James Stewart in "The Greatest Show on Earth"
Recently I've become aware of a sexy video that someone I know has made of herself. It consists of a series of photos that are frankly sexual in nature, seemingly created for one purpose: to attract sexual attention from men. They are all lingerie photos, except for a couple of nude photos that show what you could show in a lotion ad (hands over breasts, body position hiding crotch). Facial expressions are either confrontational or generically sexy, and some are almost like fashion magazine shots, featuring various floppy hats or boots, with a suitably vacant facial expression. Comments on the videos are mostly of a salacious nature, and the model seems to welcome the responses cheerfully, and to try to deflect them with an "oh my, you're a naughty boy," or an "aw, thanks, you're sweet!" sort of spirit. The model in question is married with children, and has taken on a pseudonym.
Seeing this video has made me confront some of my own issues, and it's been tough. My first response is disgust: "How could she put herself out there like that?" My second response is envy: "But I have to admit that she looks pretty hot." My third response is fear: "What if people think I'm doing something like that with my work?" The questions and go on and on: "Why is she catering to those men and encouraging sexist remarks from them? Am I also catering to men when I show myself in a sexual way in a movie? If she looks hotter than me, does that make her work of higher value, in terms of how a (male) viewer ascribes value to a work? If that's the case, does her single-afternoon photo shoot potentially erase my four years of work on a film? Do other women look at me and see what I see when I look at this video and hate me for it? Do men see me that way, and judge me only on my hotness or lack thereof?"
Betty Hutton paper dolls
Another question came up as well: "Why do I love looking at vintage pinups, neo-burlesque shows, and certain vintage sex movies, but have so much of a problem with this?" I think it's because what I love is glamour and dress-up, and the fantasies evoked in her video are so mainstream and trashy. It's the female image without a self behind it, in the mode of all contemporary generic sex imagery. The feminine side of me gets excited by gowns, makeup, beautifully done hair, etc. But without elements of glamour, artistic distance, or individuality in a woman's photograph, there is nothing to "turn me on." When I am presented by a starkly sexual image of a woman without that requisite distance, the sole purpose of which is to make a guy's dick hard, I am like most women in that I feel ambivalent. But men of course are different. I once earnestly asked a gay male friend of mine, when we were walking through a video store and stopped at the gay porn section, why all the covers looked the same, and why there wasn't any experimentation with stories or decor. He patiently explained to me that this wasn't about art, it was about getting aroused. All of that paraphernalia, such as sets and costumes and a story you have to follow, gets in the way of simple male arousal. (Of course, how stupid of me)!
Gay Porn DVD cover
The sheer power of male lust can obliterate art in that sense, as art becomes supremely unimportant when men are faced with a beautiful available nude. And if only male lust counts when judging works where females are on display, then the aims of art (especially feminist art) can seem useless and naive. I think that this element of male desire as expressed in pornography causes fear in many people, as if it could destroy civilization itself. And I think some of that fear is founded, especially if it obliterates cultural aesthetics. The person who alerted me about the video's existence asked me, "How does this relate to what you're doing?" I had to insist, "I'm making art, and this is just a girl selling herself on the web," but he didn't seem thoroughly convinced. I was disturbed that he would compare my artwork, which is so carefully contextualized, with simple internet pornography. And the comparison haunted me because I have heard echoes of it everywhere since I first put VIVA out. It's not that I think what my friend is doing is wrong; it's just that this is the only area of culture or expression where distinctions between disparate things can be obliterated in this way, due to peoples' highly subjective and emotional responses to female imagery. The attitude of most people in culture, and this includes both feminists and porn consumers, is that a woman's sexualized image means one thing, or that its meaning is always prescribed by others.
Crack Whore Barbie
And yet to escape outside definitions of what one's own image means is one of the goals of feminist practice. In my attempts to create my own image, I've found a lot of pleasure and meaning in the "masquerade," in which I can make myself into anything I want, including a "sexy woman." The mask is there to alleviate the anxiety that would present itself if I would feel that I simply "was" a sexy woman, for that would mean that my meaning as an object in the world had been prescribed by others, and could only be oppressive. I would argue that very few women feel like "women" in the loaded sense generally applied to that term. Joan Riviere, in her essay "Womanliness as Masquerade," went as far as to call the type of otherwise heterosexual woman who dons a mask of femininity to appease male aggression a "homosexual woman."
Marlene Dietrich in "Blonde Venus"
Many feminists seem to accept male to female drag and female to male drag, but female to female drag makes them almost uniformly uncomfortable, as if it's somehow a sign that a woman is trapped in her image. But they ignore the possibilities of self-transformation in the female masquerade, and the fact that girls and women have always been aesthetically interested in costume as a form of pleasure. Self-adornment has been most elaborate in the most civilized societies, such as in seventeenth and eighteenth century French court life, in which aristocrats wore powdered wigs and highly symbolic accessories in order to perform a daily theatrical construction of self. The little girl, likewise, can create a private world of pleasure for herself outside of the world of male aggression, full of fairy princess dresses, pretty mommies, tiaras, ponies with pink manes that can be brushed all day, and ceremonies with miniature tea parties full of genteel conversation.
My Little Pony
As these little girls mature into women, glamour and dress-up may continue to form part of their identity separate from the male. But now they have a new problem to deal with, which is being an adult woman whose image is in danger of being seized by the male as material for his own fantasy life. And this is where dress-up and glamour become ruined for many women. For many contemporary women, pleasing a man is tantamount to becoming a doormat, a whore, a loser, a masochist, someone's bitch, or a Stepford Wife. This anxiety of being swallowed up by the male makes many women hate themselves as women and hate other sexy women, denying their own pleasure in themselves out of fear of losing their autonomy. But there are other women who like to play with their images as women, attempting to define themselves in terms of their own pleasure without losing themselves in a man's expectations of them.
Sally Rand, fan dancer
One type of woman who played with her image in this way was the burlesque stripper, who existed roughly between the early 1920s and the late 1960s. These women took off clothing for men, but always left something on. They teased and played with the audience, often burlesquing sex and drawing on old vaudeville routines, and they controlled the pace and dynamics of their performances. They would titillate the men by flashing a breast, or taking off a bra to reveal pasties a moment before the lights went out, or flinging their panties off while concealed behind a velvet curtain. The art was as much about concealment as it was about revealing anything, and the woman's power over the men and her teasing of them was the main spectacle.
Kay Booth in the Ziegfield Follies
Burlesque performers had elaborate wardrobes consisting of elegant gowns and accessories, frills and laces, lingerie, stockings, parasols, hats, and gloves, and these adornments were a big part of the pleasure for both the performer and her audience, which was often gender mixed. Men and women alike could be entranced by frills and laces and perfumes, as this was part of the world of female pleasure that was a naughty and delicious secret to men, just as a female's anatomy was. But this feminine world collapsed with the advent of the sexual revolution, in which audiences demanded spectacles that were ever more graphic, and left less and less to the imagination.
My interest in the phenomenon of the burlesque stripper, and in the shift from the glamorous to the abject, has led me to write a feature script about carnival strippers circa 1960, based on the pulp novel CARNIVAL HONEY (although I'm going to shoot THE LOVE WITCH first). The plot concerns this transition from burlesque performance to artless stripping, in which the girls feel pressured to strip all the way nude, in response to financial pressures and changing mores and expectations. In doing research for Carnival Honey, I read some interviews with strippers from Susan Meiselas' documentary photography book Carnival Strippers (1976). In the book, Meiselas photographs carnival girlie shows in black and white, showing the girls, staff and audience in their casual moments as well as in the shows, and the book is full of quotes from the various people involved in that world. Meiselas even tried stripping herself once, to see how it felt and to develop solidarity with the girls. You can see from the photographs that it was a rough world, in which the men were rowdy and crude, the girls were mostly unskilled and poor, and girls let men touch them (including performing oral sex on them) for extra tips. Most of the girls also prostituted themselves to make ends meet.
Still from "Carnival Strippers"
One theme emerged again and again in the interviews, which was the split between a woman's desires when she went into stripping, and the men's desires who consumed the shows. Many girls said to themselves: "What's wrong with it? I don't have a problem dancing in the nude, and if people want to pay to see me, well, all the better!" The woman who started stripping felt in control, self-possessed, was a working woman. Many strippers were addicted to the raw play of power, in which they had a chance every night to tease and torture men, fantasizing about every man out there who lusted after them but couldn't have them. But the men wanted power and control over the girls too, to humiliate them and make them feel like low whores.
All of the strippers whose interviews I read were crushed by the work on some level, even if in some ways they were made stronger by it. But since male violence and misogyny were part of what drove the machine of male desire which paid for these girls to live, the girls adjusted to the abuse and even cultivated it, thinking they were in control of it, but often losing themselves and their self-esteem in the process. Being treated like scum, they eventually believed it was true, and their fantasies of themselves as beautiful queens performing in a show dissolved before the men's drunken laughter, insults, and disrespectful touching.
Still from "Carnival Strippers"
I understand something about this dynamic, because I worked for a time as a drink hostess at a Japanese bar in Honolulu when I was nineteen. I did it out of need, because I was unable to find any other kind of work. All I had to do was talk to the men and be their waitress, and I would get commissions on any drinks they would buy me. I got a little chip for every drink they bought, and at the end of the night I would cash in my chips. Some of the drinks were just tea, but some were watered down white wine. The only way you could make any significant money was with wine, so we pushed for that, and I got drunk every night. Still having to waitress, I'd be stumbling around, forgetting orders, and dropping things. But as getting drunk was part of my job, no one could object. They loved to see you get drunk, that's why they'd spend on the wine. They also loved to shock you with stories about their lurid sexual exploits, and to insult you. Every night something just shitty enough would be said to me that I'd go into the bathroom and cry my heart out. Then I'd fix my makeup and go back out again.
It was a game of musical tables, as we were taught to never let men know that we were working more than one table at a time. So you'd get up to go flirt with men at another table, and you'd have to excuse yourself by saying that you had a food order or had to go to the bathroom. But everyone knew what was going on. It was dark and the booths faced away from each other in such as way so that you could keep your cover pretty well. One liability was customers breaking the rules by touching. Of course if they did that you didn't have to sit with them, but once the hands had performed their violations into intimate areas it was too late, and you had the visceral memory of old men's hands on you to deal with in nightmares and involuntary flashbacks. Another liability was the jealousy of the other girls. If you were good at what you did you would get lots of clients, and then the venom and claws would start to come out. There was no such thing as female solidarity, and often I found girls gossiping meanly about me, whispering and then falling silent when I'd come by.
Jane Russell in "The Revolt of Mamie Stover"
I was the youngest and most popular girl and the bar (mostly because I learned Japanese so I could work both the American and the Japanese tables), so the Mama-san and Papa-san would take me out after hours to cruise the late-night bars and advertise: "This is Koharu-san (my Japanese name). Come see her at Club Subaru." And they'd hand the guy a business card. The first night I worked there, it was a slow night and I had a table with three guys who spent the whole night trying to coerce me into going home with them for money. This happened a lot, but the first time it was a like a little death. Having to be nice and obsequious to men who are treating you like a whore is not an easy thing to do, and it's not as if you feel better about yourself once you've gotten the hang of it.
Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel"
One strategy I had was to think of myself as a performer, and to look at the whole thing as a movie role, in which I was not really there. I'd fantasize that I was like Jane Russell in "The Revolt of Mamie Stover," or Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel," or like a woman in a pre-code movie. That worked for a time, but then it became more and more difficult to do. When I started out, I was like those strippers who are all hopes and strength. But by the time I left, I had serious trauma. And I wasn't sleeping with them, touching them, letting them touch me, or showing myself to them. All I would do is talk to them, sing for them, and occasionally dance with them. And yet I was unable to maintain a glamorous and powerful self-image in the face of the dominance those men exerted over me, and eventually I became depressed and defeated. To this day, I still can't bear the taste of white wine.
My experiences at that bar expressed different sides of a woman's dilemma who performs a sexualized role in life or in work: when does the performance stop being for me, and become a service being performed only for the men? Where is the self or identity behind it? Who is benefiting from this performance? Where is my own desire located? Where is the line crossed, in which my feeling of power turns into abject despair? Although it's a taboo subject in many circles, female desire exists, and some of it is narcissistic, masochistic, extravagant, and perverse, just as male sexuality is. It's also part of female identity, and to ignore it, as I've stated before, is to ignore large parts of what make up an individual female consciousness. And I would suggest that denying women pleasure in their femininity is as bad as coercing femininity from them. The burlesque performer of yesteryear knew how to express herself as a woman without sinking into being a "mere" male fantasy, and that was a lot of her power. Whereas most models and strippers today offer up fantasies that have been recycled over and over again and are never new or personal, the talented burlesque dancer was a real performer, who used artifice to enchant, and wit and humor to send up sex even as she flashed her breasts.
Gypsy Rose Lee, "the literary stripper"
It was a time when an artificial feminine presence was adored rather than ridiculed, and it was BETTER FOR WOMEN.
POSTSCRIPT:
Writing a few months later: While I tend to be personally enchanted by yesteryear and its trappings more than the present, I should mention that contemporary naked women without a "mask" interest me in representation too, as long as I can see the woman's agency at work. Of course the question of where a woman's agency begins and ends is a complicated one, and one that I want to explore more and more in my work.
6 comments:
While I cannot comment on whether the past, or that part of the past, was better for women, both because I was not alive at that time and because I am a man, I do know without uncertainty that humans need to give form to "raw" life in all sorts of ways and when they are unable to do so they will suffer greatly as a consequence. This "form" could take many guises: it could be storytelling or it could be an elaborate set or performance. Thus an artist takes the experience of working in that bar you describe and decides to make something out of that experience: to create and express meaning about life. In that sense art is a form of knowledge. Indeed I would argue that such practices like masquerade, far from being a gloss or an addition to something more basic and important, is one of the only ways to get at certain truths. In a sense a lot of what you are describing is excellence at creativity. I think that aesthetics are under threat because the engineers have taken over and have decided what is or isn't good quality. That is, aesthetics are under threat because people do not have a sense of either value or utility. They confuse information with wisdom. They have what I would call a "functionalist" mentality concerning value. There is a lot of meaning in those gowns and heels! Also, people have lost their capacity to tell a cheap or banal still photo from a complex narrative film. They would not be able to SEE what makes the Carnival Strippers book better than other photo books. Even worse, people don't think there is anything objective about quality and prefer to slide with a flattened relativism all the way down. ("It's my opinion!") Though that blog is longer than usual it needed to be that length in order to cover all of the issues you raised. At least someone is writing about something that matters as opposed to a lot of the triviality to be found online.
You're right to point out that an an interest in form is at the heart of this blog entry, and a disgust with what you term "functionalist" mentality and "flattened relativism." If I myself looked at culture in this way, then all of the things I talk about here as having value, such as the nuances of costuming or performance, would have absolutely no value and would only seem laughable and quaint, and I would see myself, because I did nudity in a film, as the same as a girl that dances at the Spearmint Rhino strip club! And of course all of this transcends male desire and the way pornography flattens out meaning. It's a widespread inability, as you say, to evaluate the meaning of objects.
A friend of mine recently (thankfully) stopped working as a stripper. The men at her club were not all bad, but she definitely wanted out. As far as making it for her rather than the men, just before Christmas she danced to Bing Crosby & David Bowie's Little Drummer Boy to jeers from the crowd. She souted back at them that you can dance to anything by David Bowie.
Another angle, perhaps, on the female to female drag is when skilled female athletes either are or make attempts at being sexy. Anna Kournikova may not be the best female tennis player, but I think her tennis was judged with undue scrutiny because she was deemed sexy by the public. Danika Patrick also did a perhaps ill-timed photoshoot in a bikini when she had yet to win a race (I think. I'm not a sports fan).
I've gone on too long. Sorry.
Nothing interesting to add to the conversation; so, I'll just say I'm enjoying your blog. Very interesting stuff here.
From these pictures, we can see some strippers are beautiful, they can be a actress. What a pity.
Thanks for all pics! how could you collect those pics! they are awesome! Your blog is really interesting and attract me at start! Thanks!
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