The False Empowerment of the American Strip Tease Dancer

*Sorry this wasn't posted yesterday my mother is in the hospital again*

This one time I wrote a thesis it took about 3 years of research and revision but I wrote it. Sounds simple right? And this thesis has now been copyrighted and published. So here is the intro to my thesis because well I can.

Also you can buy my book here! http://gradworks.umi.com/15/25/1525167.html
Introduction

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate an argument made since the beginning of feminism’s

Third Wave: that the work of female strippers is empowering to the women who perform in strip clubs. Pro-sex work feminists such as Carol Leigh, who coined the phrase “sex worker,”Jill Nagle, who wrote Whores and Other Feminists, and Katherine Frank, who wrote From G-Strings to Sympathy, argue that women who strip are taking control of their sexuality and defying patriarchy. These feminist thinkers also hold that strippers are empowered because they hold the power in relation to the men they encounter in the clubs. This thesis will focus solely on the American female strip tease dancer who works within clubs. This focus was chosen because while stripping is arguably the most socially accepted form of sex work, the area of strip work is severely lacking in research and academic study. This thesis will name and systematically explore the key elements of the strip industry that serve to disempower female workers: the lifestyle which the women engage in, the protocol of the clubs themselves, the club customers, the connection strip clubs have to organized crime, and the mental and emotional state of the women within the industry. Feminism’s main goal is to try to create equality between the sexes mainly by empowering women. And in order to understand where feminism is now in regards to exotic dancers, we must first understand how feminism has evolved in regards to the sexual revolution. First wave feminists believed that women would be empowered when they had the same education level that their male counterparts had and when women had the same legal rights as men. This belief was carried on by second wave and radical feminists, with the added belief that women’s
reproductive and sexual freedom, brought on by the invention of oral contraceptives, would finally empower all women. Oral contraceptives gave women the power to control their own fertility. A woman being able to control her fertility has helped women enter the work force and stay there without having unwanted pregnancies limit the female potential in the public sphere. At the same time Roe vs Wade gave women the right to safe and legal abortions, which was yet another alternative to undesired pregnancies. But because of this new found sexual freedom two distinct factions began to emerge with very different ideas on the subject as Ariel Levy explains in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture:

On one hand there were antiporn feminists, and on the other, there were the

women who felt that if feminism was about for women, then women should

be free to look at or appear in pornography. Screaming fights became a regular

element of feminist conferences once the ‘pornography wars’ got underway in

the late seventies. The term ‘sex-positive feminist’ first came into use at this

time. It was employed by the members of the women’s movement who wanted

to distinguish themselves from the antiporn faction. But, of course, all of the

feminists thought they were being sexpostitive...[Antiporn feminists] felt they

were liberating women from degrading sexual stereotypes and a culture of male

domination and—consequently—making room for greater female sexual pleasure.

(62-63)

 Third wave feminists saw more women entering into higher education than their male
counterparts, this also meant even more women in the workforce. Due to both their college and work experience, women now had new access on a sexual and romantic level to more men. In the Third wave there still remained the problem of women’s empowerment, carried over from the second waves “pornography wars.” During this time in feminism, neo-liberal sex positive feminist politics and ideology became the dominant voice of the feminist movement. Kim Price-Glynn in her book Strip Club: Gender, Power and Sex Work discusses some of the cultural changes that were taking place at this time in American culture: “Since the late 1990s, print media and film have lavished attention on stripping and erotic dance performances, collapsing the space between deviant activities and everyday life”(34). Price-Glynn goes onto say that shows such as Howard Stern and The Girls Next Store have helped to market sex work to the general public, propelling sexpositive feminism along with it(34).

Unlike previous feminists, liberal sex positive feminists, such as Carol Leigh (In Defense of Prostitution), believe that sex work is empowering to the women who perform it and they hold that sex work is like any other job. Liberal feminists, such as Sheila Nevins the President of Documentary Films at HBO and Robin Quivers from the The Howard Stern Show, believe that equality will happen when just as many women are doing what men already are. This ideology is flawed to radical feminists, such as Catherine Mackinnon and Susan Brownmiller who were leaders of the antiporn movement, because liberals endorse the masculine as the norm that all women should strive for, and in the process alienate the feminine as “other,” which already occurs within patriarchy. Also if one carries the idea out fully then liberal feminists want as many female serial killers and rapists as there are male, whereas radical feminists want to eradicate serial killers and rapists. Neo-liberal sex positive feminist philosophy holds that strip work elevates the selfesteem of women performing it. A study done by Bernadette Barton showed that initially strippers experience higher self-esteem levels than before they started dancing (145). It also showed that stripping itself does hold certain monetary advantages, and money does give a certain amount of power to the one making it. On average, people who lack a college degree and work fulltime make approximately $21,000 a year according to the National Center for Educational Statistics website for 2010(U.S. Department of Education). However,
strippers who have this same underprivileged background stand to make on average $26,000 a year working fewer hours per week than any other legal job available to them (Price-Glynn 57). And, unlike many other jobs, stripping does have very flexible hours which makes it perfect for both students and mothers alike. The third wave’s view is that these conditions make strip work empowering for the women who perform it.
The problem that other feminists have with this argument is that stripping reinforces the idea that women are only valuable based on their sexuality: a sexuality that someone else has made and packaged for them to sell. By no means are strippers performing their own sexuality, especially those who are lesbians and perform for male clients. The research by Barton has shown that strippers do experience a self-esteem boost initially but, after dancing for six months to a year, their self-esteem takes a dive (145). And while some strippers become wealthy and can move up in the world, those women are the exception not the rule. Strippers now face a problem due to new technologies that allow men to take photographs and videos on their phones and post them on the internet, a former stripper stands to lose her job if this kind of evidence surfaces,
which will be addressed in chapter 4 with news articles from the past several years, that went public after professional women were revealed to have been former strippers and were fired from their jobs.

Since the question of whether or not strip work is true empowerment is a complex question with many avenues to explore, this thesis will focus its attention on different aspects of both the strip club industry and the lives of the women who work in these club instead of just focusing on one or the other like researchers of the past have tended to do. This thesis will also incorporate stripper narratives in order to make its argument, which is something that has never been done before. The strippers who wrote these narratives are shedding light on what the strip industry is like from the perspective of someone within it. And, while these women are not objective, they are currently the only experts on the topics of stripping and their lives. Their voices are needed in this arena because if strippers’ voices are ignored, then feminists are coconspirators in their oppression.

This thesis will focus only on narratives that appear after the 1990s because during the 1980s the industry changed into what we see today. In the late 1980s some dissent started to occur in feminist communities due to ideological shifts from radical feminism to liberal pro-sex feminism. Because of this, during the 1990s, a new wave of feminism emerged. The 1990s pro-sex liberal or neo-liberal feminists focuses on the individual and centers on individual agency. Problems arise from this idea of individualism because everything then becomes a ”choice”and any questioning of that choice means that one is eliminating an individual’s agency. Liere Keith has stated publically, at the annual Radical Feminist Conference hosted by Gail Dines which I attended in June 2011, that neo-liberalist feminism makes women compliant with their own oppression. Keith was kind enough to provide me with a transcript of her slide show for the use in this thesis. Keith explains in the slide show that radical feminists see the group as the basic unit of human society, not the individual. She also points out the radicals see that “social life is comprised of a complex political determinism and the oppressed do not make or control conditions” (Keith 1-2). Keith goes onto say that liberal feminism discounts these outside factors, such as social conditions, as having any bearing on these decisions.
This is important when it comes to the sex industry because with liberal feminism there is no delving into what outside factors influenced a sex worker to make that “choice,” if she had other options available to her, or what social constructs she would have to conform to. There also is no research currently about what happens to women who work in the strip industry after they leave it. There has been no study to show how this industry affects the lives of women later on in life. Radical feminism refutes the point that outside factors do not contribute to a person’s decision and holds that a person is limited by their social standing if they are among the oppressed which women, as a group, are. By denying classification to groups, neo-liberal feminists cannot see women as a class or group, which is at odds with all feminist ideas that came before because by definition, “Feminism is the political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class” (Dworkin qtd. in Keith 7). Radical feminists believe that the erosion of women’s rights that has gone on since the 1990s is due greatly to the influence of third wave/neo-liberal sex positive feminist thinking. Once neo-liberal feminism came to the forefront of the feminist movement the sex industry and sex trafficking both have seen a major boom in business. Erin Kuntze states that “between 1987 and 2000 the number of exotic dance clubs in the United States doubled” (9). This is not to say that third wave feminism is what created the sex trafficking and the strip industry boom; however, the conceptualization of women’s sexual liberation supported, instead of contested these ideas and cultural shifts. The sex industry has pushed its way into mainstream culture without ever modifying the power dynamics or the treatment of the female workers within the industry. Feminist thinkers and activists such as Gail Dines have started to bring light to the issues of power dynamics, racism and abuse within the sex industry. However, these feminists usually focus on one particular area of the sex industry; for example, Dines’s area of interest focused solely on pornography. The increased numbers of sex trafficking victims and the sex industry boom is a link that some feminist scholars and activists are just now realizing and exploring.
There are three kinds of research on strippers and the strip industry: studies of strippers, accounts by strippers, and researchers who pose as strippers. As mentioned before, no other work deals solely with the false empowerment of strip tease dancers, and for those works that do, they use this false empowerment as a justification for another point that they are trying to make. Most of the research done on strippers deals with life inside the club and the abuse the dancers face, whereas the narratives explore the strip clubs and dancers’ lives outside the strip club more thoroughly. In her article “Keeping Women Down and Out: The Strip Club Boom and the Reinforcement of Male Dominance,” Shelia Jeffreys discusses how strip work keeps women in a submissive role in American male dominated society (Jeffreys 183). During this decade there has also been a large number of stripper memoirs published, such as Flesh for Fantasy, which is a collection of stripper essays, and Sarah Katherine Lewis’ Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire. These works are useful as they give firsthand accounts of the lives of a strip tease dancer giving the women a chance to tell their point of view. Both of the above memoirs tell of the horrors and joys of being in the strip industry and also how they each found their way into the industry and the effects the industry has had on them. Because this thesis is researching empowerment, the voices of strippers and their firsthand accounts need to be included. The dancers may state if they believe they are empowered or not; however, their self reporting of their feelings towards empowerment is not what is always important here – but rather the stories they share of the interactions in the club and outside of it. These narratives are, in essence, long interviews that the reader can look to for insight into issues of empowerment and agency. Bear in mind that because these are firsthand accounts about the author’s lives and experiences, their views may be skewed because of how they are naturally embedded in their stories.
There is another avenue of research, and that is student researchers posing as strippers, usually for their doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis. Katherine Frank’s dissertation G-Strings to Sympathy at first focuses on the women who strip and the policies that the typical club has. However, her research and fascination quickly turn to the men who come into the strip clubs as regulars. Frank inquires as to why these men keeping coming back to the clubs, and for the customers who are married, she questions what their relationships are like with their wives. The beginning of Frank’s book focuses more on what she as a stripper encountered and then her focus shifts to the men who are her regulars and what these men think and feel about strippers.
This shift is an important element as to why stripping is false empowerment for women. The men interviewed clearly state that they come to strip clubs because they view the clubs as keeping men in their rightful place, in control. The customers are the ones with the money so the dancers must please them and act as the customer feels that they should, thusly reinforcing certain gender stereotypes. Throughout the academic research that has been published on strippers using firsthand accounts, there is one common factor: all of the women make sure that everyone in the club, including the male patrons, knows that they are there as researchers and that stripping will not be a career path for them. The repeated public announcement of their role as student/researcher and not a “real” stripper is very important as it affects the way in which not only their coworkers and customers treat them but also how they think of themselves. Both Frank and Kuntze at different points in their work, after having a bad night, reassure themselves that they are not really as strippers/waitresses but are there as students. They both find comfort in this and are able to reassure themselves of their worth – unlike most female strip club workers who do not have many other career options. This thesis will name and explore systematically the key elements of the strip industry that serve to disempower female workers. These elements will include the lifestyle which the women engage in, the protocol of the clubs themselves, the club customers, the connection strip clubs have to organized crime, and the mental and emotional state of the women within the industry. 




So that's it folks as far as the intro goes.