by Jackson Katz
It is one thing to argue that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body, which includes taking her clothes off for men so she can put clothes on the backs of her children. But for anyone to say that stripping is an expression of women’s sexual freedom or empowerment is laughable, given that most men read it as confirmation of their degraded “whore” status. In fact, this is how some men think about all girls and women who dare to be explicitly sexual—not just strippers. This presents young heterosexual women with a difficult dilemma as they try to negotiate the line between sexual self-expression and physical safety in a world where men’s violence is a common occurrence. Lynn Phillips thoughtfully explores some of these challenges for young women in her book Flirting With Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination (2000). The disconnect between what women intend when they express themselves sexually and how some men interpret that expression also helps explain the ongoing debate about the legacy of the pop star Madonna. Madonna is celebrated by many in the media and academia for being an unapologetically sexual woman and artist who is unafraid to transgress the boundaries of proper femininity. But as noted by the cultural theorist Elayne Rapping, Madonna’s critics argue that the many young girls who imitated her dress and style were likely to be met, in the real world, by a male public very much in the dark about the liberatory intent of the pop diva’s work. Or as a sixteen-year-old boy in a detention center in the mid-1980s said to me when I asked him what he thought of Madonna, “Boy, I’d like to fuck her.”
Women who work as prostitutes and strippers are routinely subject to brutal violence from pimps and johns, and they are a favorite target of serial killers. They live in a dangerous world, where they never know if the next john they meet will kill them, or if the polite schoolteacher who sits in the front row at the strip club will turn into the stalker from hell. This ever-present danger is one of the reasons why so many women in the sex industry develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. There have been numerous media stories in recent years about a trend in high-end strip clubs toward friendlier environments for women patrons, and some women who describe themselves as feminists claim to be empowered by the experience of watching other women take their clothes off. But no matter how many positive stories the strip industry tries to sell to a public eager to avert its eyes from sexism and exploitation, women strippers remain particularly vulnerable to harassment, abuse, and violence from men—inside and outside the clubs.
A particularly tragic example of this took place in June 1996, in Peabody, Massachusetts, on the north shore of Boston. A tall, blond, twenty-sevenyear-old woman, Kristen Crowley, stopped at a Mobil Mini-Mart on her way home from work one night to pick up a can of ravioli and some water and soda. It was around midnight, and two drunk white men, Timothy Dykens, twenty-three, and John Keegan, twenty-five, were in front of the store, talking to the nineteen-year-old clerk, who was having a cigarette. Earlier, the men had been drinking in the Golden Banana, a local strip club where women danced in cages. Keegan reportedly saw Kristen get out of her car and said to Dykens, “Wow, look at that. I want a piece of that.” The nineteenyear-old clerk, perhaps in a spirit of male-bonding, shared a piece of titillating information with his temporary acquaintances.
“She’s a stripper,” he said.
“You know what we’ve gotta do,” said Dykens. According to the clerk he repeated the phrase several times.
Kristen made her purchases and left the store to drive home. The clerk watched as the two men got in their car and followed her back to her condo complex, where they jumped her as she walked across the parking lot with the bag of groceries. They dragged her to a ravine where they tore off her clothes and tried to rape her, and then smashed her skull with a large boulder and left her to die, just a few dozen yards from where her husband of eighteen months sat in their apartment, awaiting her return. Not surprisingly, media accounts of the murder highlighted Kristen Crowley’s part-time work as a stripper at men’s private birthday and bachelor parties: “Dancer murdered in Peabody.” “Jury selection begins in dancer murder.” The victim-blaming undertones were subtle but unmistakable. There is a well-established narrative in this culture that sexual women get punished for their freedom and libido. It is a favorite theme in Hollywood films, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where Janet Leigh plays the sacrificial sexy blond whose brutal and eroticized murder scene in the shower has titillated audiences and wowed critics for more than four decades.
What was not explored in great detail in the media coverage of this horrific murder was the connection between the men’s patronage of a strip club earlier that night and their crude objectification of this woman. There wasn’t even much discussion about whether their discovery that she was a stripper contributed to the crime. There was only one substantial piece in the mainstream Boston media that suggested a relationship between strip culture and men’s violence against women. It was a November 1996 article in Boston Magazine entitled, “Pretty Girl Dead,” by J. M. Lawrence, and I have used it to draw some of the facts of the case for this account. But few people in media seemed eager to examine some of the critical questions raised by this murder: Do men who frequent strip clubs learn to objectify women even more than men who do not? If men are already misogynistic and angry with women, do certain aspects of strip culture—like women in cages—validate their feelings of superiority and feed their contempt? How do men read the act of women taking off their clothes for men in public? What are some of the differences between men in the way they interpret this experience? No doubt some men remain unfazed by all of the sexist trappings of strip culture, and simply like to stare up at the stage and fantasize about having sex with an attractive woman. They see it as just another type of entertainment, some eye-candy in the background while they have a few drinks. But other men have less benign intentions. For them, strip clubs are places where they feel special license to vent their hostility toward sexual women. A former stripper I know tells this story:
One time I was on stage dancing and this guy walks up to the stage and waves a $100 bill in front of me and gives me a wry grin. I remember being so happy because no one had ever given me a tip that big. When I bent down and opened my garter for him to put the money in, he yanked it back, called me a slut, laughed, and walked away.
Would it have made any difference if someone had confronted Timothy Dykens and John Keegan earlier in the evening when they were making tasteless and vulgar comments to strippers at the Golden Banana? Probably not. How about earlier in their lives? Would Kristen Crowley still be alive today if someone a little older and wiser had provided better guidance for them years before, when they were young and impressionable, and still learning how a decent man is supposed to treat women?
J. M. Lawrence reported in the Boston Magazine piece that the name of the Mobil Mini-Mart clerk was impounded by request of the district attorney’s office after he was threatened by a man claiming to be a member of Hell’s Angels. She also quoted one of Kristen’s friends, who said she did not blame the nineteen-year-old clerk for the murder, although his comment (“She is a stripper”) might have triggered the entire episode. “He was just a kid,” the friend said. “It was just guy talk to him.” It is probably safe to assume that he wishes he had not been “one of the guys” that night. The other guys in the case surely have their own regrets. Dykens is serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Deegan was convicted of murder in 1998 but will eventually be eligible for parole, after his lawyer convinced the jury that his client was too drunk to lift the boulder that killed Kristen Crowley.
HUNTING FOR BAMBI
At first it seemed like either a crude satire or an elaborate hoax. Or maybe it was true. In July 2003, a Las Vegas television station broke the news about a new business, called Hunting for Bambi, where men in camouflage outfits hunted naked women and shot them with paintball guns. The idea of men paying thousands of dollars to shoot women dressed in nothin
g but tennis shoes and hiding behind bushes in the Nevada desert was at first too outrageous for many people to believe. The news sped rapidly across the Internet, and then made a rotation on the 24/7 cable news channels. The story made great TV: it combined a titillating Las Vegas mix of sex and violence, and it came complete with homemade video footage of naked women scampering around outdoors.
The concept of this new business was so over the top that the rational response, at first glance, was to think the entrepreneurs responsible were simply looking to profit from the shock value of their demented idea. This is a tried and true marketing strategy. Outrageousness sometimes does move product. Hence the dilemma faced by women’s groups and others: how to fight back? If they responded with outrage, it would fuel the controversy that brings free media, and even more people would be exposed to the offensive product. On the other hand, if they ignored it, they would run the risk of sending the message that men pretending to kill women for sport was not only socially acceptable but might even be profitable. Cultural critics also faced a dilemma in seeking to understand this phenomenon. Should they treat Hunting for Bambi as a cultural aberration—in which case the media storm that surrounded it could be viewed as the response of a healthy society to a violation of its central norms? Or should they treat this new “pastime” as a chilling but nonetheless understandable development in a culture where the objectification of women is common and men’s violence against women is in the news on a daily basis? There is no doubt that it was more comforting to think of Hunting for Bambi as an aberration, because the focus then would not have been on “normal” men, but on the amoral businessmen who created it and the pathetic wackos who supposedly paid big bucks to play the game.
Soon after the initial burst of publicity, the urban legends website Snopes declared that Hunting for Bambi was a hoax. Eventually the promoter, Michael Burdick, acknowledged there were no actual hunts—they were staged for TV news as a way to sell Hunting for Bambi videos. Many media commentators breathed a sigh of relief, grateful to hear that our culture had not yet sunk quite that far. But why did so many people easily believe there were men who were willing to pay thousands of dollars to play out murderous fantasies about stalking and shooting women like scared animals? For that matter, why are there men who would buy a video that depicts this? And as the sociologist John Glass pointed out, why should the actual hunt be considered degrading to women, but a video of it should not? As of this writing, the video is still available for purchase on Amazon.com, where one reviewer called it “Lewd, crude, and funny . . . watch this video at a bachelor party or at a hunting camp and roll on the floor laughing.”
The Hunting for Bambi controversy did not appear out of nowhere. It emerged in the context of a broader entertainment culture where the degradation of women has been normalized, and male sexual aggression celebrated. Is the idea underlying Hunting for Bambi so unbelievable? Not when you consider that in the U.S. in the early twenty-first century over ten thousand new porn videos are produced each year, with titles like The Stalker, Flesh Hunter, and Anal Intruder; or that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a video game that gives players the opportunity to simulate sex with a prostitute and then beat her to death is one of the all-time leaders in video game sales. Men’s violence against women—or the minimizing and excusing of it—was a pervasive presence in our entertainment culture long before Hunting for Bambi came on the scene. Still, there is something revealing about this ugly episode. While media stories about this new form of “adult” entertainment focused mostly on the degradation of women, the fact that so many people believed the Hunting for Bambi hoax says more about how we feel about men than it speaks to how we view women. During his deception, Michael Burdick—who named his company Real Men Outdoor Productions—told the Las Vegas TV station KLAS that the majority of men who paid the $5,000 to $10,000 to play the game were the submissive, quiet types. “For the individual who’s used to saying, ‘I can’t go out with the boys tonight,’ or the wimp of America,” he said, “it’s a chance for him to come out and vent his aggression and really take charge and have some fun.” No such authentic individual was ever identified. But it is a fair bet that Burdick markets the video of the staged hunt to men who fit that description. It is an open secret that tens of thousands of average Joes with similar motivations come to Las Vegas (“What happens here, stays here”) each year to explore those sorts of sexual power fantasies with prostitutes in hotel rooms, or in the legal brothels nearby. What Burdick was banking on is what feminists regard as a truism: you can look like a nice guy in public and still do—and fantasize about doing—abusive and degrading things to women and girls in private.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MVP: Athletes and Marines
“There’s nothing better than excelling at a game you love. There’s nothing worse than thinking your accomplishments as a player outweigh your responsibilities as a person.”
—Doug Flutie
“If a marine is a great warrior on the battlefield and he comes home and beats his wife, he is not a good marine.”
—Lt. General George Christmas, United States Marine Corps (Ret.)
It was while in graduate school in the early 1990s that I developed the beginnings of MVP, a program to work with high school and college male student athletes on the issues of rape, battering, sexual harassment, and all forms of men’s violence against women. I was not interested in working with “jocks” simply because of their particular problems. There is no question that men’s violence against women is a serious problem in the male sports culture—at all levels. Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the sports pages over the past couple of decades knows how sadly common it is to read about alleged assaults by male athletes. There is a widespread public perception that male college student athletes are disproportionately responsible for acts of sexual aggression against women, although to date no full-scale national studies have conclusively proven this point. But my interest in the male sports culture had less to do with athlete perpetration and more to do with the leadership platform afforded male athletes. The rationale was simple. Male athletes, as exemplars of traditional masculine success, already have status with their fellow men. If they could be persuaded to speak out about sexual and domestic violence, they could have influence not only in the athletic subculture, but in the larger male culture that continues to look to athletics for definitions of what it means to be a “real man.” In particular, leadership from men in athletics could make it safer for other men to “come out” against sexism. Eventually, this would result in a growing intolerance in male culture for some men’s sexist violence.
Striking examples of this strategy can be found in politics. Political scientists and historians frequently observe that President Richard Nixon, a renowned anti-communist, was the first U.S. president to open relations to communist China. Because of his anti-communist credentials, no one could credibly accuse Nixon of being a weak-kneed liberal who was ready to sell out American interests to the Chinese. And surely it is more than historical coincidence that Lyndon Johnson, a white southerner from Texas who talked like a good ol’ boy, was able to champion civil rights and was critical to the enactment of historic federal civil rights legislation.
Another interesting illustration of this leadership concept comes from the world of beer marketing. Consider this mini-history of Miller Lite beer: In 1972, Miller Brewing Company bought the rights to Meister Brau Light, a “diet” beer the small Chicago brewery had been attempting to market to women. Miller’s market research had determined that men wanted a beer that would not fill them up, but they did not want to drink a “feminine” beer. So Miller had a problem, because in 1972 men made up approximately 85 percent of the beer market in the U.S. Miller’s strategy was to run an advertising campaign that showed famous football players drinking Miller Lite beer. The most popular featured Dick Butkus, an iconic white linebacker for the Chicago Bears, and Bubba Smith, an iconic African American defensive lineman for the Bal
timore Colts. They placed Butkus and Smith in a bar room scene surrounded by their friends, with a Miller Lite beer in their hands. The unspoken message of the campaign was: Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith can drink Lite beer and no one is going to accuse them of being wimps. You can, too. As a result, the Miller Lite campaign became one of the most successful advertising campaigns in TV history. It won Clio awards for advertising excellence in 1977 and 1978, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s Miller Lite was the official beer of the National Football League.
How did a beer travel the distance in just a few short years from being considered a “wimpy diet beer” to becoming the official beer of the NFL? First, a smart marketing person identified the problem. Millions of men are hypersensitive about appearing unmanly, so the challenge is to make it manly to buy the product. The best way is to create an association between the Lite beer and recognizably masculine figures. In other words, if Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith take a “risk” and publicly identify themselves with Lite beer, it is easier for men with less status in the masculine hierarchy to do likewise. The same principle applied in recent years when Mike Ditka, the tough-as-nails football coach, appeared on television commercials and exhorted men to take the “Levitra challenge” and use a male sexual-enhancement drug, or when Rafael Palmiero, the home-run-hitting major league baseball star, made a similar pitch for Viagra.