Cracker: Get it Off
255 Responses
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Well money/power/sex are quite the combination, always have been, always will be.
So titillating, so distracting from other high minded pursuits......
So tediously likely to take up huge chunks of media attention for vast amounts of time.There needs to be more variety in the images of women that little girls and boys see on the music channel. Fo sure.
I think women's bodies and the expert moving of a woman's body is a beautiful thing. It's not surprising that people are not sick of watching and are never likely to be. This will never have a tidy answer as there are people inside these bodies. Was I completely comfortable the time I attended a shock rock gig complete with strippers? Not completely. There were lots of young hipsters of both genders trying to look unconcerned. "It's ironic" was the expected attitude, which it was on some level, but when you go to Thailand or other places and see other faces of this industry it opens your eyes. I guess what I am saying, if anything at all, is that I can understand the full range of opinions on the subject. A person who thinks that strippers are completely about objectifying woman and reinforcing power structures right through to those who think that a woman has the right to do whatever she damn well pleases with her body. The way that society views "the whore" is a major indicator of the state of affairs of women in general, some kind of barometer of how far we have come or not come. So when I have been up close and personal with that side of life, irony has not been my prefered mode of engagement.
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The sexualised presentation of very young girls is a particularly new and distressing trend.
I think we've discussed this before here, but the state of the pop videos that get played on TV -- in the mornings, even -- does my head in. I'm sure I'd feel even worse about it if I had young daughters, instead of sons who don't watch that stuff anyway.
But I'm not sure about a blanket diagnosis of despair about young women. Girls do better in education than they ever have (and better than boys) and I really do think young women are more confident than they were 30 years ago. A "Girls can do anything" ad campaign (remember that?) would seem odd these days. They just do.
At every year's new intake at Auckl;and Uni you see the Paris Hilton girls tottering across the quad in their heels. But there are plenty of others who think that's just wack. The teenage girls I know are into the MinChicks and learnning to play the drums.
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My friend's wife insists that if he's going to go to the strips, then he has to give the dancers a LOT of money. Otherwise it's exploitation. Don't know whether it's the soundest argument, but he doesn't complain.
Why don't you get all your male chums together, and then invite the female partners to take off their clothes and dance for you? And you could give them money and see if its exploitative or not. It could be a fun night, a variation on the old 70s 'key parties'. And for extra fun the guys could give the ladies a strip show. You could be the DJ, Damian, if your body is less than toned ...
Doesn't that sound like an egalitarian non-threatening sexscapade? (It's right up there with the sex therapist's standard: pretend you don't know eachother and try to pick your wife up at a bar)
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Ah, but perhaps they were enjoying themselves _ironically__. It's so hard to tell these days.
No, they just seemed to be enjoying it for what it was. It's when it's all ironic and stuff that it tends to bug me. Like when MTV, after emitting lots of fine words about fostering local culture, put on pole dancers for its NZ launch. Eew. Tacky.
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Yeah exactly Russell, I had the feeling that the strippers (in the rock gig) would have preffered good old fashioned punters rather than ironic art school students who standing around watching them coldly. Irony, bah.
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Society's pendulum swing - we're still trying to find that equilibrium between allowing people of all genders to express themselves as sexual beings, while extending gender equivalence to all the other areas that have previously discriminated.
I don't know if that makes any sense or not.
I think it makes a great deal of sense. It's really, really complicated because all women are different, all situations are different. 'Strippers' aren't some amorphous blob of identical people all doing the same thing for exactly the same reasons, whether that's being empowered, or being too stupid to realise they're being exploited, or whatever.
What I do find really distasteful is the suggestion that people who hold particular opinions on the subject have been 'brainwashed' and are too stupid to see how things really are.
I just got back from the supermarket, where a whole bunch of uni students were stocking up for the Undie 500. As every year, it was loud, raucous, crass, and hugely entertaining. There was a van there, camo-painted, with 'Husband Hunters' written on the side. Accompanying it were half a dozen young women in camo pants and singlets. I looked very carefully for signs of brainwashing, self-loathing, woman-hating, and irony, but they did just seem to be having a good time. Much like the guys in their underwear driving the Prom Night Dumpster.
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Good old marxisims money is power & now with Xmas coming up in a few months how many young mums wanting to do the best by their kids will enter the industry?
A fave song of mine
Son Hickory Hollars Tramp
Oh the path was deep and wide from footsteps leading
to our cabin and above the door there burned a scarlet
Lamp and late at night a hand would knock and there
would stand a stranger Yes i'm the son of hickory
hollars Tramp. -
Was I completely comfortable the time I attended a shock rock gig complete with strippers
Meat-bix? Just curious. In which case I recommend "The Raven Is The Only Acceptable Black Metal Bird There Is."
Anyway, I can't help but feel that there is something going on that a Marxist would call "false consciousness". So Emma's worry about telling other women what to do is a bit like worrying about criticising the working classes for their failure to throw off their shackles (complete with soul-searching on the one hand about just how shackled they really are, and annoyance on the other with people who wear their shiny pretty shackles with pride, and on the third hand maybe a tiny pretty thin shackle is just personal adornment... I don't know) but still, you can be undecided about that and still believe that there IS a working class and a bosses class and so on and so forth.
(Apologies for syntactic mess but I have to get back to work.)
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Heather that was very thoughtful, I also hate the tabloid alarmism.
Don't give a shit that some Aussie politician went to a strip club 4 and half years ago.Society's pendulum swing - we're still trying to find that equilibrium between allowing people of all genders to express themselves as sexual beings, while extending gender equivalence to all the other areas that have previously discriminated.
I think so too.
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I love Meatbix. I am practically a bandaid.
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Society's pendulum swing - we're still trying to find that equilibrium between allowing people of all genders to express themselves as sexual beings, while extending gender equivalence to all the other areas that have previously discriminated.
the problem i have with that is that is that men are expressing their sexuality by obejctifying women and women are expressing their sexuality be being objectified. where's the gender balance in that? again, i'm talking about music videos, and the expression of sxuality is hardly gender neutral. i have no experience of strip clubs, but expect that things are not too different there.
and gender equivalence in other areas? well women are still earning less than men for doing the same job; tracey watkins latest piece in the herald gives the stats for women in management/leadership positions which are sadly pathetic; got the stats at a child abuse seminar in hamilton last night on women being killed in domestic violence incidents - can't remember them but they weren't good. yes, girls can do anything, but they aren't - eg only 9% of those in the modern apprenticeship scheme are female.
we seem to believe that we have or are approaching gender neutrality because girls are getting good marks at school & there are more of them at uni. but if they are still earning on average $3,000 less for the same job as a male on the day they start work after graduation (which i believe is the figure for the legal profession), then what is the point? where is the equality? and on the flip side, women are also by far the higher number in low paid professions such as cleaners, shop assistants and caregivers.
why are we so loathe to accept this reality and do something about it, rather than pretend that we live in a society that treats women as equals?
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What I am finding a bit disturbing about the public discussion of this (in the MSM and in one or two other blogs, not here on PA) is the blokey attitude of hey, everyone is doing this, and lots of people have done it, so it must be okay, and afterall, we are all consenting adults.
Well, yes, these are all consenting adults, and I'm not inclined to interfere in the choices of consenting adults. But I hope all the strippers, and the audience, are at least 16 (age of consent for sex), and preferably 18 (if there's alcohol being served). That would take care of the adult criterion, legally at least.
But consent.... That could be a mixed issue for the dancers - some of them could genuinely enjoy the work, others of them might find that they make better money there than they could elsewhere, some of them might have no other way to make an income. So the degree of 'consent' might vary. If it's 'genuinely enjoy the work' consent, then whatever. But 'no other way to make an income' consent tends to exploitation.
As for the audience - I know, mixed groups go along to strip shows and bars, but I think that at least some of the women in the groups might feel pressured into it. Sure, they can always bail out and refuse to go, but they risk exclusion from the group, and being told that they are frigid prudes who can't take an ironic joke. I am so over irony - how the hell can you tell whether a punter is being ironic or getting his rocks off.
Sounds like your uni students are having a fun time together, Emma, and they are not doing it because it's the only way to earn an income. Which takes me straight back to consent...
So what do I think about strip clubs, and going to strip shows? If it's a sin at all, it's a venal sin, not a mortal one, and most likely a sin against good taste rather than anything else. The whole thing is so damned tawdry.
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I think we've discussed this before here, but the state of the pop videos that get played on TV -- in the mornings, even -- does my head in. I'm sure I'd feel even worse about it if I had young daughters, instead of sons who don't watch that stuff anyway.
Fairly aggravating when the tunes are damned good too. Someone like Snoop Dogg has made a career out of fantastic beats and dirty funk coupled with derogatory lyrics and writhing women. A tune like 'Gin & Juice' can go from perfection to cringeworthy in the space of a couple of lines.
I'd still rather listen to him than Bono though.
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kowhai: if this is the gig I'm thinking of, Josh told me that they just knew they could book out the Las Vegas for cheap - the owner insisted on having the dancers. And never mind the coldly ironic gaze, what really annoyed them was a) no tips and b) people taking photographs.
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Sounds like your uni students are having a fun time together, Emma, and they are not doing it because it's the only way to earn an income. Which takes me straight back to consent...
Was a (possibly ironic) reference to Raunch Culture, not sex workers. I think it's important to keep those as two separate (albeit possibly related) issues. It's the alarmism over Raunch Culture that I'm really, well, over.
And anjum, I'm not saying everything is hunky dory. Women are now expected to be aces at work, perfect mothers, and gorgeously attractive into their forties. I guess maybe it's reflective of my age that I'm more concerned about that than whether some woman's skirt is two inches shorter than some other woman thinks it should be.
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Well, we could start by examining matters close to home. How about looking for a wider range of images of women on our very own dear TV channels?
Competent and experienced female journalists are dumped because they lack the "shag factor" - don't take my word for it, Granny Herald reported it last week. And it's bloody offensive. So when you lose the ability to raise a male TV executive's wan willy, your job expertise counts for nothing and you're out on your ear or relegated to backroom duties.
Air stewardesses took court action to combat this blatant type of prejudice in their workplace, but it seems our journos and presenters lack the will or ability to press for change. So presenters and newsreaders are encouraged to come to it from a primary career as beauty queen/model/cheerleader etc. If you can remember as far back as such expert newsreaders as eg Marama Koea, you know that the loss is ours.
People internalise a lot of this type of pervasive discrimination and no longer register it happening... it just becomes the norm. But it's still prejudice at work. What ever is wrong with looking at older people anyway? Handsome is as handsome does. As long as someone with the right professional qualifications is well groomed and can muster a pleasant expression, that should be enough. Did someone say "dumbing down the news"?
Speaking of cheerleaders, a US exchange student tried to start it at my (girls') school in the 1960s. She had no takers. We fell about laughing at its silliness and could not believe American girls would be so ...needy.... and undignified. After all, we were active sports participants ourselves, and were not relegated to standing on the sidelines wiggling our backsides. Now of course a generation of Auckland girls has learned that this is the way to please men. Such progress.
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why are we so loathe to accept this reality and do something about it, rather than pretend that we live in a society that treats women as equals?
This is kinda where I was headed. A lot of people - men and women - think that acknowledging and solving the problem happened in about the same paragraph, but that's clearly not the case. But instead of having a society with strongly defined and oppressive gender roles, we now have this weird mishmash that's neither oppression nor enlightenment. We've got people who are trying hard to address practical gender stereotyping issues - from such perspectives as career choices and pay equity; others that are worried the first group's attempts will transform us into sexless automatons; people that don't even think these problems are even related to gender oppression; people that think "reclaiming" and "empowering" existing oppressive gender roles (such as in the sex industry) is sufficient to justify them; others that think they should be banned altogether; etc etc etc.
It's two steps forward and one step back - for every attempt at a solution, there are new, more nuanced problems. It's a long arduous journey, but my original point is that we're still moving forward. Heck, we've seen the complete transformation of centuries of gender oppression in just 40 years, hands up who thought it was going to be that easy? :)
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Was a (possibly ironic) reference to Raunch Culture, not sex workers. I think it's important to keep those as two separate (albeit possibly related) issues. It's the alarmism over Raunch Culture that I'm really, well, over.
I'm not over it. But then, I have three little girls.
There are some issues of consent tied up in raunch culture too. You know what peer pressure is like, how as teenagers and young adults most people just desperately want to fit in. So how many of the kids dressing in an extremely sexualised way and going along to strip shows in mixed groups really want to be there? If the alternative is to be derided for being a prude, or for not being able to take a joke, then it's not so clear that kids really want to participate in raunch culture.
That's going to hold true for lots of teenage / young adult activities. You can gurarantee that if the culture was all about saying the rosary every night and going to church on Sundays, there would be some nascent atheists who nevertheless felt they couldn't do anything but get down on their knees in front of the group's god.
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I'm more concerned about that than whether some woman's skirt is two inches shorter than some other woman thinks it should be.
I don't give a toss about how short an adult woman's skirt is. What I care about is that young women - as young as 4 - are buying into the same old shit. I agree with Heather that it's about the pendulum swinging to a certain extent, I just sometimes despair that it's 2007, and here we are mayhaps not as far along as we perhaps we think we should be. I don't agree, Russell, that the little girls at venues like The Big Day Out aren't chasing after boys like they used to. Of course they are, they're just less open about it. I don't have daughters, but I do have alot of nieces and I teach a lot of little girls. My niece is 9, and gets changed under a towel. That might not seem much, but isn't that the start of body shame? Like I said, the same old shit, it seems to me.
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men are expressing their sexuality by objectifying women and women are expressing their sexuality by being objectified. where's the gender balance in that?...
Women are now expected to be aces at work, perfect mothers, and gorgeously attractive into their forties...
Competent and experienced female journalists are dumped because they lack the "shag factor" - don't take my word for it, Granny Herald reported it last week. And it's bloody offensive.
I gotta agree with all 3 comments above, particularly "women are expressing their sexuality by being objectified". What rankles with me is the idea that it is men who have done this. In the 20 years its taken to go from young adult to old fart it's been my experience that is women who have sought to out-do eachother in the shagability stakes. And I don't think it's men who've been egging them on.
I know its possibly a hackneyed debate, but it is women who edit and write for women's magazines, and have been doing so for the last 30+ years. And what images do they portray? Skinny super-young 'celebrities' or fat cellulitey 'look-no-make-up' celebrities. And stories about losing 10 kilos now, or how to spice up your sex life.
Most guys I know (pardon my use of cliche) do not want to have sex with boy-thin chicks. Curveacious (sp?) women are just fine, thank you. But what do women do? Obsess about their weight and try to be thinner, prettier, younger, sexier. And drive us nuts in the process. </my wife excepted>
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...but my original point is that we're still moving forward. Heck, we've seen the complete transformation of centuries of gender oppression in just 40 years, hands up who thought it was going to be that easy? :)
Heh, the eternal optimist. You must be a West Ham fan!
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(lightbulb) Wow, I never made the connection before...
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It's kicking off in the best possible way on this thread isn't it.
Loving it. -
Yeah. I'm going to take a timeout because I don't want to sidetrack the thread by getting male-defensive (as I've done). I think the Ladies are making better points ....
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When I backed up Heather's cautious optimisim I don't mean to say that there is not a lot to be done. I am very grateful that daleaway, anjum and Deborah can spare the energy to list all the areas that still need work. Hell, sometimes a bit of anger is in order.
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