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There are three things I am constantly asked as a performer. The first is of little to no importance. The second is why I chose to be a burlesque artist given the nature of my background and upbringing.The third and perhaps the most important question regards the inspiration behind my sometimes controversial routines and character as a burlesque artist.This piece is a poetic if not quixotic attempt to explain in words things that go beyond reason and words.
The right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying social norms and traditions."
-Hina Jilani, lawyer and human rights activist
It is 12:31 am here in Perth but in my head, it is 8:31 pm. My head is almost always four hours behind. Perhaps because in my head exists a parallel universe, one where I am not Iskra Valentine, Australian burlesque performer and creator of Varietease Productions. No, in this parallel world of blurred sights and loud sound, a world of different rules and restrictions I am just a white ghost in the middle of a teeming bazaar. Iskra Valentine has no place in the four corners of that parallel world, amongst eons of culture woven into fourteen hundred years of stony religious tradition. Neither does the burqa clad ghost have a place in the sea of black suits in the Hay street mall at lunchtime. They both inhabit their own worlds, their own compartments in my stuffy over crammed mind. Every day sees the white ghost lady pushed further and further into a corner but her muffled screams grow louder and more demanding. “Don’t forget me. You have no right to forget”.
I have not forgotten-its still there, red as an albino rabbit’s eyes. I was ten and my father drove me to a farm to buy a pet rabbit. We came home empty handed. Muharram riots had spilled into the streets and blocked the roads. My father bluntly said it was a better idea to go home and pray. I had never been taught to pray. I remember his voice booming like thunder in my ear, his hands pushing and contorting my veiled body into prostrations and bows in the direction of Mecca while a strange electric hate filled me from top to toe. Later that night as I folded my velvety prayer mat, I counted ten purple bruises on my arms and cursed my birth as I poked every one of them. “You are a Mussalman. Learn to live like a Mussalman”. Mussalman, muscle man, mussalman, muscle man. The words danced in my head as I cried myself to sleep. He was a muscle man, a mussalman and I was a disappointed bruised little girl who wanted a pet rabbit.
I have not forgotten. It’s still all there fresh and dewy wet like a monsoon frog. The day I turned twelve, I had my first period and I was suddenly enveloped in a shadowy women’s world with barbed wire edges and many secrets. My best friend didn’t have a matching set of x chromosomes and thus could not accompany me. I cried from the dull ache in my belly and the sharper ache in my heart. There was to be no more street soccer with the boys. Instead there was embroidery, knitting and panadol. I wrote him letters and hid them in a flowerpot between our adjoining gardens. He moved away a few months later and no one even told me. The letters he never received rotted away.
I have not forgotten. It’s still there tugging at my insides like a spring kite. I was thirteen maybe fourteen. At school, the drama club was preparing the play Feathertop for the Basant festival. Your name was Wajiha and you had really short blue black hair and Buddy Holly style frames. You asked me to pin a marigold to your boater hat on opening night and I almost had a mini heart attack. I remember wanting to play Polly because I wanted to be the one you kissed on the cheek as the lights went low. Perhaps it was because you would have made a really handsome boy. How was I to know what a lesbian crush was? We didn’t have google or yahoo answers and cable t.v was highly censored. All I knew was I liked you… a whole lot and I couldn’t explain it or tell anyone. Later on in the afternoon we flew kites together. Mine got entangled with yours before the strings gave and they fell to their destruction
I have not forgotten- its still there, that burn in my cheeks when on rare occasion I blush. I was fourteen maybe fifteen and you were the marble skinned boy who stared at me during morning assembly. Our eyes would meet and two perfect dimples would form either side of your smile. My lip would tremble and my heart would swell like a marshmallow in a microwave. During the national anthem big fat tears would roll down my cheeks and the teacher would pet me on my head mistaking high estrogen levels for patriotism. Being shy, I never took the opportunity to do more than send you little notes about my day sandwiched between the pages of Archie comics which were then relayed back and forth between us by this Timon and Pumba duo I had thought to be my friends. Then out of the blue, you stopped writing back and I was told curtly by one of the girls that you found me overweight, pimply and unattractive. You must have heard my heart fall to the floor and smash into a million little pieces, I’m certain of this because the very next day you stopped me in the dusty halls to say hello. I was so scared I dropped all my textbooks. As you helped me pick them up, you were so close I could see the black spots in your hazel eyes. I ran away crying. I wish I had stayed and seen the sweetness of your expression, the apple blossom blush of your cheeks. I wish I had said something, anything. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen and convinced I was too ugly to be loved.
I have not forgotten. It’s still there in the ear of my mind, the popping sound punctuating the song of the cicadas. It was during the Afghanistan raids that my cousin and I would sit on the terrace and wish on shooting stars that whizzed by. Dehdeh, the time wizened old crone who raised my father and uncles from squirming babies to respectable khan sahibs would come hobbling out, creaking bones, wheezing cough with prayer beads in hand. Then she would begin the well rehearsed sermon on the terrace yelling at us shameless unmarried girls for giggling in the dark wishing on missiles while entire families were being wiped out not too far from where we lived. She sure knew how to ruin a party that Dehdeh but god we loved her stories. “When I was twelve, I raised all six of my siblings and by the time I was seventeen, they had all been married off. All, except me because I left it too late. You girls ought to focus more on easing your family’s burden. Be good girls and marry good men in good time or you’ll be like old Dedeh lecturing crazy delinquents during air raids”. The next day we’d make an extra effort to stay out of Dedeh’s way as she and my grandmothers prepared pots of soupy curry to hand out to the growing crowd of refugees in the shanty town across our Villa. Sometimes I wake up at night to the crackle and pop of the electric water heater outside my window screaming “Rabia Rabia! AlaAla! ramanday ka[1]”. The words hollow and meaningless bounce off my bedroom walls and into bed with me.
I have not forgotten. Its still there, the silver scar bracelets from when I was fifteen going on sixteen and the first signs of bi polar started oozing out of cracks in my personality. I would sit under a filthy mulberry tree afterschool and cry until my mother came to pick me up. Then I’d be carted from math and science tuition centers to Urdu language classes to Quraanic study class. Finally, I’d crawl into bed, a brain dead heap dreaming about the adventures of the 2 marks that cost me a hundred per cent on some algebra test and the permission to go to my only friend’s birthday party. Weeks, months and then an entire year went by until one day while studying logarithms I lost the plot and punched through my bedroom window. My arm felt so warm it almost felt numb. I was sixteen and I was bored of living. My grandmother picked the glass out of my wrist and convinced me it was my duty to will myself sane. “No one wants to marry a mad woman. A mad woman marries an early grave.”
I remember, the salt of my tears the day I left it all behind to come to this strange and exotic new land- to start anew, leaving the binds of custom and culture behind. You must wonder what its like to live like that? I will tell you. Those customs and traditions I have lived by for a good part of my life we’re like a kathak dancer’s ankle bells, growing heavier and more restrictive by the year. However as the years progress the dancer is expected to adapt to the bells and to carry on with the same grace and fluidity as if the weight of the bells is no different to the weight of her bones, her muscles and her blood. As the ankle bells become an extension of the dancer, so do the customs and culture become the extension of the Pakistani woman. In my minds eye I can see myself in my white burqa hugging my grandfather for what I didn’t know was the last time and he told me for no reason at all that he was proud of me. He said my dreams and I were Siamese twins and the death of one meant the inevitable death of the other. I was by no means to compromise either. He didn’t come with us to the airport and instead stayed in his garden waving at us with his newspaper. That is how and where I left him for all eternity. As I got ready to board the plane, driver Kaka, our old chauffer who had worked for my family for eleven odd years gave me his handkerchief.
“For Bibigul on her journey, a pomegranate and cashews from my village. We will meet again Inshallah”.
There I was, sixteen years old, at the airport with nothing but a backpack full of belongings and a handkerchief bundle finally leaving everything I knew for a chance at the unknown. When the last wheel was off Pakistani soil, I felt invisible dancing bells fall off my ankles and into the blackness below. The pomegranate was sweet and sour, the cashews were salty. Such was that moment, as were my tears.
No, I have definitely not forgotten. I have not forgotten a single moment or the feelings that came with them. I have not forgotten my unfulfilled and obstinate desire to be free of my mental illness, ridicule, religion and cultural bonds. I have not forgotten what it was like to have strange burdens placed on a young back. I have not forgotten the empty peanut eyes of myopic grandmothers in the old country praying to their Allah for my virginal return to the motherland, for a suitable chaste groom, for an end to my red hair dye obsession and the death of the libertine shaita’an that lives inside me. I will not forget the greedy black eyes of the girls that convinced me I was too ugly to love or the some times conditional love of my father. I will not forget starry eyed Dedeh clicking her rosary perhaps dreaming of her lost wedding. I have not forgotten Driver kaka and the taste of those cashews on the plane. Oh! The pretty pieces and the power punches thrown my way all those sixteen years, sewn together by this gold thread we know as time. Together they have pieced together this new person, this ragtag character. This Iskra Valentine.
I relive all those moments every time I am on stage. With every movement of my arm I wave away ill wishes and bad omens like old Dedeh with her prayer beads. My lost lesbian love, my lost high school sweetheart and my lost best friend propel me back and forth on the balls of my feet, contorting my body into bows and prostrations towards the motherland where they now live their lives free of me. I dance myself into frenzy when I dance for my audience and while they come in droves, I dance all alone conjuring up ghosts of time past and reviews of the future. When I look out into the inky black room I can make the faint outline of the white ghost woman as she screams “don’t forget, you have no right to forget”. When the lights come up, I am heartbroken and she is gone.
The burqa clad woman is centre stage in my mind right now, swirling like a dervish. Her burqa is a patchwork blanket of all these memories and many, many more. Like a color wheel, she spins faster and faster until each memory trips into the next; all the colors are as one. The lady in the white burqa moves so fast she appears still, motionless amidst the chaos. She is the eye of the tornado and questions dance dangerously in the winds around her. Who is this white ghost? Is Iskra Valentine trapped under that burqa or did the burqa and all it holds give birth to Iskra Valentine? One day I will have more than memories for you my friend; one day I shall bring you the pomegranates and cashews of my motherland from my grandfather’s now barren garden. One day I shall bring you answers. Right now at 4.35 am in Perth and 12.43 am in my head. I bring you to the edge of my perception of this matter; I bring you to the end of this story.
When I was 14 or 15, my mother bought me a bass and I taught myself how to play. Why a bass and not lead guitar or a drumkit? Because all of the best bands (the ones I loved at the time, at least) had female bass players. At the time I had bleached platinum hair and wore a lot of black lace and combat boots and I really, really wanted to be D’arcy Wretzy from The Smashing Pumpkins – a woman with the power to stand up to the legendary ego of Billy Corgan.
Earlier that year, I’d taught myself a whole heap of easy skate punk tunes and tried to convince my friends to start an all-girl punkrock band. We’d be awesome, and there wasn’t really anything that I’d seen like that around. I mean, sure, there was the Riot Grrl movement (KATHLEEN HANNA!) but the music we listened to was all male-dominated, singing about blowjobs and girls (thanks, Blink 182). Alas, whilst I spent my post-homework evenings trying to write songs, the other girls spent their time chatting online to their latest crushes.
Fast-forward about five years. I was 19, at the Hydey watching my friends debut their band on a bill with another friend’s band. During the in-between I’d gotten an acoustic guitar and taught myself how to play chords (our uni parties invariably involved drunken singalongs accompanied by piano and guitar), and also how to play Nine Inch Nails songs on piano. I turned to my friends and said “I want to do this. I really want to be in a band.”
One of my friends turned around and said ‘What do you play? Our bassist wants to play keys, so we’re looking for a bass player.” I replied with the standard: “I’m not that good, I taught myself”-self-deprecating answer and we arranged a practice – which led to me becoming (as I would refer to it) the ‘cliché-female-bass-player’ in an otherwise all-male band.
The first few months were strange. The boys had been playing together for so long, that it was a bit like being the new kid at school, even though I already knew them. The band already had so many songs and I just kept quiet and learned them and didn’t really offer any creative input, but as I became more comfortable with the boys, I began to change parts (the bassline on ‘Noise Pop Band’ being a particular victory that set me against Jim, our singer-songwriter, but with the other boys saying “Jim, that sounds awesome, you can change your part to make Jess’s bassline work!”).
I finally stopped feeling like a girl who’d accidentally joined a boy’s club. Our first gig was a Campus Bands competition at Curtin University. Out of the thirty-ish musicians in the six bands playing, I was the only girl. And I felt that. Being onstage as the only female, not only in your own band, but in every band on the bill - you feel like you’re being judged because of your gender. I’ve heard people say that “having a girl in the band” is a good thing. The reason has nothing to do with subverting the paradigm that males make superior rock stars, or showing that gender has no effect on a person’s ability to rock-out, or that the woman in question might be amazingly talented. No, the main reason that it’s good to “have a girl in your band” is because “if the band sucks, at least there’s eye candy.”
I remember fretting about what to wear to the gig. Should I emphasise my femininity as a fuck-you to those people who think that girls can’t play instruments? Should I dress in a manner that wouldn’t draw attention to the fact that I was female? I don’t remember my exact decision, but I do remember that my skirt ripped as I got into the car and I had to change my outfit last minute – plain black skirt, black t-shirt and black flats. Looking at the photos, I’m quite definitely female, but not particularly eye-catching.
After a few gigs, I finally became comfortable being “cliché-female-bass-player” and realised that I was actually playing in a band, and I was actually a musician (I kept feeling like someone was going to call me out on the fact that I’m not that good and all the fun would be over – although this probably had more to do with being nervous about playing gigs). As our band established itself a little more, I became confident enough to ask for what I wanted, rather than deferring to the knowledge of the sound techs (invariably cranky aging men who know better than everyone and look at everyone as though they’re annoying small children), and admittedly even used my “feminine wiles” (read: manners) a few times to get some particularly ornery techs on side.
During the year or so that the band played shows, as I became more confident in my skills as a musician, I started to flaunt my femininity. Short dresses, make-up, heels. I even sang and played toy accordion on one song (although, a comment from a friend after one gig which implied that I was intentionally acting cutesy and pretty when singing and playing my accordion never sat well with me). I was told that I was the only person worth watching in the band – not because I was “the girl” but because I was the only person that didn’t stand stock still on stage. And the best praise I’d ever gotten had nothing to do with my gender, but my talent as a musician. There was no barbed comment of “you’re pretty good – for a girl.” One of musicians from one of the bands we used to play with told me that I was the constant in the band. I held everything together when the singer was off-key, or the drummer lost the beat entirely, or whatever else went wrong.
Stripping, I thought, wasn't designed to turn me on, a not-really-straight-nor-really-bi pan with a fetish for men in drag and rich voices (so....Tim Curry).
If someone made a striptease designed to arouse me, what would it look like (and I'll allow that notion to entertain you throughout your working day)?
The question of how to arouse straight women through striptease has not been ignored, male striptease does exist, where men perform naked and oiled for the arousal of straight women on hens nights. But the women don't get wet, they laugh. Business deals aren't closed during lap dances and strip joints with male entertainers are rarely 'the local pub'.
I, of course can imagine what a male stripper could do to arouse me, and it involves fishnets, but I don't for a minute imagine the rest of the population shares my tastes. And I find it hard to believe that mens tastes are similarily homogeonous. I do not believe that when men watch a woman take her clothes off in a club, an erection is all they're seeking. And so, the first mistake I made when considering stripping was that its objective was arousal, and arousal only.
Sex work and its position in feminism is a long, bloody, battle ground strewn with arms and legs and hearts of the well-meaning fallen. A battle sex workers themselves are rarely asked to fight.
"The opinion of sex workers is only consulted...when they confirm one or the other postions" (Barton, 2002: 587).
Those postions being Radical (Your work is inherently exploitative and an example of the dominace of the patriachy!) and Sex Radical (We are subverting the patriachy by our engagement in sex work!). Academicaly speaking, these two positions are tearing at each others throats; leaving the sex worker in question standing there on the sidelines, bemused, muted, and waving a feeble hankerchief crying "Stop! O! Stop!". They reduce the agency of the womans body far more than the work itself has been accused of doing.
"When I hear about stuff written by so called feminist allies, it feels as if they are fighting over our bodies" (Barton, 2002: 587).
Radical feminists focus on the disempowering and exploitative incidences in stripping. Sex radicals focus only on the liberating. Both delegitamize the examples of the other. I cannot see how this is productive.
If a stripper feels that a certain incident that occured during her shift was liberating, or empowering, no one else has the right to take that feeling from her, or delegitamize the truth or strength of that feeling.
But these incidents should not act as blanket that covers up or excuses the abusive occurences. I do not believe that strippers should have to "toughen up or get out of the industry". Or that abuse is an occupational hazard. It might be the case, but it shouldnt be accepted, and it shouldnt be the ideal. A stripper should not have to suffer abuse just because shes a stripper.
The seperation between the body performance and a sense of self appears difficult. In an industry which sees women paid according to the performance and attraction of her body and personality, it is hard to argue against a consequent commoditiastion, and hence objectification, of that body and self. Strippers enact crippling amounts of emotional labour, and are perhaps paid a compensatory amount.
It is over money that the two Radical and Sex Radical positions also differ. Sex Radicals see the amount earned as a site of liberation, almost exploitative of the men viewing, and paying for the dance, however in this industry, money "goes beyond the means of its purchasing power...", and starts to signify self worth. More powerfully than a salesman who must reach a certain quota, and experiences feelings of increased self esteem when s/he excells, it makes sense that it would be harder for a stripper to seperate the amount of money paid to them and their feelings of self worth, when their body and personality are the earners, rather than a product to which they are not as emotionally attached.
However, these moments, whilst empowering and liberating, are dangerously transient and fragile in nature. I say dangerously, because I imagine the fall from feeling like a goddess to feeling like a whore because of some assholes behaviour must be a sharp one. To ignore one feeling to preface another would be to turn a blind eye to abuse within the industry, or to delegitamize the empowering moments. Neither is fair. Whilst there are rules governing the extent of contact and behaviour, transgression of these rules are common, and like all performance, the performer is incapable of controlling the way in which the performance is recieved. This leaves the performer in a state of frightening vulnerability.
And so, there are two things that still puzzle me.
Status in the community often seems to be attached to how much money you make. Why are strippers constantly at the bottom of the food chain? In an alternate universe, women who deign to show their naked bodies to the public and accept, in some cases, huge amounts of money for doing so, should be hailed as goddesses. Instead they're apparently whores with low self esteem, without any skills other than getting naked for hoards of drunken men. Perhaps a certain element of respect is missing here.
And is there a Gay, Lesbian, Bi, or even straight woman equivalent? To find one would involve figuring out why men invest in the stripping industry, and I would say that alchohol and nudity are only a small part of it. It could be that strippers fill a heterosexual need or insecurity not held by other facets of the community. Maybe.
Stripping and where it sits in my own feminism has puzzled me for a long time. Above is an introduction, and below is a more academic attempt, if you're interested.
Lucy
Barton, Bernadette. 2002. "Dancing on the Mobius Strip: Challenging the Sex War Paradigm" in Gender and Society, 16:5 pp 585-602.
The Sex Wars
According to Bernadette Barton, in her article “Dancing on the Mobius Strip: Challenging The Sex War Paradigm”(2002), the “Sex War” began in 1982 (Barton, 2002: 585), at the Barnard Conference on Women and Sexuality. In the twenty years that have passed since that conference, what has remained a firmly polarized feminist discourse on feminine sexuality and power has used the performing body of the exotic dancer as its standard bearer, and in both position’s fight for dominance, has objectified and reduced the agency of that body almost as effectively as any abusive customer . Barton, borrowing from a concept elucidated by Wendy Chapkis (1997), explains these two polarized positions as ‘Radical’ and “Sex Radical” feminisms. Radical feminists ‘find any kind of sex work, and often even sexuality itself, inherently and irrevocably exploitative within patriachy’ (Barton, 2002: 586), almost to the extent that it attempts to expose ‘deep structures that underlie captivating surfaces...show long standing histories of suffering and sub-ordination’ (Felski, 2006: 73). In direct contrast, “Sex-radical’ feminists ‘theorize sex work as subversive of patriachy’s definition of conventional feminism and...strongly support sex workers right to perform erotic labour’ (Barton, 2002: 586). Both positions ‘assess particular acts as either liberating or oppressive’ (Barton, 2002: 586) . Within this analysis, these acts are gendered, and when employed within these discourses, serve as evidence of an entire genders power or disempowerment within the industry. These examined acts are often both individualized and decontextualized, and as a result highly subjective and easily manipulated, with the “The opinion of sex workers ...only consulted when they confirm one or the other positions” (Barton, 2002: 587). This creates a narrow and inaccurate view of the power mechanisms operating within the industry, a view which either delegitimizes the damage suffered by the dancer, risks entering into an uncritical victim/perpetrator discourse, or exaggerates the agency of one gender over another, whilst ignoring the context in which such power operates. In this circumstance, situating both discourses within a Foucaultian framework serves to illuminate the way in which both feminisms have utilized language to construct two irreconcilable arguments, but also new sites of recontextualized oppression and dominance within the industry.
Barton (2002) attempts to move away from a Radical or Sex Radical discourse by adopting a methodology that “Avoided asking about her (the dancers) career in terms of oppression and empowerment, rather in terms of like and dislike, bad and good experiences...”(Barton, 2002: 589). In her study, she discovered that “depending on when you question a dancer about her feelings about her career, when she begins or later in her career-you are likely to get a different self-assessment of her power or oppression, as what dancers initially experience as pleasurable becomes increasingly fraught with problems”(Barton, 2002: 589). Barton agrees that ‘as the sex radicals articulate, individual women can experience dancing as liberating and rewarding, at least for a while’ (Barton, 2002: 597) , whilst also acknowledging that ‘structurally, dancing is exploitative and destructive to women both as individuals and as a group –supporting a radical feminist analysis’(Barton, 2002: 597). The acknowledgement of the structural implications on the oppressive nature of dancing is important (Barton, 2002: 586), as it has the effect of obscuring the gender of the oppressor, moves away from a style of analysis that focuses on the ‘individual’, and offers a context for the oppression.
Barton (2002) finds abuse and oppression evident both within the ‘structure’ of the operation of a Strip Club itself, and present within the consequences of gender roles in the broader society within which the strip club is operating. An example that serves as evidence of the tension between individual empowerment and disempowerment caused by the structure of the management of the Strip Club and gender norms that operate within society is ‘the number one thing that every dancer appreciates most about dancing...the money’ (Barton, 2002: 589). Barton states that “it is difficult for a woman with less than a high school diploma to make this much money, even a bachelors degree does not guarantee this much income”(Barton, 2002: 589). This wealth is in itself ‘liberating’ (Barton, 2002: 589), but Barton (2002) states that the ‘meaning of money goes beyond its purchasing power’ (Barton, 2002: 589) and is ultimately tied to feelings of self worth. This, however, whilst containing the potential to make the dancer feel empowered, serves as ‘a constant reminder that a woman’s worth in the world is tied to how beautiful and desirable they are...” (Barton, 2002: 594), in ‘a society that still reserves its highest paying and most prestigious jobs for men’ (Barton, 2002: 599). In an industry which sees women paid according to the sexual attraction of her body, it is hard to argue against a consequent commoditisation and hence, an objectification, of the women involved.
However, it is this aspect of the job which serves as a point of contention for Radical and Sex Radical feminists. For Sex Radical feminists, earning money for this reason is not viewed as a site of oppression, but in fact liberating, and almost exploitative of the men viewing, and paying, for the dance. April, a dancer interviewed by Barton (2002), articulates this sense of liberation and power:
“It's a power trip though. It takes hearing how beautiful you are and how sexy you are and just, it takes just taking people's breath away whether they're drunk or not. If you're hearing it 20 times a day, it's slowly healing you and you start to believe it. That's how all of the girls are the same. You see, everybody thinks that girls that dance, they have this very high self-esteem; and they believe that they're beautiful and all that. And that couldn't be further from the truth. It's your other personality there. If you were told 50 times a day that you are the most beautiful woman that person had ever laid eyes on, wouldn't that make you feel better?” (Barton, 2002: 589)
For April, feeling beautiful and sexy are linked to feelings of ‘power’, to ‘feeling better’ and regarded as ‘slowly healing’. However, a ‘discourse of empowerment’ can delegitimize negative experiences in its attempt to emphasis those it views as empowering (Gill, 2008: 34), and ‘over-emphasise its transgressiveness” (Attwood, 2007: 239). While these feelings may in themselves be empowering, they are both fragile and transient in nature. In her conclusion, Barton points out that both Radical and Sex Radical feminists view power, from either standpoint, as static(Barton, 2002: 599). However, the feelings of power experienced, due to their personal nature and intrinsic attachment to self worth, are not static but are capable of being inverted (hence Barton’s analogy of a Mobius strip), and whilst valid as events in their own right cannot be, due to their transient nature, indicative of a dancer’s sexual power. “Many men act as if this is what their paying for: their right to treat naked or near naked women with contempt and abuse”(Barton, 2002: 592). Barton gives an example of the unstable nature of this feeling of power:
“A dancer may feel as if she is queen of the universe when a man tips her $100 for her conversation. The next potential customer, how- ever, may make a nasty comment about the size of her breasts, or stick his tongue down her throat before she has a chance to push him away. On the other end of the spectrum, she may get no attention whatsoever, a rejection that wounds dancers both financially and emotionally.” (Barton, 2002: 598)
Within the dancer/spectator relationship, “women do the approaching rather than men and thus face the possibility of rejection” (Frank, 2003: 65). Whilst there are rules that govern the extent of contact allowed and code of conduct, abuse and transgression of these rules are common and men within the club wield the power to accept or reject the woman’s offer, but more than that, the power to emotionally or physically abuse the woman. The spectator holds the power of interpretation. No matter how empowered the dancer may feel, she is incapable of truly controlling the way in which her performance is received. Katherine Frank, who ‘worked as a stripper to get funding for graduate school and research her PhD dissertation on strip clubs and their patrons’(Jeffreys, 2008: 153), experiences this limit in power, asking “what is the effect of my double agent approach to womanhood on the men who gaze up at me? The hard truth is that I cannot predict or prescribe how my performances will be interpreted” (Jeffreys, 2008: 153).
This power of the customer is considerable. “Customers spit on women, spray beer, and flick cigarettes at them...they are pelted with ice, coins, trash, condoms, room keys, pornography and golf balls...”, dancers reported that customers would “pull women’s hair, yank them by the arm, rip their costumes, and try to pull their costumes off”...they had been “bitten, licked, slapped, punched and pinched”. Customers would “attempt to penetrate women vaginally and anally with fingers, dollar bills and bottles” (Jeffreys, 2008: 163). These are not isolated incidents, at an isolated strip club, but common experiences collated from different dancers working at different strip clubs, in different countries, on different nights. They are incidences that have the potential to (and often do) happen on any given night. The dancers have the power to have the offending patron removed from the club, but not the power to stop the abuse from occurring.
It is from this stand point that Radical feminists argue, and however true or frequent the reports of abuse are, they are still ‘decontextualized’ (Jeffreys, 2008: 158) events isolated within the discourse from the institutions and structures within which they are operating. A ‘decontextualized discourse is inappropriate because entrepreneurs are very organized nationally and internationally, they are not operating simply as individuals’ (Jeffreys, 2008: 158). It is often within ‘the context of huge profits to club owners, of organized crime, and trafficking that women strip in clubs’ (Jeffreys, 2008: 159). In an environment where owners and managers are largely male, and these managers ‘pressure dancers to completely shave their pubic hair, acquire year long tans, and undergo surgical breast augmentation’(Jeffreys, 2008: 159), dancers are disempowered by the appropriation of their bodies by a company as a commodity. And a discourse on the empowering nature of stripping is of course irrelevant when considering incidences of trafficking, which have ‘become a common way of supplying clubs with dancers’(Jeffreys, 2008: 159). These are incidences where women who have entered the industry initially by consent, or by force, are kept there by debt bondage or ‘controlled by threats to themselves or their families’, or ‘deprived of travel documents’ (Jeffreys: 2008, 159).
Strip clubs are sites that are highly gendered. In an environment where the dancers are female, and are at the risk of potential abuse by males who are either in control as managers or as spectators, and are placed in such a position of power by structures within society or within the business, a discourse which views one gender as the oppressor and the other as oppressed is a valid, but narrow, perspective. It is however, not valid to view these incidents of abuse as more legitimate than incidents that feel empowering to the dancer, and it is on this point that Radical and Sex Radical feminists differ so passionately. Each ‘empowering’ or ‘disempowering’ event is considered within a decontextualized, individual framework and both incidents are transient, rather than static in nature. Interpretive studies that investigate these events exist, however no analytical comparative studies were found in the literature regarding the frequency of the ‘empowering’ events in comparison to the ‘disempowering’ occurrences. Taking this into consideration, whilst it is quite valid to comment on the nature of occurrences and the impact the individual events have on the dancer or the spectator, it is not valid to claim that the practice of stripping is disempowering or empowering to a specific gender.
Of the feminists discourses surrounding prostitution, Barton (2002) records one sex workers as saying “it’s like prostitutes are just these bodies who are somehow connected to something evil or something good and on the cutting edge of revolution. They just turn us into symbols” (Barton, 2002: 587). Radical feminists and Sex Radical feminist positions are perhaps so irreconcilable and contentious because as discourses, they fail to accurately represent the full picture of the parties they claim to champion.
A Foucaultian framework explains that a discourse (the production of knowledge through language)(Barker, 2003: 101) is regulatory in nature, in that it dictates not only ‘what can be said under determinate social and cultural conditions but also who can speak, when and where’(Barker, 2003: 101). It is these regulations produced by both feminist discourses that render them ineffective and subject to criticism. Taking Barton’s claim that “The opinion of sex workers is only consulted when they confirm one or the other positions” (Barton, 2002: 587), the experiences of the dancers are regulated within the discourse in such a way that they are only rendered valid when in support of the given discourses political standpoint. Academics can be said to have appropriated this discourse to the extent that they regulate where the sex worker ‘can speak, when and where’, and this is seen by the way in which Radical feminists or Sex Radical feminists emphasise an empowering experience or disempowering experience over the other, ‘regulating’ the way in which the opposing experience is discussed, and thereby rendering it less legitimate. The appropriation of this discourse by academics has recast the dancers as ‘docile bodies’, capable of being ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (Barker, 2002: 587). By the subjection of the dancer’s bodies and subsequent regulation of their experiences, it is unsurprising that both discourses struggle for dominance, as one discourse is produced in such a way as to completely disclude the ideas and politics of the other. Sex Radical feminism dictates simply that the “Pro-stripping line is the correct feminist position” (Jeffreys, 2008: 153), whereas the focus of Radical feminism on abuse and oppression over, and in some cases to the exclusion of, any positive or empowering experiences makes it incapable of including this position uncritically within its discourse. Sex Radical feminism, in its lack of attention to abusive experiences, ‘normalizes’ (Heyes, 2007, pg 100) the abuse within the industry. Both discourses are an example an attempt to exercise power through the ‘discursive production and control of sexuality’ (Howe, 2008, pg 27).
Radical and Sex Radical feminisms consider within their discourses experiences that are both disempowering and empowering for the dancer. However, in their exclusion of the other’s salient points, they fail to accurately represent the lives of the women on whose behalf they claim to speak. A discourse that rejects empowering experiences will attack the very reason the dancer chooses to stay in the industry, whilst a discourse that delegitimizes the horrifying effects of abuse runs the risk of alienating the dancer, and tacitly permits and normalizes the abuse. Therefore a discourse which instead takes into account the context and power structures within which the dancer performs is an inclusive strategy which affords the dancer agency and control in an arena where the power she wields is not static, but transient, fragile, and unstable.
Bibliography
Attwood, Feona. 2007. “Sluts and Riot Grrrls: female identity and sexual agency.’ Journal of Gender Studies. 16:3. Pp 233-247.
Barker, Chris. 2003. Cultural Studies Theory and Practice. London: Sage Publications.
Barton, Bernadette. 2002.“Dancing on the Mobius Strip: Challenging the Sex War Paradigm” in Gender and Society, 16:5 pp 585-602.
Felski, Rita. 2006. “Because its Beautiful”: new feminist perspectives on beauty’ in Feminist Theory. 7 pp 273-282.
Frank, Katherine. 2003. “Just trying to relax: Masculinity, Masculinizing Practices and Strip Club Regulars” in Gender and Sexuality pp 61-75.
Gill, Rosalind. 2008. “Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising’. Feminism and Psychology. 18:35. Pp. 35-60.
Heyes, Cressida J. 2007. ‘Cosmetic surgery and the televisual makeover’ in Feminist Media Studies. 7:1. pp 17-32.
Howe, Adrian. 2008. ‘Lets talk about sex, baby’. Sex, Violence and Crime: Foucault and the ‘Man’ Question. Oxen: Routledge-Cavendish. Pp 22-53.
Jeffreys, Shiela. 2008. “Keeping Women Down and Out: The Strip Club Boom and Reinforcement of Male Dominance” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 34: 1 pp 151-167.
Velvet skies are illuminated by the lights of the city below it. Leederville’s café strip is a buzz with activity. Families, of all shapes and sizes dressed in their Saturday night out clothes walk talk and laugh, while young mums and dads assist kids in their strollers into their respective cars. The kids themselves are weary and tired. They look like fishermen with sea secrets in their eyes, after a long and arduous voyage (who said ice cream after a day at the park would be easy? Ah, parenting.). Couples at restaurants; Italian, posh, flirt with each other. Young attractive girls in barely-there clothes make their way to a night club.
A few metres up the road from them, a few kids skate at a skate park. Slowly they come into focus through the LCD monitor of a film camera. They are being filmed by a young woman with long hair standing with her film equipment on the Leederville Bridge. In the distance behind her a flurry of train commuters step out onto the bridge, they rush past her and exit the bridge like a pack of charging rhinoceros. The woman with the camera turns her attention to the oncoming river of traffic flowing below the bridge. She adjusts the focus ring of the camera. Her view of the LCD screen reveals a dance between the headlights of the oncoming traffic and the midnight highway.
Suddenly, out of nowhere a male voice interrupts the dance, “What are ya filming?” he asks. She turns around to face him, a young man in his mid twenties, the same age as her, dressed to the nines for a good night out with his equally well dressed six male friends stand before her. “It’s for a short film”, she smiles as she answers, and directs her attention back to the dance between the headlights and the highway. The young man positions himself two feet from her; he looks over her shoulder at the LCD screen then says, “I’ll give you something to film”.
A few seconds later a series of crude comments and odd sounds distract the woman’s attention away from her work. She turns her head to look at the young man standing close to her and realises what’s going on. She redirects her attention back to her film subjects. Her posture changes, she isn’t sure of what she’s doing there anymore but, she appears incapable of moving, perhaps with fear or is it anger? Two feet away from her, the young man with all the questions continues to go about his business.
Masturbate. Mourn. In Pleasure.
His friends are standing at the exit point of the bridge. Their laughs have disappeared and in their place left uncomfortable smiles, the sort you get from people who’ve had more than a healthy dose of Botox. This lasts six minutes. During it the young woman with the camera remains frozen on the bridge. Once he finishes, the man urinates, then speaks to the woman, “I hope you got some good footage”. He and his friends roar with laughter and objectionably triumphantly high five. They disappear into the night.
That was how my date with a film camera played out a few weeks ago on a Saturday night at 8pm in Leederville. You should have bashed him with the tripod, I hear you say. Let me put it to you this way, think of seven rough and ready men against another man. Now, imagine a smallish woman against that lot. Don’t get me wrong, the thought did cross my mind but, then the intellect in me weighed my chances and informed me that I had none unless I could bolt like Usain Bolt. I had even thought of turning my camera and filming him and perhaps giving the tapes to a commercial television programme such as “A Current Affair”. I saw the headlines in my head, “The scum making Perth unsafe for women, how we name and shame them!” Given Mr. Scum’s nature I did once again evaluate my odds and decide against filming him, just in case he thought it might be fun to push me over the bridge. One of my closest guy friends inquired later, “was he high or drunk?” “No” came the simple reply from me. I’ve associated many people on a myriad of drug and alcohol cocktails and this man, at least in that department was clean.
The next day I found myself typing the following status update (YES, a nod to this glorious past time most of us generation Y’s seem to be addicted is necessary even if it may appear an indulgence) on my Facebook page,
“Sam is inclined to think that a certain portion of the men in this city, were hatched from a procedure devoid of a mother’s love. The misogynistic and vile behaviour and complete lack of etiquette I experienced last night can not be explained any other way.”
So onto the elephant in the room, why do certain men of this modern societal landscape feel the need to behave in such an appalling manner? I had thought we lived in a better world than our parents and grandparents. There was the internet, bringing people from all over the world together on social networking sites, cheap air fares enabling us to travel to distant parts of the world our grandparents perhaps had never heard of and experience vibrant cultures, racism was down (well, excluding the unfortunate Muslims of the world after 9/11 thanks to that G.W. Bush, and of course, the first Australians of this beautiful country), homophobia is down (the gay and lesbian population have certainly begun sticking it to the man, the Pope), and equal rights for women have improved dramatically. Ding, Ding, Ding! Or have they?
Flashbacks of the bridge. Thunder echoes.
That man couldn’t do what he did to another man and get away with it. Well, certainly not with out expecting to have the shits kicked out of him, and end up with a head the size of a massive Halloween lantern, broken jagged teeth and a morphine prescription for two weeks. Blokes, do far less healthy self-reflection than us women. Oh no, here goes another instalment of “grumpy old women – the feminist episode” and the “what’s wrong with blokes today” I hear you say. Bear with me. I was watching a TV programme on which Gene Simmons was being interviewed (yes, the KISS rock god whose slept with 4,600 women!). When quizzed about the above mentioned number of women, he very respectfully reiterated to the female interviewer that a man does not need a woman, aside from the purpose of having sex. He proceeded to postulate that women are born with a yearning for a man biologically, due to the fact that we have a limited amount of eggs to a man’s millions of sperm. I curbed my urge to yell out, “I am very happy to have my eggs unfertilised for the present time, thank you very much”, at Mr. Simmons (make that the television). After how far we think we have come is it possible that men (I should actually rephrase that to a “certain portion” of men) still view us as things? If so, can I sit on Santa’s knee this year and ask that my Christmas gift be “a transformation of said portion of men into pro-feminist men”?
The “magic” transformation we would all like to see happen, yes even many of you fellow blokes (the nice guys) can’t be done in isolation. The journey into your inner self is an arduous one, and it calls for a few companions for the ride. Kind of like a buddy film. If one guy’s Sundance, some one else has to be Butch. Going back to my Facebook status update, it is possible for me to imagine that those men I encountered on that night could actually have grown up in an environment where the sensitivities a mother brings to the family may have been compromised. Childhood plays an important part in ones journey through life. Indeed, pro-feminist men grow up with an acute understanding of their mums’ emotional lives, and are therefore able to understand us and respect us. Moreover, they grow into secure adults who have nothing to prove to his “pack”. Having said this, I would suggest that a grown up devotion to justice is ingrained in more than our kiddie experiences of playing in the park and spending quality time visiting boring places with mum on Sundays.
To make a long story short, young males desperately need gurus. I’m not referring to those wise men you get in India. I’m referring to the ones you encounter at school, home, the footy field and at work. With all due respect to these gurus for all they offer the males of our culture, it must be said however, that they fall short when it comes to helping the general young men with the existential issues.
As a result the anti-feminist blokes voices. Loud! Obnoxious! Drown out the aspirations of the feminist man. Mocking his passivity. We’ve all met these men, at parties and at corporate conferences. They often have conversations with our nicer friends and a few more “yes men” to complete the circle and proudly declare that they want to get rich, get laid, get shit faced watching footy and they don’t want any of that “emotional intimacy crap”, or if they are feeling particularly gentlemanly, “that emotional intimacy stuff”. These anti-feminists pressure the others to live life, stop worrying about justice “and all that bullshit” because you are only young once. Consequently the feminist man experiences something like the crushing wall effect. His mates become one wall urging him to stop worrying about “chicks feelings”, while the community conformists of our culture become the other crushing wall, urging him to take up his role as the superior being, the leader.
So what is the solution?
Religious leaders and defense attorneys of footy players would have us believe that it is a problem with the female species. We either wear clothes that are too tight, short or we look too pretty and therefore offer serious temptations for the male species to harm us. Does this mean that they would rather have us look like scary old hags from the Stone Age, when our appearances had to be negotiated due to a lack of running water and bars of soap?!? Eeeep! I don’t think any of our community conformists would like taking out a woman of the above description to the super market let alone a restaurant, unless the woman happen to be wearing a paper bag. So, this is not something the female discourse should spend hours on end trying to solve. Really, it’s not our problem, we aren’t the cause.
The pivotal thing men need to do, is be candid about their desire to use women (e.g. snagging a super hot girl friend, whom his mates would pat him on the back for), and the way in which men treat women as a whole, to establish their status in the eyes of other men. A classic example being the incident described in paragraphs one to four. So, here’s where our best guy friends, and others of equal moral fiber can step in and carry out a service every red blooded female on the planet would be grateful for. When they are at a party, at a club, pub or parking lot, if they challenged the anti-feminists and other men whom I shall not spend time categorizing, and held each other accountable for the ways in which men utilize their spouses/girl friends and the way in which men approach, address, and treat other women on the street to whom they have no obligatory relationship (“it is a truth universally acknowledged” that a man would never dare or even dream of calling their own mum something appalling), then the anti-feminist voices of our culture would with time have some hope of being eradicated. And those men who were once kids with skinny arms and bony knees, would grow into gentlemen (I’m not referring to those men with good breeding and posh accents but, rather, gentle men), who respect women. Regardless of whether the woman happen to be a “pert boobs in a bra” or “boobs which have migrated south indefinitely and therefore gone past their need for a bra.”
I grew up thinking that the world is not fair. All the people seemed to think that girls are not funny. And when the boys wanted to make a performance in elementary school where they just walked through the stage, everyone thought it was funny. I didn´t. I was jealous, because I wanted to be one of them. And now, doing improv, I´ve noticed that it´s just so much easier for guys to be funny. They practically don´t have to do anything and they are considered funny. And as for women, it´s at least twice as hard. Unless you´re fat or funny-looking.
But what the most pisses me off here is that when you hear a guy doing stand up, they usually start talking about the differences of men and women. And that´s the moment I´m totally pissed. Every time they start to talk about how women are very interested and accurate about interior decorating or cooking or cleaning. And I´m like: what the fuck? What kind of women you´re dating? I´m a woman. Or at least when I have to choose between two different sexes. But I´m not interested in decorating my house, or cooking, or fashion, or reality-TV and I definitely hate cleaning. And I´ve seen ladies do stand up and they talk about cosmetics, food or animals. And so I thought what I would talk about if I would do stand up.
Something in common. I´ve had this penis-envy for many years, ´cos I think it´s very cool that guys are able to pee and write their names into snow. But when I was ending my breast-feeding, I found out that I don’t have to be. And what a cool thing it was, spraying my name to the shower-curtain and shooting those animals down from the curtain. I felt like a cyborg-warrior having a secret weapon in my boobs.
The difference. My ex-husband refused to see me milking my breasts. It´s the most natural thing to do, but he didn´t want to see it. He said: Honey. If you ever want me to see your breasts as erotic objects, I don´t want to see that. And I was astonished. How many times I´ve seen him pee. Can I now refuse a blow job?
Well… I can see that the gig would be very short with these topics. So it´s a good thing that I don´t do stand up. It´s not easy being a woman in comedy. We have only one famous stand up comedienne here and she has this incredibly stupid blonde girl –character. And that´s all. I think about 5-10 % of the stand up artists are women here in Finland. With improv it´s different and I think the situation is 50-50. And when you go down the professional level and look at the amateur-groups, there are 90% if women. But you can be skilled improviser without being considered funny. And of course we all know that it´s not because girls are not funny. But it´s hard to believe that you can be, when all you´ve ever heard is just the opposite. And of course here is the Finnish way of not being too proud of yourself and the shame especially for women if they try something and fail. So it´s safer to stay in the corner everybody thinks you should be in. Yep. That all I have to say about it. For now.
Johanna is a freelance teacher from Finland. She studies Theatre and Women Studies with a Drama Research Major at the University of Tampere.
I've sometimes thought that if I had been born a boy, I'd be a stand up comedian. I love stand up. I think that good stand up it's one of the coolest, most enthralling, impressive, sexy things anyone can do. I have supported stand up as an audience member, a door bitch, a friend, a girlfriend. I sit in the audience and beam like a proud mum at beloved members of the Perth comedy scene doing whole sets that I've seen so many times I could recite word for word. More than a few clever young lads have caused my ovaries to clang above the roar of laughter in comedy rooms around the country. In fact, a trip to the Melbourne Comedy Festival is like my version of sex tourism and I know I’m not alone here.
Just so you know, I wasn’t born a boy. I was born a girl. A ‘pretty’ girl. I have also answered to the adjectives ‘cute’, ‘sweet’ and ‘nice’. I learnt early on that these were highly regarded as pleasing qualities for a lady and, while surely not the be all and end all of existence, had value, could elicit reactions and attention. I could get by on pretty and nice. Being funny and intelligent were just things I sometimes did on the side to stop from getting bored.
Cute often grows up into sexy and I ended up following my dramatic leanings down a twisting pathway and finding burlesque, an artform which celebrates the sexy, the beautiful and the decidedly feminine. It does so in a big, camp, parodical way, which I adore. The word burlesque comes from the Latin burla - which means jest or mockery. So I get to be humorous and clever, while simultaneously reveling in, exploiting and taking the piss out of all this prettiness, sexiness and whatever I’m meant to have going on. I get to do all this while wearing sparkly costumes. Sweeeeet.
Creatively and aesthetically fulfilled as I am, I do sometimes fantasise about what it would be like to be able to enthrall a room full of punters with hilarious words and mind-blowing trains of thought. I could, I suppose, give stand up a go. It is almost the done thing in my social circle. When I imagine myself up there doing my three minutes, however, I imagine a room full of men looking at my boobs and not listening to what I’m saying. I imagine twenty women bitching about what I was wearing afterwards. I imagine forced and polite laughter because I need to be ‘given a go’ for the sake of correctness and fairness. Yes, I’m being a bit pessimistic here, but I know it would be like this because I know comedy audiences. They are hard on female comedians. Because even though we are just around the corner from hover boards and holidays on Mars and even though we do really know better, part of us still thinks that women aren’t supposed to be funny. They are supposed to be pretty, or maternal, or sensible. We think funny should be left to the boys, who are more confident and do it better. If there were a female equivalent to Bill Hicks, she might get a bit of recognition, but she would also be put on some magazine’s worst dressed list and asked to do a novelty 'FHM' cover.
There are plenty of fantastic girls who experience these attitudes and do it anyway. All comedians have to develop thick skins, but women need scales and antlers as well. Most women are not encouraged to be funny growing up and then if they do give it a go they have to work twice as hard to be heard above the noise of intense criticism and doubt. Funny women are tough.
Tina Fey is Goddess of Hilarity in my personal pantheon of inspirational heroines. I’ve day dreamed about getting up on stage at Lazy Susan’s and telling Sarah Silverman’s jokes, except, in the dream they were my own. Funnily enough, I’ve never day dreamed about doing my own material. So don’t worry that I’m repressing my creative dreams for fear of scrutiny or failure. I’m not a comedian. I’m too busy and happy writhing about in sequins and innovating new ways to flash. Stand up is a day dream for me, but I’m not really compelled to do it. I don’t want it enough. Those who do will overcome the crap and have you in stitches. Then, when they get as successful as they possibly can they’ll still have to have their weight scrutinized by ‘Who Weekly’ and be obliged to comment on boring claims by dull male journalists that they in fact aren’t funny at all. Snore.
In a parallel universe, where I had been born Ben Church, instead of Bec (not to be confused with Russell or Sutton), I think yes, I probably would have given stand up a whirl. I think I could even have done quite well and been very passionate about it because I would have been encouraged at the very first sign of wit in my infancy. Then again, Ben would most likely dance in front of the mirror in shiny dresses when alone and day dream about being able to bump and grind like Dita Von Tease.
Jerry Seinfeld once talked about the undecipherable allocation of funny people in this world. There is no tangible or fathomable thread linking anyone that is funny, men, women, short, fat, tall, lanky, conservative, liberal, it doesn’t matter. Despite the overwhelming amount of funny Jewish people, there is no particular group of people or social association that were specifically given the gifts and opportunities to be able to absorb, think, and deliver comedy.
Saying that, we are aware of the fact that there is a stigma in this society pinned to female comedians, there is a social aberration that dictates ‘it does not make sense for a woman to be funny, it is not in alignment with what should be, all that social power is too difficult to comprehend, women aren’t so funny’. Yet worldwide women continue to sell out thousand seater venues, these gigs are attended by both men and women… What?! That doesn’t make sense either… How is it that the other night I was in a room watching a female comedian storm the headline position, I looked around, men and women were doubled over and clapping uproariously, that doesn’t make sense?! Well of course it doesn’t. But it was true, and it is true. If successive collective laughter on a consistent basis is the indicator of funniness, then that was and is proof that women are funny right?! Well, I think it is more a sign that a person can be funny.
There is no logic to funny, any definition you throw as to what comedy is will implode on itself…try it, I’ll immediately give you an example of why you are wrong in that generalised statement…sure you can build evidence for an idea about comedy, but as soon as you start to zoom into something your definition will cease to exist. There is no logic to funny, it just doesn’t make sense. Surprisingly there is some logic to this awkwardly hierarchal opportunistic seemingly liberal society
Sure a woman may walk onstage and maybe there is a subconscious feeling or sense of ‘oh oh, she is a woman, will this be funny or not, will she fit our expectation or not’.. but all that is is simply worthless expectations socially conditioned from our environments wherever we are. As soon as that comedian starts talking, and starts with the jokes, the logic goes right out the door and all the audience cares about is if they are funny or not. Logic does not stand a chance in the field of funny. It is worthless. Why else did such comedians as Lenny Bruce, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor, Phyllis Diller, or Groucho Marx completely own their crafts before their sometimes racist, anti-semitic, sexist, ignorant audiences. How else did they become stars with some people in their industry still hanging onto their backwards beliefs?! How is it that we have disabled comedians selling out large scale theatres? Prominent feminist Susan Wendell wrote a lot about the social attitudes towards people with disabilities, she coined the term ‘the rejected body’. So with so much social expectation how can one by so successful?! Quite simply, they were funny.
I guess if anyone knows of or has been lucky/unlucky enough to see a famous/well known comedian go onstage and die miserably, they too know the power of funny. Despite the positive attitudes beaming towards them, if they aren’t getting laughs after that first minute of lenience, then the crowd has no time for them. Seriously! They have no time for them! Logic has nothing to do with it. Funny is a seemingly pointless wonder.
What is the subtext of this article? Women can be funny too. Well that is in itself creating an unnecessary divide between male and female comedians. So I would just like to point that out.
I used to write fairly in-depth articles for Curtin University’s Grok magazine, covering topics such as the Kent State shootings on 4 May 1970, student riots in Papua New Guinea, marijuana law reform in WA, and Islam. Some of these articles appeared in full-page, even double-page, form, so I tried to make them as rigorous and well-written as possible. At some stage, and for reasons unbeknownst to me, I had the idea that I should write one of these long-winded articles about women. I didn’t really know what the article was going to be about, other than that I wanted to write a positive article about women, without sounding like one of those dudes who get so righteous about the ladies that they join feminist organizations and take up the fight against the patriarchy (only to later on reconsider their position and piss off their former feminist allies by writing books such as The Myth of Male Power, as in the case of Warren Farrell).
With such an interesting but ridiculously open-ended premise in mind, I commenced my research, which involved hoarding any books which touched on the issue of women, ploughing through piles of old Bulletin magazines for interesting gender-related articles, and collecting newspaper clippings and copies of pro-women lyrics sung by men, such as Billy Bragg and Wilco’s interpretation of Woody Guthrie’s “She Came Along To Me”:
“Ten hundred books could I write you about her Because I felt if I could know her I would know all women And they've not been any too well known For brains and planning and organized thinking But I'm sure the women are equal And they may be ahead of the men…”
I had never done so much research for an article before in my life, and I was still no closer to getting to the heart of the story I had convinced myself I wanted to tell.
In the end, I didn’t tell it at all. Writing about women was just too hard.
Against my better judgment, I then allowed myself to be donkey-punched by the maddening complexity of it all yet again by recently turning my attention to the issue of women in comedy. The Ghost of Aborted Feminist Articles Past haunts and vexs me anew.
Where do you even start?
Women and comedy are each fascinating and complex subjects in their own right, but combining the two? The resultant fusion is unwieldy and mind-boggling.
And if one does get a handle on it perchance, how can he then express himself honestly without running the risk of (a) being misconstrued as sexist or anti-women, (b) being so PC and safe that he sounds like a groveling, craven cheerleader for what Flaubert described as “the Good Lord’s most charming creation”, or (c) inadvertently offending some female comedians who also happen to be his friends?
What’s a man to do?
I decided to start by asking myself what my honest belief is. And my honest belief is this: there are plenty of funny women, but not many funny female comedians. Why? Is that even true? If it is, how can we change it? Can we change it?
Personally, I am happy to acknowledge the inherent and natural funniness of many women I know and have come to love, and to leave it at that. Not Christopher Hitchens though, who goes one step further and compares female funniness to male funniness, and concludes, for reasons mainly to do with evolutionary biology, that women, generally speaking, are less funny than men.
THE HITCHENS VIEW
His essay’s characteristically provocative title, “Why Women Aren’t Funny”, is somewhat misleading, as Hitchens does acknowledge that there are fine female comedians and wits out there, and also emphasizes that women have a sense of humour (if they didn’t, there would be no need for men to try so hard to be funny). But having a sense of humour, of course, is not the same as being funny. According to Hitchens, men generally have more developed funny bones than women because of their multitudinous shortcomings; the average man, being so ill-equipped to impress the opposite sex, “has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh.” Women, on the other hand, have no corresponding need to appeal to men with humour because “they already appeal to men.”
Hitchens also argues that women’s ability to reproduce gives them “a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment,” “imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle”, and ultimately means that for women, “the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one.” Because women have this “unchallengeable authority”, this “higher calling”, which is no laughing matter (I can say from personal experience that most women, unless they’re really cool, don’t seem to appreciate jokes about abortion and fetuses – or is that feti?), they are, oddly enough, the responsible, respectable masters, and men the naughty prankster slaves.
“But Mr Hitchens”, I hear you say. “What about women who aren’t the typical feminine, maternal type – who aren’t so hung up on reproduction?” Hitchens has this covered too:
“There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don't dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.”
Some commentators have suggested that the new wave of pretty female comedians, represented by the likes of Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman, undermines Hitchens’ thesis, but it doesn’t really. A woman who is pretty and funny is always going to be the exception rather than the rule. I emphasize the word “pretty”, by the way – it is no impediment to a female comedian to be attractive or good-looking (which to me are different from the more delicate and feminine “pretty”), provided that one is not threateningly so. Excessive prettiness usually only distracts men and breeds resentment in women.
Hitchens’ view doesn’t change my belief that there are plenty of funny women around, which it doesn’t even need to, given that the two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. Hitchens’ view is just far more expansive and brave than mine. However, as compelling and rigorously argued as his analysis is, it ultimately doesn’t help me work out how women who are funny off stage can become more funny onstage. It’s easy to write off women on what some would describe as biologically reductionist grounds; it’s much harder to think of ways in which female comedians can be funnier. And I want female comedians to be funnier, not just because I think comedy would benefit, but also because saying that has the potential to exponentially increase my poontang-pulling power.
DICK JOKES
It should be acknowledged that stand-up comedy, which is brutal and hard in and of itself, can also be much harder for women. Stand-up comedy is a masculine affair: dick jokes, beer after the show, constant travelling (which makes relationships, raising families and hosting Tupperware parties very hard), and holding your own against a room full of strangers are all very manly, “lone wolf” things to do. Transplant the American phenomenon of stand-up comedy to an Australian context and the blokiness becomes even more pronounced.
What we have is an essentially blokey artform, in a blokey country, with audiences that generally associate stand-up comedy with men, and ipso facto bring with them lower expectations of female comedians.
But it’s more than just expectations; it’s also how an audience relates to a female comedian once she walks out on stage and starts talking. Most audiences at first don’t quite know how to relate to a young lady holding a microphone and trying to make them laugh. A funny dude can just go out on stage and be a funny dude. There isn’t the same dynamic, the same baggage.
However, as Perth comedian Laura Davis has acknowledged, there are perks to being a girl in comedy too: “With only a small percentage of comedians being women, the chances of you getting noticed are much, much greater…the crowd is usually more polite towards a female act, there is less talking, less heckling and if you do your job well and no jokes fail it is easier to ‘keep’ a crowd than for a male act.” Furthermore, the comedy circles I move in are very egalitarian. It's the audiences that tend to be the cunts.
Ultimately, taking the sociological view of stand-up comedy only gets you so far – the deciding issue is the funniness of the individual female performer, which can overcome all. There is a point at which gender analysis ceases to be useful for all concerned and simply becomes playing the gender card. A cop-out.
Which for me, is the problem with such well-intentioned, gender-specific initiatives as Upfront (the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s annual women-only stand-up night), Jeez Louise (the festival’s annual women’s comedy workshop1), the Melbourne stand-up scene’s so-called “skirt network” (a loose association of female comedians, writers and performers), and women-only comedy nights. They have their place, particularly as a forum for audiences who want a female comedic perspective, or for performers who want a more supportive environment, but they don’t help to make a female comedian funnier. And under the guise of promoting women in comedy, they can have the counterintuitive effect of placing women within a special niche of comedy, of reinforcing the idea that one is a “female comedian”, and not a player in the main arena where all the big boys are.
LANGUAGE
Another problem for female comedians is language. Whilst there is a readymade language for male comedians to adopt, harness or just plain plagiarize, the language of the female comedian is still being developed. Shit, stand-up comedy itself is still being developed, being the relatively young artform that is. Most commentators seem to trace stand-up comedy back to 19th-century American vaudeville, although some, like Time Magazine’s Richard Zoglin, argue that modern stand-up comedy really began with Bob Hope (there is a compelling argument that Jesus was the first stand-up comic, but I’ll leave that for another day).
Comedy, of course, also changes with the times. Try watching an old episode of Martin and Lewis or a Charlie Chaplin movie – I’d be very surprised if you found them as hilarious as audiences apparently did back in the day.
In the 21st century, as gender roles and identities continue to be explored and wrestled with (the activist sixties and seventies weren’t really that long ago), more and more women have been stepping up to the comedy plate, but they have also found themselves in a world of uncertainty, where the option isn’t open to them, as it is to men, to simply channel Bill Hicks or Jerry Seinfeld or Dave Hughes. Women are reinventing themselves, and what it means to be a woman; little wonder then that many women don’t necessarily find it easy to speak in a comedic language that works for them, and which isn’t outdated or hackneyed.
THE COMEDIAN
Like the stages of a video game, the female comedian must pass through various phasesbefore she can become what she is: self-doubt as a woman, self-doubt as a comedian (which happens to everyone, except for delusional numbskulls), sheltered workshops and gender-specific showcases, and the real business offinding a comedic language, a voice.
In the end, the comedian, if she’s any good, realizes that she’s completely on her own, beyond gender, confronting the beautiful and terrifying reality of stand-up comedy, which is that it is so solitary and individual.
To play the gender card in the existential morass that is stand-up comedy is to kind of miss the point.
The true comedian, you see, is not female, gay, Asian, black or even “alternative” – she is a funny person, and she doesn’t need your sympathy or sheltered workshops. She just needs an audience that is willing to listen.
The rest is up to her.
FOOTNOTE
1 Incidentally, most of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival staff are women.
Hi my name is Ben Russell, I am new at stand up comedy.
I say new because I have been doing standup since 2005 and have not even begun to scratch the surface. I managed to walk in on a conversation that I had no business in while at The World’s Funniest Island Festival in Sydney between Heath Franklin and Mickey D where Mickey was stating with some zeal how “this isn’t something that you can get in three years, it’s not something you get in fifteen. You never get it and even if you do there is no piece of paper to hang on your wall afterwards.”
Now this may seem like an unfair statement taken out of context, but what I think Mickey was saying is not that somehow comics have a harder job than other people, it’s that when done well it looks so damn easy. But it’s hard, really hard, and fun, but harder for women. I have been in the audience when a female comic has walked out and they have had to noticeably try harder to earn that trust of the audience. Don’t make the mistake of making the audience primarily male either, regardless of the major sex of the audience I have still felt that when a woman steps out onto that stage the audience sighs, crosses their arms and thinks “here we go” and that is so fucked I have to stop myself from flying into a massive two page rant.
I don’t pretend to know precisely why this is so I’m just going to go for one thing I believe is a contributing factor. One day when I was watching Rick Shapiro eat two steaks while trying desperately (and failing) to keep up with his coffee consumption. In between him shouting at patrons of the hotel restaurant he was staying is that he noticed something curious about his time in Australia is that “...everyone here has a bad attitude when it comes to confidence and going after shit. They’re looked down if they succeed, they don’t like it, people, people think their weird or something you know? Especially their women, they’re talented and smart and fuckin’ gorgeous man you know!? What the fuck!?”
I can understand how Rick could feel this way, I mean, he’s an American and there is a very interesting thing Americans are brought up with; the American Dream. The philosophy that if you want something, you should do it and take it as far as you can. Here there is a very different philosophy of if you want something, you should do it and take it as far as you can but don’t go too far because we don’t like people thinking they’re better than the rest of us. There is something in keeping your flaming ego in check, but all this “Tall Poppy Syndrome” does is help celebrate Australian mediocrity. This definitely affects our industry but more specifically it also affects how women comics are viewed both by male and female audience members. Before you even say a word the audience is making judgement calls, and it takes them a while to reset those calls when you’re actually funny, but don’t be too funny because we don’t want you to get a big head. The tall poppy syndrome is working it’s magic on the comedian even before they step out on stage though and that’s what you have to fight. It’s tough enough having to deal with the audiences judgement you shouldn’t have to deal with your own. You are good enough, otherwise you wouldn’t fucking be there. While I admit this is not THE reason, I believe it is a contributing factor.
The point that I’m trying to make is that I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that women have it tougher in comedy; I think it’s that women have a tougher time in general within our society. Granted I haven’t made much sense in this article, but trying to get my head around why I see disgustingly talented females in comedy, both stand up and improvisation, get up there and give an audience everything they’ve got only to have it judged harsher because they have a boobs and a vagina is a fucking outrage. But I have no idea how to fix it and that is even more infuriating.
I used to wear my bathers on stage.Not just any bathers, they were red razorback Speedos, like the ones that I used to wear at swimming carnivals when I was in school.
I’m not exactly sure why I did this.
Maybe they made me feel like a champion?Maybe I thought that they made my stomach look slim?Or, maybe I was just that scared of drowning?
I think it was all of the above, and more.
Truth be told, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure it was also because I wanted to look androgynous.
And, for this ONE simple reason: I did not want my gender to interfere with my jokes.
And, it didn’t.
Over my first 2 years of doing stand-up I accumulated four pairs of identical red razorback Speedos. They all got their fair share under the spotlight, but you know what?None of them even touched the water. They were my special ‘stage bathers’ and even though they were clearly built for a 50m lane, I didn’t let them get a whiff of chlorine or an itch of sand, not even once.
But, despite their anguish of never being able to live out their real dreams, we all worked well together.Everything was going along swimmingly.
That is until, one night, at Lazy Susan’s Comedy Den.I walked out on stage and before I’d even managed to get word out, a girl in the front row yelled up at me, “Where’s your t-shirt bra?”
Oh no. How was this possible?She’d somehow seen straight through my togs of deception!
Reality hit hard that night, real hard.Like asphalt in the face when the front wheel of your Malvern Star blows out.
Who was I kidding? I wasn’t hiding anything. I was braless under a spotlight. My nipples screamed out, ‘Look I’m a lady!’ and ‘Me too!’
The next gig I had after that one, I’m proud to say, I wore a bra. I probably wore three, one on top of each other, just in case the Intimates Patrol were out on the town again.
And, you know what, I totally surprised myself by how well I did.The red razorback Speedos had become my good-luck trunkets.But somehow, their charms still worked from my undies draw at home.
I didn’t drown, I touched the wall in first place that night and came off stage feeling like a champion.A Champion Girl.Because bra or no bra – comedy is comedy.
