Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (7 page)

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.
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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.’
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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.’

Stripping in various styles is not the only element of the sex industry that has become far more acceptable in recent years. Prostitution has also moved from the margins to the mainstream of our culture in a development that one can track in the popularity of bestselling memoirs of prostitutes. Although people have been intrigued by fictional and factual memoirs of prostitution for centuries, there is a new and hugely popular genre dealing with prostitution, which presents a striking shift in the way this work is perceived. The genre includes
Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl
, by Tracy Quan,
The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl
by Belle de Jour and Miss S’s
Confessions of a Working Girl
.
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Although we have always had glossy accounts of prostitution in popular culture, the difference between the
Pretty Woman
-style fairytale and current tales is that today we are asked to believe that these are genuinely honest accounts of what it is to sell sex. They have a matter-of-fact tone, and tend to emphasise how very normal the occupation is and how close to any liberated woman’s sex life.

These books show how the image of the prostitute has changed radically over the last two hundred years, and how this change has been driven by women as much as by men. Look at the difference between fictional nineteenth-century prostitutes, as described by men, and the prostitutes who now describe their own lives in these bestselling memoirs. Those prostitutes of the past might be either glamorised or degraded, but their experiences were definitively separate from those of other women. There were glorious femmes fatales such as Nana in Emile Zola’s eponymous novel, a ‘force of nature, a ferment of destruction, unwittingly corrupting and disorganising Paris between her snow-white thighs … She alone was left standing, amid the accumulated riches of her mansion, while a host of men lay stricken at her feet … her sex arose in a halo of glory and blazed down on her prostrate victims like a rising sun shining down on a field of carnage.’
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Or there were tragic fallen women, such as Nancy in
Oliver Twist
, who is agonised by the sense of her utter degradation when a virtuous woman tries to save her: ‘“Lady,” cried the girl, sinking on her knees, “dear, sweet, angel lady, you are the first that ever blessed me with such words as these, and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!”’
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The tone of these recent writers’ work, in contrast, is utterly nonchalant. For instance, as Miss S, a young woman who worked in a brothel while she was a student, says of her choice of work: ‘At least I wasn’t getting blind drunk like the rest of the
student girls in the dorms and going off with strangers, waking up in strange places, not knowing where they were or how they got there! Hell, I could have just as much fun. I didn’t need to get plastered to lose my inhibitions – and I got paid.’
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While prostitution has always been with us, this casualness about what it means to work in the sex industry is an unexpected development. When a television series was created out of one of the most popular books in this genre, Belle de Jour’s
The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl
, the series and its promotion showed how prostitution has become so normalised in the last few years. One of the most striking aspects of this series was how little it differed from every other television drama about the lives of young women. Here was a young woman who was smartly dressed, with a circle of chic friends, drinking lattes in cafes and cocktails in hotel bars, having sex with strangers – sometimes good, sometimes weird, sometimes bad – without much emotional engagement. There was little to distinguish it from the groundbreaking American drama about promiscuous single women,
Sex and the City
, or the lesbian equivalent
The L-Word
, or the male equivalent,
Californication
. Rather than being seen as shameful, prostitution can now be seen as an aspirational occupation for a woman. ‘My body is a big deal’ ran the advertising caption for the television series based on Belle de Jour’s book over huge images of the actor, Billie Piper, in underwear.

It would be naive to assume that the promotion of such a view of prostitution in the mainstream media does not have an effect on the real-life behaviour of men and women. One day in 2007 I went to visit a woman I’ll call Angela, who has been working as a prostitute for four years. Although in some ways Angela was quite formal, and uneasy about sharing the details of her life, from time to time her rage would burst out in a torrent of words. In the sitting room of her chilly, scrupulously clean flat in Middlesex, where there were no comfortable chairs, but where there was a metal pole running floor to ceiling with a pair of
patent high heels next to it, she explained to me how she had come to this point.