New Literary Genre: the Stripper Memoir

Came across this interesting article on Slate.com's XX site. Click here to read about stripper memoirs.

It's interesting that in any given genre what begins as sharp commentary will inevitably dull and become just another innocuous part of popular culture. Like Ozzy going from Prince of f*ing Darkness to bumbling TV dad and progenitor of sullen offspring.

My literary theory's a little rusty, and my focus was never on feminism, but this article intrigued me.

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First I want to note how I love that "stripper memoir" is now a genre. Like the rock star heroin odyssey or politico fratboy recollection. It's amusing that people who work in an industry based around titillation would write in such a formulaic manner as to be given their own niche. As author Katie Roiphe concludes:

This stylized form of sexuality seems to lend itself to cliché. In all of these memoirs, there is something false in the revelation and mechanical in the execution, that is—if we take the word of these bored and jaded ladies—something like stripping itself.

My two cents (based on article alone, as I have not yet read these memoirs. Will update when I do.)

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Ah, sex. The alpha and omega taboo, from the beginning of time 'til our inevitable decline, it is the one subject sure to set pens scribbling. I find it intriguing that apparently self-proclaimed modern and liberated women would feel the need to emphasize their ascension above sexual exploitation in their writing.

I'm not a stripper because I choose not to profit off my sexuality, reserving it for my own private endeavours. However, if someone chooses to make money of their own volition, then more power to them. And yes, you can draw the line arbitrarily wherever you want, since it's your body and your psyche. When you reach your comfort limit and say, "enough," fine. But from reading this article I get the impression that there is judgement toward the other types of strippers in these books, the "lifers" as it were. These writers immerse themselves in this existence, yet keep themselves at a remove from it in order to pass judgement and remain "untainted" according to this article. Roiphe says they display the "same innate, catty, female dividing of the world into sluts and non-sluts, that takes place in the rest of the world." If so, weak.

The archetypes of mother/nurturer and whore go way back and are key players in the successful feminist deconstruction of writing, which is overwhelmingly "masculine" or judgmental and limiting. The idea that women fall into one of two archetypes is tenacious in its survival. It seems that even in our liberated 21st century we find the atavistic tendencies return. Sure, they're reconfigured so that the mother/Madonna figure becomes the wholesome "stripper with a heart of gold, putting herself through anthropology courses, one lap dance at a time" and the whore becomes, well...it's the far endpoint of the spectrum, but the whore becomes the more risque stripper who chooses to pursue prostitution or pornography beyond her oeuvre.

I'd be interested to read the memoir of one of these ladies. The hardened lifers who watch the Diablo Codys and Lily Buranas and think to themselves how those pretentious young twats talk a good talk but have only skimmed the surface of the dark half of the subculture, which they never fully devote themselves to in the first place. It's like first-person voyeurism, rather than immersion.

How does one contend to shatter the notion of "woman as sexual object" by becoming it and then rejecting it outright? So do you either embody sex or purity? What about sexuality as one part of a person's identity?

Are we taking a step forward or backward when we define female sexuality and liberation in terms of exploitation? Would a male stripper have to seek validation with a white picket fence history beneath his greased-up pectoral exterior? Probably not. If not, why do these women have to excuse themselves for doing what they do? If it's shame they feel, then their claims of liberating women sexually are dashed. If they feel superiority, then they have to look at their acts and see that they're exploiting their bodies as much as those objectifying them. If it's an insider's look into the abyss, well, then I'm not quite sure we're there yet.