Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  From a handful of clubs in the 1990s, there were an estimated three hundred clubs in the UK in 2008.1 The way that lap-dancing clubs have been classified in licensing laws since 2003 means that such clubs do not have to register under the same regulations as sex shops, but are simply treated in the same way as bars or restaurants. Although this was not a deliberate policy to relax the regulation of the sex industry, but rather an unintended consequence of plans to simplify licensing laws, the effect has been to make it almost impossible for local authorities or concerned residents to do anything to prevent lap-dancing clubs opening. As they have expanded, lap-dancing clubs have become an unexceptional part of many men’s social lives, from city workers to men on stag nights. As one online organiser of stag weekends states: ‘No stag night would be complete without a lap-dancing club.’2 Their ubiquity makes possible the kind of scenes that I watched in Mayhem club in Southend, since girls stripping down to their thongs for nothing in one club is seen as so acceptable partly because everyone knows that just down the road women are stripping fully for a few pounds. The Muse lap-dancing club in Southend, near to the Mayhem nightclub, offers ‘fully nude dancing’ for £10, and a dress code that is unequivocal: ‘You keep yours on, the girls take theirs off.’3

  The way that lap-dancing clubs are now seen so much as part of the mainstream has also filtered through to the new popularity of pole-dancing. Pole-dancing is usually offered in clubs where girls dance naked for customers, but it is no longer seen as part of a seedy sex industry – rather, it has become seen more as a cheeky part of the entertainment industry and classes in pole-dancing have sprung up throughout the UK. I’m certainly not going to stand in judgement over any individual woman who chooses to learn any kind of dancing, but it is intriguing how young women have chosen to make fashionable a style of dancing that is so closely associated with stripping and sex work. While women who are desperate for cash do a pole-dancing show as part of their work in lap-dancing clubs, successful models, singers and actresses do it to show how daring and sensual they are. For instance, Kate Moss did a pole-dance in a video for White Stripes, and the Spice Girls went to a Soho club to learn how to pole-dance for their 2007 comeback tour. As quoted in the Sun, a source said, ‘The girls all agreed that a pole-dancing section in the show would be fabulous and sexy. And they wanted to get some proper lessons from professional dancers. They chose the Soho Revue Bar with all its fabulous kitsch decor and they liked the idea of something a bit seedy.’4 Similarly, the Sugababes have been praised in the tabloids for participating in the dance culture associated with sex clubs: ‘The Sugababes nipped into a nude lap dancing bar this week – then kicked off their shoes for a go on the poles. The girls got hot and steamy at Boutique gentlemen’s club following their after-show party at Manchester’s Red Rooms. And it seems the girls are big exotic dancing fans. Gorgeous Keisha Buchanan told a fellow clubber she had blown thousands of pounds in a lap dancing club in Atlanta in the US.’5

  As we see from these examples, some women are using the dancing associated with ‘seedy’ clubs to enhance their sexiness in the public eye, while others boast about taking the behaviour of the lap-dancing club into their private lives. The actress Emilia Fox, who has starred in Jane Austen adaptations, said in 2008, ‘I’ve mastered the art of removing my knickers. I wanted to know exactly how to do it in the most provocative way possible so I took striptease lessons. You can’t just pull off a pair of knickers. That’s not sexy. You have to take off your knickers in such a way as to get every man in the room watching you. You do it slowly. Carefully. You hook your thumbs into the top of your knickers and start to slide up and down, then down a bit more. It’s the stepping out of them that is the real triumph. It’s like a dance. One leg first, then the other, effortless but naughty. It’s something every woman should learn how to do. It’s amazing how much confidence you get, how good you can feel about your own body. My husband paid for my lessons. I think he was thrilled that he was getting a wife who wanted to know how to do these things.’6 Obviously there is nothing unusual about a woman stripping for her partner. But it is notable that for this woman the idea is to perform to her own husband as though she were performing to a room full of men with whom she had no relationship. Clearly, the new acceptability of lap-dancing clubs is having an impact both on women’s public and their private lives.

  While stripping has become more mainstream through the rise of lap-dancing clubs, there are also much more upmarket strip shows, including burlesque, which cater to a more middle-class audience. The close association of burlesque and stripping is a phenomenon of recent decades – once upon a time burlesque simply meant a comedy show that parodied high art. But now performers such as Dita von Teese and Immodesty Blaize have helped to create an inescapably sexy view of burlesque, even if it doesn’t have to involve full nudity. While lap dancing is generally seen as pretty seedy, great claims are made for burlesque as art. The art often seems to centre simply on the use of vintage accessories, such as feathered fans and nipple tassels, huge martini glasses and corsets. But as burlesque dancers can come in various shapes and sizes, and can wear more unusual costumes and construct more complicated narratives around the striptease act, burlesque is often seen as a truly creative way for women to take their clothes off.

  No wonder, then, that this is where the undressing-as-empowerment rhetoric really seems to come into its own. Indeed, the word empowerment rarely seems to be far away when burlesque dancers talk about their work. Immodesty Blaize has said: ‘I find burlesque empowering because instead of all being told we have to be one type, showgirls all have individual characters and body shapes.’7 Michelle Baldwin, who performs as Vivienne VaVoom, has said, ‘Our performances, persona, costumes, all of it comes from us. Before, women were given their persona and even their stage names by men. This time women are in control of their own image and that’s empowering.’8 When former Spice Girl Mel B starred in a burlesque show, her role was described by promoters as a ‘bold, sexy icon of female empowerment’.9 Such a view of burlesque can be very attractive even to feminists.

  Laurie Penny is a writer who was attracted by the idea of trying this kind of stripping as part of a creative stage act when she started studying English at Oxford University in 2005. Penny had identified herself as a feminist since she was ten years old – since she read Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman, she told me. But she had been severely anorexic in her teens – so severe that she was hospitalised – and was still looking for a way to feel positive about her body. She joined a burlesque group that was run by two male students, and at first she found that displaying her body on stage felt both powerful and fun. ‘To be honest, people yelling for you to take your clothes off does sometimes feel positive,’ she told me when we met. ‘We were all young, amateur performers and trying out different ways of playing with our sexuality. To have that appreciated by men and women in the audience can make you feel powerful. It’s the one kind of power that is sanctioned for women – the power to look sexy, to draw attention to your sexiness – and it can feel very good to succeed on that ground.’

  But gradually Laurie found that far from liberating her, the structure of the burlesque acts began to feel restrictive. She began to realise that the audience’s reactions made her deeply uncomfortable. Once she was at the Edinburgh Festival and one of the acts was a Little Bo Peep number in which she, as Bo Peep, ended up in nipple tassels and a sheep’s tail. ‘After the show some guys came backstage, shouting, “Where’s Miss Bo Peep, she’s really hot,” and I realised I just didn’t like the way they were seeing me. It felt creepy. Another time when I was doing a ball in Oxford and the audience just saw it as a strip show, they were shouting “Get them off” through my act, and I felt absolutely awful. Afterwards I got incredibly drunk.’ As time went on, the creative, comic acts in the show diminished and the stripping increased. ‘That’s what they wanted to see. It drew in audiences. But it just began to feel so limiting to me. Even if this power to comma
nd attention through stripping can be enjoyed by women, it is such a circumscribed sort of power. In the end it felt more like we were serving up misogyny with a tasteful package of feathers.’

  If burlesque keeps falling back into the same old patterns as classic striptease, lap dancing is even more obviously problematic for women who take part. Ellie, the young woman who went into lap dancing, at first believed what the culture around us suggests, that lap dancing can be sexy and even empowering for women, so the reality she encountered came as a shock to her. ‘I was aware that I hated it from the start,’ Ellie said, ‘but I didn’t really reflect on it. As soon I started to reflect on what I was doing, I left. I don’t think that my feeling of hating it is that unusual. For all the we-love-it, it’s-empowering talk, I think that most women who do it don’t feel anything positive about it. You just feel you can’t make money any other way, that the most important thing about you is the fact that you are a sexual object, and that’s what men want, and that’s all you are.’ Her friend who had also worked in a lap-dancing club was not supportive of her doing it, but to this day they have never talked honestly with one another about the work. ‘I think that people who have done it have something very big invested in pretending that it is all right, because to say anything else is embarrassing,’ Ellie says thoughtfully. ‘The reality is so not what the perception of it is. If you say it’s really degrading, and you did that, it says so much about you, or it feels as if it does. But it is degrading.’

  The structure of the club Ellie found exploitative to the very core. The women didn’t get paid unless they made money directly from the customers, and they would pay the club to be there, so there were nights when Ellie actually went home with less money than she started with. She would turn up to the club and just hope it would be busy, but at times there would be ten women to every man. ‘You’d all be sitting around, drinking, and a man would come in and everyone was like, ooohhhh, a man, but you had to wait till he’d ordered a drink, and then the woman nearest to him would go over. You’d have inane and boring chat – which was all about you trying to get him to ask you to do a dance.’ What the women were after, Ellie explained, was to talk the man into sitting with them for an hour for £250, which included as many dances as he wanted, or to give him individual dances for £20. And each woman also had to go up to do a pole-dance at least once a night, sometimes more. ‘I never did it sober,’ Ellie said sadly.

  Ellie never felt in danger in the club, but she constantly felt degraded. ‘It made me really begin to hate, or despise, the men who came in – that they’d pay money for this, this transaction, and it really isn’t sexy. There is a lot of touching that goes on – it becomes a part of what you do, to get more money. It’s a sales technique, and the more you put out, the more you get.’ I ask her to explain this a little more, because obviously the ostensible code for lap-dancing clubs is that no touching should go on. ‘That’s right,’ she says, ‘the culture is that all the men know they aren’t allowed to touch, but the game is that you go OK then, just for you, you can do it – and so they feel special.’ What struck Ellie is that although being touched on her breasts or genitals was clearly sex work, the lap-dancing club was masquerading as something more innocent than that, and so men who would never think of going to a prostitute would go to a lap-dancing club. ‘It’s the same as going to a prostitute,’ she says, ‘but they wouldn’t think of it like that. They just think, it’s what lads do, and their girlfriends think it’s OK, and society thinks it’s a bit of fun, a bit of cheeky fun. And it isn’t. But because everyone thinks it is, how can they see it isn’t?’

  It has now been shown over and over again that, as Ellie says, many lap-dancing clubs do not keep to the purported rule of no touching.10 And it has become increasingly clear that some lap-dancing clubs are straightforward routes to prostitution. For instance, in an investigation for one Dispatches programme in 2008 the reporter was offered sex in more than one lap-dancing club. The very presence of lap-dancing clubs in the high street also appears to have negative effects on women in the local communities. A report by the Lilith Project, an organisation that works against violence against women, looked at lap dancing in Camden Town, north London, and found that in the three years after the opening of four large lap-dancing clubs in the area, incidents of rape and sexual assaults rose in the area.11

  The fact that lap-dancing clubs have been associated with prostitution and sexual assault means that this shift in our culture has not gone quite unopposed. There have been protests against the opening of lap-dancing clubs in various areas, and campaigners, particularly the organisation OBJECT, have now forced a concession from the government so that, at the time of writing, new and proposed lap-dancing clubs will soon be reclassified as ‘sex encounter venues’. This will allow local people to have a greater say over whether clubs can open in that area, and probably result in a reduction in the numbers of such clubs in coming years. But even so, it will now be extremely difficult to take the ripple effects of the fashion for lap dancing out of our culture. The expansion of these clubs throughout many town centres and their increasing acceptability among men of all ages and occupations have changed cultural attitudes to the objectification of women. When the journalist Catherine Bennett saw an advertisement for a lap-dancing club, ‘a heap of predominantly naked women’ glued to a hoarding outside a sixth-form college, she complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, whose guidelines state that ‘ads must not prejudice respect for human dignity’. The ASA did not uphold the complaints, and stated that ‘in the context of an ad for a table-dancing club, the image was unlikely to be seen as unduly explicit or overly provocative.’12 Even if the growth in lap-dancing clubs is now rolled back, it seems that the explosion of these strip clubs on the high street has normalised the sex industry in a way that previously would have been unthinkable.

  For individual women who have found themselves seduced by the idea that working in a lap-dancing club is straightforward and even liberating work, the effects can go deep. Ellie discovered that the whole set-up was the opposite of empowering. ‘You are totally and utterly pleasing – that’s the game, to be impressed by them. It’s not necessarily the best-looking women who do the best, but it’s about how much you can convince them that they have the power.’ And although Ellie stopped lap dancing a couple of years ago, she hasn’t shrugged off its impact. ‘You get all this positive affirmation about your appearance, of a totally superficial nature,’ she said, ‘and in a way that feels good. But it’s affirmation of something I already believed, that I am an object, and now I will probably always struggle to see myself sexually in any other way.’

  When I ask Ellie how she feels when she hears people say that lap dancing or glamour modelling are free choices made by women and therefore beyond criticism, she responds thoughtfully. After all, she knows that she was not forced into this work, and she worked alongside other women who were students or looking to move forwards in other occupations, whom she wouldn’t want to paint purely as victims. ‘I don’t wish to identify myself as a victim,’ she said. ‘I did make a choice. It was a self-destructive, damaging choice, like taking drugs, but nobody forced me. At the end of the day I was lucky, I’m well educated, I’m from a middle-class background, and deep down I do fundamentally know I can do something else, that I will do other things.’ But she can see that other women’s choices are not necessarily as free. ‘I do feel angry that women who could do other things, who are bright and intelligent and driven, but not as well educated, live in a culture now that encourages them to think that this is the best thing they can do, that makes them want to aspire to this, and says this is all you are worth.’ When Ellie went for her audition at the club, she met two sisters who wanted to be glamour models. ‘Their dad had dropped them off for the audition, and they were doing it hoping it would help them into glamour modelling. It was the only route they could see towards wealth, their only opportunity.’

  Ellie feels that dissent is
being muffled by the identification of sexual liberation with this hypersexual culture. ‘Now, women get told they are prudes if they say they don’t want their boyfriend to go to a club where he gets to stick his fingers in someone else’s vagina, or if they say they don’t want to watch porn with their boyfriend. But being sexually liberated …’ Ellie paused for a while as she thought about it. ‘Well, I don’t think it means that we have to enjoy and accept the forms of sexual entertainment that were invented by men for their own pleasure.’ Above all, Ellie feels strongly that the rhetoric we hear now is far from the reality of what goes on in the sex industry. ‘People say it’s cool, it’s empowering, but I’m not going to put lap dancing on my CV, I don’t feel comfortable telling most people about it. I think women need to start speaking up about this, being a bit more intelligent about these things. We hear a lot about choice or liberation, but it just isn’t equal – you know, you just look at the lap-dancing club, and it says so much about our culture. The men in there are respectable, they are in suits, they have bank accounts, the women are not respectable, they are naked, they have debts.’