Is Stripping (or Being a Video Vixen) a Feminist Act?
The objectification of women has been a hot topic here and elsewhere lately. Let’s face it. From the adult dancer/college student/single mother who accused Duke lacrosse players of rape to the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team to nearly every song on urban radio and every video on BET, women are viewed by society as sexual objects.
But in an era of Girls Gone Wild, video vixens, strip clubs in every city, Internet porn, King, Maxim, Playboy, Hustler, etc., how much responsibility do women have for objectifying themselves? By choosing to bare their assets for money, attention or both are they seizing the power or are they allowing themselves to be sexual puppets to male desire?
In an article on Alternet, adult entertainer turned author Sarah Katherine Lewis confronts the question from a feminist standpoint, “If a woman chooses to objectify herself — shedding her clothes to obtain power through money — is she helping to eliminate gender inequality or simply degrading herself?”
She lays out both sides of the argument:
It’s almost as if sex work is the most feminist thing a women can do — because if women are objectified every minute of every day against our will and without any personal benefit, why not grab the reins on that process and make a decent living wage at it? If women’s bodies belong to everyone, some feminists argue, why not be the ones to profit from our own bodies instead of being consumed for free?
Or…
The opposing narrative about sex work is that it’s never a feminist act — that by collaborating with the enemy (i.e., the patriarchal view that women’s bodies are, by definition, public entertainment), women harm themselves and enforce old, harmful views about women as erotic property.
But the most telling point of Lewis’ piece is when she gets down to the dirty truth - most of the women who become sexual entertainers or sex workers do so for the money.
When I wasn’t able to afford the things I needed to live, I didn’t feel like a feminist. I didn’t feel strong and proud — a sister in struggle to the kind of college-educated white-collar women who would run me ragged and then sail out of the restaurant without tipping me. I didn’t even feel human. There is nothing more objectifying than poverty.
