- There have been a couple of disgruntled telephone calls
to the Guardian this week. Readers, quite reasonably, have been wondering
why our website deemed it acceptable to run ads for a new E4 show named
Lap Dance Island, a reality programme which promised to send 10 lucky,
lucky men to a tropical island with 40 lap dancers. In truth the E4 show
is a spoof, though the ads have already lured more than 15,000 applicants
and a speculative inquiry from Pole Position magazine, the discerning gentleman's
pole dancing publication.
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- Hot on the tail of Lap Dance Island's tantalising advertising
campaign came the news that Kate Moss is to pole dance in the White Stripes'
new video, directed by Sofia Coppola. Moss is one of pole dancing's many
celebrity devotees, twirling alongside Sadie Frost, Jennifer Aniston and
Angelina Jolie. Zoe Ball, lest we forget, has a pole in her bedroom. Bolstered
by such celebrity endorsement, the past couple of years have seen a rash
of pole dancing, cardio strip and erotic dancing classes opening at venues
such as the flexingly hip Third Space gym in London, as well as the infamous
Spearmint Rhino. It is now deemed perfectly acceptable, and terribly modern,
for young women to visit a lap dancing emporium on a night out. As the
Daily Express put it, so succinctly: "Everybody who's anybody has
taken up pole dancing."
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- There was a time, not so very long ago, when lap dancing
clubs were still considered to be something for women to get riled about.
They stood alongside Page 3 and those wipe-clean naked lady calendars as
shining examples of the public debasement and objectification of women.
Now, however, with all the young hepcats merrily writhing round poles and
whisking off their brassieres with gay abandon, we seem to believe we have
wrestled lap dancing from the salivating jaws of men and reclaimed it as
our own.
-
- Raising objections to the rehabilitation of lap dancing
is a little like pointing out that the emperor is naked, when the masses
would really rather continue admiring his new clothes. The new lap dancing
is, after all, performed and watched with a buffeting layer of irony, which
rather protects it against any kind of moral attack. Suggest that lap dancing
is anything other than a delicious bit of seediness in our respectably
mundane lives, and one is immediately dismissed as someone who has missed
the joke; as some fusty, po-faced prude.
-
- Stripping has even acquired a certain feminist kudos
of late. The argument runs that in the lap dancing world it is, allegedly,
the woman who is in control and, of course, charging gentlemen amusing
sums of money purely to look at their naked body. The buffoons. To illustrate
this, the press regularly hauls up some Oxbridge-educated, middle-class
young lovely who has abandoned a lucrative career in financial strategy
or some such to strip for hard cash. "I do it," she invariably
trills, "because I like it."
-
- The vast majority of strippers, lap dancers and pole
dancers, however, don't fall into the profession purely for the unfettered
joy of wiggling their naked derriere in gentlemen's faces every night of
the week. Debt, desperation, a lack of qualifications and a simple need
for money attract most of them to a profession which offers a possible
£2,000 a week, plus sizeable tips.
-
- A couple of years ago I myself learned to pole dance
for the purposes of a newspaper article. It was one of the most depressing
things I have ever had to do. It wasn't sexy. It wasn't even particularly
seedy. It was just sad. The lap dancing clubs I visited were populated
by gaggles of pretty young ladies with perspex heels and silicone bosoms
who had become trapped by the money, the lifestyle and the supposed adoration
that lap dancing offers.
-
- What perhaps defines our generation of young women is
that we're eager to shake off the feminism of our mothers' generation which
frowned and tutted at such things as lap dancing, porn and Benny Hill,
and instead embrace them. But the simple, inescapable fact is that lap
dancing clubs are demeaning to women, and our presence in them, even our
willing participation, does not make them any less so.
-
- The truth is that lap dancing has been repackaged, remarketed
as a liberated thing to do. And we're all buying it, in the same way that
we knock back the beer and belch with the boys because we seem to believe
that it is how we should express our liberty - by playing at their game.
This doesn't make us equals, it makes us hangers-on. It makes us little
sisters forever tugging at our big brothers' sleeves and whining "Let
me play! Let me play!"
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- laura.barton@guardian.co.uk
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,11812,1028165,00.html
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