KEEPING HER OFF THE POLE: MY DAUGHTER’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE

       Katherine Frank

       ISSUE 1.4 (2006)

Comedian Chris Rock has become the father of a baby girl named Lola, and in addition to his jokes about racism, politics, and relationships, he has now added material on fathering. One of his main tasks as a father, he claims in one of his monologues, is to “keep her off the pole.” And just to be safe, “My daughter is staying away from all poles. That includes monkey bars,” he says. Rock believes that having a daughter who is a stripper is the ultimate failure for a father.

As the mother of a baby girl, and as a former stripper, I found that Rock’s comments gave me reason to pause. Certainly, the news headlines and television stories often make me stop to think about how one should go about educating kids about sexuality. After all, despite all of the hype about abstinence, kids are experimenting sexually at young ages. Oprah interviews young teens about “salad tossing” (oral-anal sex) and “rainbow parties” (oral sex fests where the girls wear different colors of lipstick). A network news story breaks about a ring of middle school group sex parties outside a Southern metropolis. A wide range of near-erotica can be viewed on late-night television, and kids are definitely tuning in. Even parents are becoming familiar with the popular terms “fuck buddies” and “friends with benefits,” used by youth to denote casual sexual encounters. Girls Gone Wild has become a profitable series of videos (“Girls Gone Wild on Campus,” “Girls Gone Wild Doggy Style,” “Girls Gone Wild American Uncovered,” etc.), in addition to being used as a description of a regular Saturday night, and young girls flash their breasts or butts in exchange for baseball hats, T-shirts, cheap glass beads, or simply a few whistles.

NBC conducted a poll on teen sexual attitudes and behaviors and found that 27 percent had “been with somebody in an intimate or sexual way” (despite the certain denials of their parents), 12 percent had engaged in oral sex, 13 percent had had sexual intercourse, and that half of those who had engaged in oral sex or intercourse had done so by age fourteen. Religion seems to quell early sexual behavior a bit, but not completely: teens from Protestant and Catholic families were equally likely to be sexually active (26 percent), while teens from nonreligious families were slightly more active (39 percent). In many of the news stories, unfortunately, it seems that girls are striking unequal bargains: they tend to claim that their exploits are primarily about pleasing the boys and they still tell stories about being judged negatively by those very young men that they are so interested in serving. (“Do you think any of these boys will ask you to prom?” Oprah asks some party girls. The answer: it doesn’t bode well for a corsage and dinner.)

My primary concern is actually not about preventing my daughter (or anyone else’s) from becoming sexually active early. Such prevention efforts may not be effective or worthwhile. Some kids do begin these explorations at young ages, no matter how their parents try to prevent them, and for many of us who blossomed relatively early, such experience is not necessarily negative. I was personally quite interested in sexual things at an early age and believe that my experimentations during my teen years were important in determining the woman that I would become. On the other hand, I know that I did sometimes engage in sexual activity of different kinds for reasons other than for desire or self-exploration. Sometimes I ended up in a situation because I wanted to be popular, wanted a particular guy to like me, or didn’t want to seem too uptight since my friends were all “hooking up” at the same time. Sometimes I thought, “Why not?” and couldn’t come up with a good answer. Sometimes I drank too much and made decisions that I later regretted. A lot of us did. And, it seems, a lot of young girls (and boys) still do. Luckily, I had been provided with enough information about sexuality that my regrets were primarily emotional—I did not end up with sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, or with bodily scars from physical violence. These risks are real and youth should be educated about them in multiple forums. Recitations of the “horrors” of sexual activity are not, however, very effective as preventive measures for some of us.

Clearly, Rock believes that when young girls turn to stripping, or some other form of sex work, it is an example of the widespread tendency to devalue their sexuality, to see themselves simply as objects for men, and to engage in sexual activity and exhibitionism for no good reason. Yet I’m not sure I’d necessarily agree. When I began stripping in my late twenties and met women working in all different areas of the sex industry, I learned things about my sexuality that I believe would have helped me in my earlier years to avoid negative sexual situations. First of all, through stripping I actually learned how incredibly valuable my sexuality was. Not just valuable in terms of female virtue (“be careful not to lose your reputation”), an idea I found fairly nebulous and unconvincing all along (perhaps because I had already lost mine). Instead, I found that my sexuality was tangibly valuable. Economically valuable. What I had once given away for free, I learned, men were willing to pay for, and quite highly. This simple realization changed the way I thought about a lot of things, including my decisions to engage in sexual activity or to show off my body for others outside of the club. I see cheerleaders now and wonder if they realize how much money they could be making for those peeps up their skirts. I view young girls dressed like Paris Hilton with an almost conservative eye: Why are they going out dressed like that? Why show all that skin for nothing more than a bit of attention? Can’t they see that they could be paying off their school loans with such attire and behavior?

In this capitalist context, where sexuality is sold and used to sell in multifarious ways, I don’t think a father’s greatest failure would be for his daughter to become a stripper. In fact, her choice of job could be seen as an intelligent entrepreneurial decision. At least she’s not shrugging her shoulders when asked later why she was disrobing onstage in front of men (the way so many spring breakers and Mardi Gras enthusiasts tend to sheepishly do). In his comedy routine, Rock also disputes the idea that girls are stripping to pay for their education: “I haven’t heard of a college that takes dollar bills. I haven’t seen any clear glass heels in biology. I haven’t ever gotten a smart lap dance.” Sure, the comment is meant to be funny, as if strippers would always look like strippers in their five-inch heels and glitter, or show up to pay their tuition with folded money pulled straight from their garters. Yet, what Rock is really saying is that the woman who profits from selling sexual entertainment is not going to be able to accomplish anything else. Fortunately, he is wrong.

Many of my stereotypes were also overturned when I became a stripper and recognized how hypocritical people’s judgments of sex workers tended to be. At one time, for example, I believed that prostitutes must be miserable women, that strippers were most certainly exploited, and that porn stars probably had experienced all sorts of psychological trauma. My experiences and friendships in the sex industry made me rethink a lot of these assumptions. I came to understand the sex industry not as a panacea for sexual ills or a capitalist utopia, but as an industry with many of the same benefits and drawbacks as other industries. I began to question why it was that women who sold sex or sexual fantasies were criminalized and stigmatized, while women who gave it away for free were either accepted and valorized (as long as they didn’t give away too much, to too many people) or pathologized (if they did give away too much, to too many people, or the wrong people, or enjoyed it too greatly). Perhaps, I came to believe, we are barking up the wrong tree when we assume that sex or sexual expression has some predetermined meaning or that it necessarily has to be coupled with romantic love (something the college students who are embarking on their one-night stands and friends-with-benefits relationships already know). Perhaps, I also came to believe, the distaste that people express when confronted with explicit sex-for-money (or sexuality-for-money) exchanges is also hypocritical, rooted more in ideology and fear than in any truth about sexuality.

One night, after a few margaritas and a lot of discussion about raising a beloved daughter in a sexist and sexual world, I wondered aloud to my friends about whether I might suggest that my own daughter sell her virginity on the Internet, as some enterprising youngsters have already been doing. It would give her a reason to save it, I surmised, and perhaps it will be legal to do so in the future. After all, why lose your virginity to some high school guy in the backseat of a car (or wherever it happens nowadays), while you are drunk or stoned (or whatever kids do to lose their inhibitions nowadays), when you could get paid good money for it? She might earn enough from that one encounter for a down payment on a house, or to buy a new car, or to put away for college tuition. She might like the guy or she might not. Who cares? It would be quick and painless, because she would have the knowledge to make it so. And liking someone can be a transient state anyway—how many people actually end up with the first person they sleep with in the long term, or even the short term? Probably fewer than one would expect (or than the abstinence folks are hoping).

After their initial horrified reactions, my friends began to see my point, even dressed as it was in hypothetical attire. One woman remembered feeling as if her virginity was a kind of blight to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. She had made a bet with her friends to see who could lose it first, and though all of them successfully accomplished their missions right around the same time (not exactly Mission Impossible, after all), the experiences had been uniformly unimpressive. Several women told of wanting their first time “to be perfect,” but “settling” for far less. One woman couldn’t remember the first time she had sex, as she had downed a pint of whiskey to avoid worrying about the supposedly immanent (but never actually forthcoming) pain.

Some first-time stories are romantic and some are upsetting and abusive, but most are unexpectedly banal. Certainly, if a young girl was planning on socking away some cash for the “gift” of her virginity, she might at least use that sense of value if she decides to be generous and bestow such a gift on a boyfriend. She might negotiate. She might insist that he take her on dates, or buy her Valentine’s Day presents, talk to her in the halls the next day instead of whispering behind her back with his buddies, or even use a condom—tall orders for some young men nowadays. And, it seems, high expectations for some young women. Perhaps she might even insist on having an orgasm, or at least require him to make some attempt at providing her with sexual pleasure as well. Perhaps she would decide that it was a gift of love, and would request that he accept it in those terms (rather than simply hoping that he might feel the same way someday).

And what about all of those experiences short of losing one’s virginity? How might she feel about those? The quick gropes that were allowed to appease a drunk fraternity boy, the backseat blow jobs (with no reciprocation of any kind), the frantic dry humping (which does, in fact, often resemble an unpracticed lap dance)? What are those moments worth?

These comments are not offered to feed or stir up any kind of crazy passion for virgins or to suggest anyone engage in illegal activity. Nor are they meant to suggest that all young women would be served by working in the sex industry. This is a thought experiment: The issue at hand is not whether or not you actually sell your sexuality in some form or another, or give it away for free. The issue is whether or not young girls feel like they own their sexualities. How does one maintain one’s own understanding of sexual value in a world where sex is both incessantly commodified, on the one hand, and invested with multiple layers of often contradictory meaning, on the other (love, fear, pleasure, sin, freedom, commitment, adventure)? Unfortunately, laws against prostitution mean that, legally, women do not “own” their sexualities outright. We cannot do with our bodies as we see fit in the sexual realm (although we are certainly allowed—even coerced—to sell our bodies for other forms of demeaning labor). Not yet, anyway. However, we can own our sexuality in the sense that we can consciously decide what counts as a good reason for having sex (love, money, pleasure, fame, popularity?) or expressing ourselves sexually in other ways, and we can still demand respect and care for our bodies from those people we interact with sexually. We might not always get that respect, but we should at least be confident enough in our own sexual value to ask for it. This is something that feminists have fought for over the years: a reward that we hope our children will also be able to reap.

So how will I respond if my daughter becomes a stripper someday? Probably with the same ambivalence that I’d respond to any job choice—they all require some amount of compromise (and as of yet I can’t even imagine her leaving the house on her own, so this is really becoming a thought experiment). Certainly, I could imagine that stripping would teach her the value of her body, as it did for me; that it is acceptable (and wise) to set your own limits about what kinds of activities you wish to engage in and to stick to those limits; to learn to take control of her sexuality; to overcome the fear of sexuality that tends to pervade many people’s lives; and to think critically about sex, power, and love, and how she wants to put these explosive and powerful elements together (after all, there are so many rewarding ways to live).

On the other hand, stripping is still stigmatized work, which means that it does involve personal challenges that should not be glossed over—there will always (at least in the current climate) be those individuals who see strippers as “trash.” Stripping is also physical labor: it can be grueling at times, dirty (literally, not figuratively), exhausting, and downright boring. But so can waitressing! Doing physical and menial labor is the fate of many teenagers, and such work is accompanied by the benefits of low personal investment, flexibility, a lack of required skills and training, and low competition. Some of us find stripping to be far preferable to taking orders all night and delivering burgers and fries to surly or amorous customers. Stripping, of course, is also premised on appearance. Girls are hired at other jobs for their appearance, or are successful in them because they have a particular kind of middle-class, girly look. In some ways, the explicitness of stripping can be a relief from some of the more covert ways that women are sexualized at work and elsewhere.

Categorizing women as Madonnas or whores, “girls you date” or “girls you sleep with,” good girls or sluts, has a long and unfortunate history that will not be overturned without a struggle. And women who strip or work in other realms of the sex industry will likely continue to find themselves fighting against these kinds of labels and the judgments that accompany them. But one hope that I would have for my daughter, and yours, is that she could grow up in a world where some women are not highly valued at the expense of other women, and where a woman’s sexual desire, interest, experience, pleasure, or mistakes are truly her own.

KATHERINE FRANK, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist and the author of Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through The World of Group Sex and G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. She is also a coeditor of Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance. See Katefrank.com for more information.