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 I haven't had a chance to see Live Nude Girls Unite! yet because it's out in Magill, I didn't have time to go to Bryn Mawr and I cannot find it ANYWHERE online (has anyone else? I thought that it'd be easy to find but I guess I was wrong).  Anyways, sex work and stripping is something I've thought about a lot, and I immediately thought about this song, which I'm sure you all remember:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uv2b8jo46w

City High, What Would You Do

Boys and girls wanna hear a true story?
Saturday night I was at this real wild party,
they had the liquor overflowin' the cup,
about 5 or 6 strippers tryin to work for a buck,
and I took one girl outside wit me,
her name was Lonni, she went to Jr. High wit me,
I said, Why you up in there dancin' for cash?
I guess a whole alots changed since I seen you last
She said,

what would you do if your son was at home,
cryin' all alone on the bedroom floor
cuz he's hungry, and the only way to feed him 
is to sleep with a man for a 
little bit of money and his daddy's gone,
somewhere smokin' rock now,
in and out of lock down,
I ain't got a job now,
so for you this is just a good time but for me this is what 
I call life, mmm

girl you ain't the only one wit a baby,
that's no excuse to be livin' all crazy,
then she looked me right square in the eye,
and said every day I wake up hopin' to die,
she said-nigga I know about pain cuz,
me and my sister ran away so my daddy couldn't rape us,
before I was a teenager I been through more shit,
that you can't even relate ta... 

what would you do?
get up on my feet and let go of every excuse
what would you do?
cuz I wouldn't want my baby to go through what I went
through
(come on)
what would you do?
Get up on my feet and stop makin' up tired excuses
What would you do?
girl I know if my mother can do it, baby you can do it

what would you do if your son was at home,
cryin' all alone on the bedroom floor
cuz he's hungry, and the only way to feed him 
is to sleep with a man for a 
little bit of money and his daddy's gone,
somewhere smokin' rock now,
in and out of lock down,
I ain't got a job now,
so for you this is just a good time but for me this is what I call life

This song was released in 2001, so I guess most of us were about 12 years old and didn't quite understand what the song was talking about. But the lyrics are straight forward enough that I had the idea. When I listen to this song now, I can't really keep my thoughts in a straight line. I think of my mother's friend who got pregnant at 18 and tried like hell to get a job as a secretary, in food service, in factories around the city but nothing pulled through for her so she starting dancing as a stripper at the local bars. That's all she's done for more than ten years now, and she has a nice, clean home and has enough money to give her youngest child, her daughter, everything she desires. There's still a lot of conflict though, from the lifestyle that tends to come along with this kind of work. She doesn't have custody of her son of her son because of mix-ups with drugs and partying when she was younger and first started stripping. 

In the song, the part rapped a male member of the group (starting with the line "get up on my feet and let go of every excuse") really rubs me the wrong way. I understand what he's saying, and in some ways I agree with his sentiment, but I've seen this woman get her life together and be a responsible and loving parent while stripping. He ends this section with "girl I know if my mother can do it, baby you can do it" which has a really caring, sincere tone, but she HAS done it, and so have many other women who have turned to stripping and sex work in order to provide for their children. 

So I guess right now my opinions and thoughts are mixed and mashed. I would like for women to not have to resort to stripping in order to make rent and buy food, but what else do you do when you've spent months and months applying for jobs and going to interviews without getting any offers? I don't see it as a degrading profession when the women choose it and become well-off because of it--what is degrading about being able to put food on the table or buy Christmas presents for your child? It's likely that most of the time, especially for women who have been doing this for awhile, stripping isn't even about sex. It loses that feel after 5 years of dancing in lace underwear on a stage, or that's what I think would happen if I were in that position. I don't have a full perspective on this issue, and I really can't wait to get my hands on that documentary to see what perspective that offers me. It could be that it totally changes what I think, but at this point I know that stripping does not have to be a horrible thing, and that negative sentiment shouldn't be pushed onto the women who are working as strippers--rather, we should be listening to them telling us how they feel. 

*Note, I'm not sure yet how I feel about "sex work" still. It's in a different space in my mind, away from stripping, and seems to imply something much more dangerous and risky than dancing.