Below is an excerpt from an AlterNet post on the issue of porn (and stripping, etc), its impact on women and feminist response to it:
Read the full post and comments »
By
Leanne Shear[...]
Part of the reason why we took the class in the first place is because my girlfriends and I tend to consider ourselves pretty adventurous and free-spirited. A few months back we started regularly going to (female) strip clubs and getting the occasional lap dance, while the mostly male clientele licked their chops. However, suddenly two things made all of that a lot less alluring for me — and one of them wasn’t that every time I tried to swing around the pole, I got dizzy and my sweaty hands caused me to land in a heap on the floor.
First, taking the strip class put me square in the stripper’s shoes (heels), right there on the stage, under the flashing lights. Second, and more importantly, reading Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy gave insight into the mind of the stripper, and the overall rampant pornification of our culture at large.
Levy writes about the proliferation of “raunch culture,” which, regardless of my self-proclaimed staunch feminism (women can make any choices they want!), I have been unwittingly engendering by doing things like going to strip clubs. Levy says in raunch culture, it’s the norm that “all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual … and the only sign of sexuality we seem to be able to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment.”
All during strip class, Daphne kept repeating the mantra ad nauseum: everything we were learning was for “[our] man.” To me, empowerment signifies control — and the man-centric philosophy strip class (not to mention the whole stripping industry) seemed to espouse flew in the face of female control, either in society or just swinging around the pole.
Empowerment in my view is also about equality — and if all things were equal, would women necessarily want to be stripping for the greasy dollar bills that men throw at them with the same hand that wears their wedding bands? If my experience is any indication, I don’t think so. Proponents of “female liberation” might argue that some women are really comfortable with their bodies and like what they do with that pole, but as Ariel Levy says so perceptively, “because I am paid to is not the same thing as taking control of my sexuality.” Liberation implies we have broken the chains that have bound us to our status as sexual inferiors, and as Daphne’s sultry intonations suggested, that’s definitely not the case.
Ms. Levy continues, “The vast majority of women who enter the [stripping] field do so because they are poor and have no more attractive alternative” — and they stay poor. It really unsettled me to discover that I, as a “feminist,” would exploit one woman’s lack of power in the name of my own empowerment. This sort of hypocritical “empowerment for sale” mentality strikes me as another layer of conspiracy in the race to keep women down, and indicative of the fundamentally economic nature of the inequality of the sexes.
If we were smart and really empowered, we women would use our economic power to take sex out of the equation. Similarly, Female Chauvinist Pigs quotes Erica Jong as saying “sex is not power — women in decision-making positions — that’s power. When the senate is 50 percent women, that’s power. Sexual freedom is a smokescreen for how far we haven’t come.”
In a perfect world, I’d love to be able to be judged for something other than my physical appearance, and for something other than just my sex. Strip class taught me though that at least for the moment and to the detriment of all women, even the rare few who actually hold truly powerful positions, achievement for us is tied to sex.
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