Investigations of a Dog

I’ve been reading Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture by Catherine Roach, which is really good and has made me think about lots of things. These are some random observations about it or inspired by it.

The book is mostly about female strippers, although it does include a bit on male stripping. Male and female stripping seem to be vastly different cultures with hardly any overlap. Knowing about one doesn’t tell you much about the other, but comparing them says a lot about gender ideology in general. From here on you can assume that when I used the words “stripper” or “dancer” I’m talking about a woman, not a man.

Strippers subvert and resist patriarchal norms at the same time as replicating them. The whole book is about rejecting false dichotomies and recognising that something can be two or more contradictory things at the same time. “Is stripping empowering or demeaning?” is a stupid question. The only answer is “it’s more complicated than that”.

The seats right at the front of the stage near the tipping rail are often called “pervert row” by the dancers. I’m fascinated by the ways that the concept of perversion can used to delegitimize almost any form of sexuality or interest in sex, no matter how unperverted it is. What could be more heteronormative than a man looking at a naked woman? And yet this can commonly be labelled as “perving”. Men generally get a much better deal out of sexual double standards than women do, but their sexual freedom is still limited by those standards.

Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature (which I’m going to have to read – I got a copy off Amazon for only 1p!) includes a chapter on woman as show horse, which is very relevant to some of my ideas about how patriarchy blurs boundaries between women and horses. Roach contrasts this with a burlesque song called “Pony Girl”, in which the dehumanizing misogyny is ironically subverted by being both reduced to absurdity and reclaimed as a source of submissive pleasure. I’m not sure if Roach realized that this is an actual fetish which people really do, but its existence only strengthens her point. Men and women actually do find freedom and fulfilment by roleplaying ponies, and they can swap gender as well as species. I’ll probably have to write more posts about pony play at some point because it’s really interesting in terms of gender, sexuality, animal-human boundaries, subversion, resistance etc.

Pole dancing requires serious upper body strength. This is interesting because even Joshua Goldstein considered upper body strength to be one of the main limiting factors on women in combat roles. But some dancers prefer not to train in advanced pole tricks because the muscles they develop can be perceived as unfeminine and even intimidating by male clients. Just another way that patriarchal ideology makes women’s bodies conform to stereotypical ideals. Culture influences not only perceptions of reality, but reality itself. The stripper’s body is “clearly not natural, but is a construction and artefact of the culture” (p. 45).

Many dancers say they like wearing dangerously high heels because the shoes make them feel sexy, confident and powerful. (But could there be a difference between feeling powerful and actually being powerful? How does their experience compare with other women who are required to wear high heels at work?) This feeling seems to come mostly from the added height that they gain. Most women are shorter than most men (Goldstein’s figures, based on American 18 year olds, show that on average men are 8% taller than women, and that only 15% of women are taller than the shortest man). Being able to look down on them is a new and exciting experience. This ties in with Peter Edwards’s point that in early-modern England horses helped to reinforce authority because a man on a horse could literally look down on people on foot. Dancers would only ever wear their stripper shoes at work, and consider it “sluttish” for non-strippers to wear them in other contexts. Double standards manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Strippers can be patriarchal collaborators at the same time as challenging patriarchy by looking down on men. The dancers interviewed generally tend to define themselves in opposition to prostitutes. One of them describes a foot fetishist as “sick”. Not much sex-positive solidarity here, but this shows how patriarchy puts strippers in a position where they have to distance themselves from other kinds of sex workers, and from non-mainstream sexualities, in order to claim some legitimacy for stripping. It looks like a win-win situation for patriarchy. Closing down strip clubs isn’t going to end patriarchal equilibrium, but keeping them open isn’t either.

The need for dancers to play a role while interacting with clients can be alienating, leading to a false self. Having read Stephen Greenblatt, I’m not convinced that there is such a thing as an authentic self against which a “false” self can be judged. Following Judith Butler, Roach does emphasise that gender is always a performance, and that the gender performed by strippers is a hypersexualised, hyperfeminine version of an ideal woman. Stripping does seem to have an emotional/psychological cost, but is this caused by the ideology of authenticity and sincerity as much as by the falseness of the performance? Might Holden Caulfield have been happier if he admitted that “we are all phoneys”? If a performance in a strip club can be as good as the real thing, why not everywhere else too? And how can we know the difference? Is it that the stripper’s performance is too hyperreal to be real?

The “popular culture” in the title refers to the way that stripping has gone mainstream as what Roach calls “stripper culture”. Poledancing lessons are popular with lots of women, the stripper look is all over mainstream fashion, and stripper thongs are being marketed to pre-teen girls. One thing that struck me about this, which Roach doesn’t go into much detail about, is that by appropriating some aspects of stripping and taking them out of their previous context, the mainstream has effectively made stripper culture more patriarchal and misogynistic. Girls can go out dressed like strippers, but they don’t get the benefit of tips, bouncers, or no touching rules. They assume the semiotics of hypersexualized hyperfeminine availability, but without the protection, empowerment or profit that some strippers can get in well run clubs. Maybe that’s another reason why the real strippers call them sluttish.

Consent to work in the sex industry can be compromised by poverty. Consent is less meaningful when there is a limited range of choices on offer. Sex-positive feminism is not about complacently saying that sex work is OK, but about increasing the range of choices available and improving working conditions for those who do choose to do sex work. Carol Leigh: “the problems of prostitution don’t get solved until the problems of poverty get solved” (p. 131). Maybe the problem of patriarchy should be added to that, but patriarchy and poverty go together.

As a final thought, I wonder what would happen if a man went to a strip club in drag? How would it affect the gender dynamics? How would the dancers and other clients react? Would he even be allowed in?