Responding to comments on “The Cowboy and the Stripper”
Because of the move from The World’s Forgotten Boy, I thought I’d respond to comments from petitpoussin, tomemos, and Julie here. In addition, tomemos’s comment never appeared online, so I’ll reprint it in full at the bottom of this entry.
Petitpoussin writes that, because I don’t examine stripping as a profession, my post “precludes any real examination of people (women) who are strippers, or the reality of stripping.” If I understand her, she thinks it’s a little spurious to use a Britney Spears video to analyze what happens in a strip club, and she thinks that I’m appropriating Lily Burana while “implying ‘that’s not what she really means’ or maybe ‘she means it, but she’s deluded’.” She concludes, “Just because stripping is, for you, an isolating consumerist appropriation of bodies, doesn’t make it an accurate portrayal of stripping for women who choose and enjoy that work. Believe it or not, they exist. Pleasure isn’t ‘slow suicide’ for all of us.”
Britney Spears’s video for “Stronger” is relevant to a discussion of stripping because it’s a nice representation of the solipsism embedded in the archetype. Petitpoussin re-creates this isolating ideology by writing that some women enjoy the work. I’m certain that’s true, but it’s not responsive to the criteria of mutuality and honesty I raised in my post. The fact that petitpoussin can run through the whole of her response without once mentioning the men and women who constitute a dancer’s audience is significant; it reveals the barrenness of certain contemporary models of enjoyment, and a real contradiction where that enjoyment is based on relational qualities like power and desirability. (There is also a danger in letting oneself be convinced that protestations of enjoyment are equivalent to the “reality” of anything.)
I never doubt Lily Burana’s words or try to put a meaning over on them. When Burana says she lies about “everything,” I believe her. When she says a lap dance is the sexiest thing she’s ever seen, I believe her there, too. I just want to understand the implications of that judgement.
Let me clarify the comment about ‘slow suicide': it’s a comment about the fear of pleasure as it manifests in American culture in general, and also about my own sensibility a few years back. The post is written at some distance from that earlier self, despite my nostalgia for the popular culture of the early 1990s.
One last thing: petitpoussin asked me what I thought of Britney’s “fall.” I think Britney was done in by a series of compromises. Critics were falling all over themselves to embrace “Toxic,” because it was a predictable song that processed Britney’s voice out of existence and used the same squiggly synth lines that Missy Elliott and Timbaland have been cooking up for years. (I know Britney can’t actually sing, but at least she used to occasionally sound like a human being.) The video was a rip-off of Alias, another “girl power” phenomenon, proving that Britney was now following trends rather than igniting them. Nothing about the new Britney is as provocative as “…Baby One More Time.” Her disastrous, highly public attempts at domesticity and motherhood just make her look pathetic.
Tomemos, nice comment (see below). I’d agree that some erotica is liberating where it challenges the mainstream, possibly including SuicideGirls, and certainly including art as ferocious as Liz Phair’s song “Flower.” However, erotica needs to be understood for what it is — a construction — not as authentic self-expression. I wanted to suggest that if my friend loses interest in a woman when he realizes that she’s trying to find herself, that may point to a certain amount of pressure on women (and on men) to consistently project false confidence. That’s at the expense of honesty, and maybe even at the expense of introspection, since introspection so often produces self-doubt.
Julie, let me make sure I read your comment right: you feel the problem with Sex and the City is that it privileges relationships over careers, rather than that it promotes feminine dependence? It seems like we’re saying basically the same thing.
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Tomemos writes:
I would agree with what I take petitpoussin to be saying: there is an important difference between female sexuality (or any other sort, I suppose) as a cultural product in general, and the particular form of mass-market, commercial sexuality that you very convincingly identify with Britney, the Spice Girls, et al. Sex-positivity, to use the parlance of our time, is not incompatible with genuine feminism. After all, Sleater-Kinney had a number of songs that were fairly raunchy–“What’s Mine Is Yours” and “Let’s Call It Love,” and “Turn It On” before that. Liz Phair’s “Flower” is another one, even if it isn’t very danceable. These are songs that, in my mind, provide an alternative to the sex-as-trauma view that, like you say, permeates a lot of feminist art. I would say that Sucide Girls, and other indie (and, often, woman-created) erotica/porn/stripping, has the potential to do the same thing. Unlike Britney or Christina, the goal of such works and performers isn’t to appeal to as wide a range as possible; I don’t just mean because they’re R rated–because what could be more conventional and mainstream than Maxim?–but also because they do not conform to standard views of sex and gender relationships, and are, in their way, feminist. I’m also not bothered or disappointed by Katie Suicide being unengaging or Missy Suicide being rich, any more than I am by a successful actor or athlete who holds those same qualities. …interesting, though, that Suicide Girls seems to be a riff on Spice Girls, right? What with all of the girls taking the last name “Sucide”? I never noticed that before.
We might be saying the same thing. I’m saying that the “text” (feels weird to use that term for a TV show) – ie, the snippets of the characters’ lives that we see in each half hour segment – unintentionally distorts the importance of relationships, creating the illusion that relationships are the characters’ primary concerns and careers are secondary. I don’t think that distortion is a product of unconscious sexism on the part of the writers, but rather an effect of the concept of the show (that is, a show that centers on sex and relationships). So, for instance, when twenty minutes are devoted to Miranda’s insecurities about her boyfriend and only five deal with her making partner at a highly successful law firm, what was written as a way to demonstrate the fact that she’s empowered in other areas of her life without compromising the concept of the show comes across as a disregard for those areas.
The only part of your original post that I took issue with was the idea that the show considers female comeraderie a veiled way to “do everything for men.” It sounded like you were saying that the show *does* promote feminine dependence, although I might have misunderstood.
If I take your comment that:
The strip club is designed to create an invisible barrier that keeps this sort of reality far away, and which even keeps sexuality itself behind a glass.
It does not necessarily follow that:
Instead of refuting the equation that pleasure is death, it is actually an inoculation against pleasure by the maintenance of distance, so that by overcoming pleasure, the individual can again choose life (i.e., work and family).
What if the delay of gratification is in fact a source of pleasure, rather than a safeguard against its possible consequences? What if this is true not only for the stripper’s audience (fair point on my not mentioning the audience) but the performer herself? I suppose you can argue that this
reveals the barrenness of certain contemporary models of enjoyment, and a real contradiction where that enjoyment is based on relational qualities like power and desirability.
However, I disagree. ‘Barren’ is a judgment I’m not prepared to make about others’ sexualities.
Also: can you say more towards this?
(There is also a danger in letting oneself be convinced that protestations of enjoyment are equivalent to the “reality” of anything.)
What if a stripper’s perceived reality is that she is a stripper and loves her job…? I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. Some kind of epistemological reality, perhaps? A metaphorical reality of the archetype?
Tomemos:
there is an important difference between female sexuality (or any other sort, I suppose) as a cultural product in general, and the particular form of mass-market, commercial sexuality.
Right, exactly. I’ve gotta work on this ‘brevity’ jam I keep hearing about.
Interesting that you made no mention of television (or film, I guess, or maybe I skimmed over it) in that TV is probably vastly the most significant contemporary model of enjoyment, to take your language, and meshes nicely with your scheme of the passive, unseen audience. I remember watching the Howard Stern show once–I think it was the Howard Stern show; it was late at night and I’m not used to cable and I only watched it for a short while before turning away amid emotions probably similar to Joseph’s when he heard the story about his then girlfriend’s heroin experiences)–and I think the set up was that they had this porn star woman offer to have sex with some random guy to see what he would do. I caught it–I think, again–as she came into the bathroom where she’d hidden the camera guys. It could have been that there was some form of reality tv going on before I flipped to this channel, but, based on how the guy reacted to the cameras, it makes sense that he hadn’t seen them up until that point. So the girl runs back into the hotel room with the cameras behind her and she leaps onto the guy’s lap while hiking up her skirt and gyrating. The guy–he’s in his forties maybe, a little tubby, not an impressive figure–goes from brief excitement, to confusion, to recognition of the TV cameras, to resolute rejection of the offered exchange and clear, swift declarations—spoken directly into the camera–of his love of his wife. He left and the pornstar girl complained to the camera about what a loser this guy was. So the guy is one thing in the darkness and another entirely when the in the spotlight. (Incidentally, or maybe not so much, the girl was wearing like the exact same pink trucker hat you saw Britney wearing in the tabloid pictures at the beginning of her fall (aspects of which I heartily approve of)). But I think this–the urge to hide desire or the desiring self–is the point at which we should attack less than ideal models of enjoyment. If we could live in a world where people were able to openly express their desires without fear (of being ostracized?), it would be easy to imagine a more appealing form of strippery than we now have. I think also its part of the reason I’d want to be hopeful about the overlap between sex positivity and Suicide Girl-type sex commerce (although all I’ve really seen of the suicide girls came nervously browsing through a photo book at The Green Apple in San Francisco). Regressionary forms of enjoyment will likely attempt to disguise themselves in sex positive trappings, but I’d be careful about writing off cultural movements that don’t entirely bleach Girl Power of its meaning, especially when we’re venturing into the very difficult waters of deciding which protestations of enjoyment are authentic and which are not. I’d also want to pay a lot of attention to realizing the economic and political conditions that would offer people the space and time to know who they are, sexually and otherwise, to the point that they can represent it honestly to their coexisters. God knows such circumstances are a long way off.
Timothy, television does creep in a few places, where I mention Sex and the City, and Alias, and an upcoming reality show on strippers. In some ways, television is the background to all of this, since I think the models of “personality,” desire, and power in play here come from a culture accustomed to TV.
Julie, you might have seen more of Sex and the City (which isn’t a bad thing, culture is culture), and you might have a better sense of whether the friendships between the women have other dimensions besides girl talk. In the episodes I’ve seen, the women tend to either argue with each other about relationships, console each other, gossip about each other’s men, or play “wing man” at a watering hole. In other words, their friendships are crippled by a lack of other content — which is your perceptive point about the show as a whole.
Petitpoussin, I do understand what you’re saying about a stripper who loves her job. All I’m trying to suggest is that pleasure should not be taken as a barrier to analysis — it shouldn’t necessarily be the last word. For example, Lily Burana’s book was about a “farewell tour.” No matter how much she claims to love her work, she loves it as a swan song leading up to settling down in a marriage. This enables her to avoid difficult questions about, for example, what it would mean to grow old without having a fall-back career. My friend’s disappointment in “Katie Suicide” is another example of how what seems to be enjoyment all round, can prove to be a house built on sand, precisely at the moment when the fourth wall is removed.
Of course, it’s possible to claim that illusion is the point: “I do believe her, though I know she lies.” But that just doesn’t look like happiness to me. (I’m not retreating into the subjective; I mean that it doesn’t compare to the mannerisms and language of people who’ve found occupations and relationships that will last them all their lives.) It’s like delayed gratification being a form of gratification: that is, by definition, what it isn’t, because otherwise there would be no delay.
It’s also like the movies. I wish we could be in love with the movies the way that little kids fall in love with Star Wars or The Neverending Story. (This seems to be the relationship certain directors, like Godard or Neil Jordan, actually do have to the movies.) Instead, we quietly forget an awful matinee (like Chocolat or The Illusionist or X Men III), but when someone asks us about it, we rush to the defense of our squandered afternoon. “Oh, that,” we say. (By which I mean myself, in lesser moments.) “I did enjoy it pretty well.”