we who are in fact the ones who expect dancers to feel ashamed and exploited. But it's the skeptics and even the cynics who know better. We know that some of the allure, the sense of the erotic that men derive from these experiences has a great deal to do with the posturing and their own perception of these women as being somehow exploited. We generate popular humor from the expectation:
We didn't set that expectation. That was one that has existed since the beginnings of the sex industry in the West. The origins of which are rife with the possession and effective ownership of women. The nature of what the article chooses to highlight as well, what we're told to take away from the experience, is that the women are absolutely not exploited. But there was another finding in the study that got short-shrift in the article.
However, the researchers also found dancers' welfare was often disregarded. They called for better regulation to improve dancers' safety and security, including the banning of private booths in clubs, arguing that women could be in danger when alone with customers or that standards could be lowered by women offering more than was allowed in dances. Dancers were also open to financial exploitation by the clubs who could impose charges and fines.
One dancer told researchers: "There's not enough security. I know of girls who have been raped and abused at work. You cannot go to the police as you are a stripper, so there's no legal standing."
That last line breaks my heart, and drives home the point that we, collectively, as a society, continue to expect these people to be exploited. With that expectation in mind, how is it again that this does not objectify women, or perpetuate sexism? We can certainly argue about whether the women in the industry themselves are satisfied or not- but that's actually almost a separate issue. They can be extremely satisfied, but that does not mean that they are not objectified. And that does not mean that objectification does not have its consequences for society. There is a reference here too, to who's exploiting whom,
"In a club, it's your job to flatter the men into buying private dances. It's a sales job, and the girls who do that job do it really well. You have to suss out someone's body language, look at their clothes and watch to suss out how much money they've got, and look at how they behave in the group they're in."Here, it's subtle, but there is a definite subtext, "It's not the women being exploited, it's the men!" That subtext becomes clear to a lot of men- and they will tend to feel exploited. It's not unusual for men to develop a resentment towards these women because the attention they proffer is conditional. This is because- once again (and to guilelessly belabor the point), men often feel that they possess women. It seems strange, doesn't it? To argue that women shouldn't engage in a behavior because it's the men who have a problem. Feminists rightly deride the idea so often. However when the behavior itself is entirely driven by the problematic attitudes men have, the burden of the issue itself must shift.
Overall, the article itself is nothing new. It's a habit really, part of a cycle of sensation and popular cultural vacillation on the issue. Next month, another article will be written on the matter and how another study found something different, or perhaps a debate over some new law destined to make things worse for someone somewhere. This will no doubt hit the late-night comedy shows for us to laugh at and move on. The haste to draw popular and easy conclusions about a complex issue is old hat for us by now. We should move away from tropes and common wisdom, the infographics and data-rich, insight-poor research. We need to take it more seriously than we pretend to.
