How CAN stripping for men be feminist?
AuThoR Margaret atwood is hailed around the world as a feminist giant because of her bestselling dystopian novel The handmaid’s Tale, where women are subjugated and treated as nothing more than vessels for babies in a male-dominated future.
With the publication of its longawaited sequel this week, fans were in raptures, and Time magazine put her on its cover, describing her as ‘the reluctant prophet’. Reluctant is not the word I would use, however, given her latest outburst.
Bizarrely, she has come to the defence of female strippers, claiming their profession can be ‘empowering’ for girls and make them ‘feel in control of a room’ and their lives.
By coincidence, the 79-year-old’s outpourings coincide with the release of Jennifer lopez’s movie hustlers, where J-lo portrays just such an ‘empowered’ stripper, who’s taking control of her life by drugging her sleazy male customers, and stealing their bank cards and PIn numbers.
The truth is the sex business is never more than a hair’s breadth away from serious crime. atwood is legitimising an industry that degrades, abuses and exploits women on an unimaginable scale, treating their flesh as a commodity — as I learned when I investigated suburban pole dancing clubs for this newspaper some years ago.
one dancer I encountered, a single mum, confessed she thought it was the only way to make easy money to support her child — and then broke down in tears saying no decent man would want to marry her now.
other dancers revealed that, despite the clubs claiming to have a ‘notouching’ policy, the reality was very different. Some confessed they had customers they slept with for money.
The seediest joints all too often involve the trafficking of terrified girls miles from home, who are forced by criminal pimps to sell their bodies.
Surely it is wrong to encourage girls to go into this tawdry and dangerous industry? I would ask this of atwood.
Does the ‘empowering’ profession of stripping pass The Daughter Test? If her own child, eleanor, had said: ‘hey Mum, I’ve decided on a career removing my clothes for lascivious men,’ would she have embraced her choice? I doubt it. When a young woman strips for money she is not freeing her soul but slowly destroying it. Far from being emancipating, it is as enslaving as atwood’s wombs-toorder in The handmaid’s Tale.