5 WHERE THE MEN AT?

Helen O’hara: If you’re looking for peak male entitlement, look no further than the New Yorker review which thought that the film might have been better had it spent less time on female friendships and more on relationships involving men: some of the clients at the club, perhaps. The film fails a reverse Bechdel test: the only time we hear men talking to each other, they’re talking about these women. But that is a rare feat rather than an everyday occurrence, so if any men are feeling victimised by not being central to the narrative, ask a nearby woman for help on how to cope.

Lorene Scafaria: Even though we’ve seen so many things in strip clubs in movies, there’s so few from the dancers’ perspective, so I thought this story was an incredible way to talk about capitalism and the economy and as it relates to gender, and our value system, which is truly broken. I was surprised how difficult it was to get the movie made. When you have male characters doing questionable and criminal acts it doesn’t seem to be that difficult for people to wrap their heads around it, but I really felt that people weren’t judging where the characters end up; they were judging where they started from. It did feel that [the movie] was wrapped up in the stigma that these dancers faced in life, strippers and sex workers, so I felt like we were off to the wrong start for people, out of the gate. I’m glad to see it resonate so much because to me it felt incredibly relatable.