I chose the article “Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture” by Katie Barack from Bowling Green University. I chose this article because I have a friend has chosen to have a sex profession. She is an exotic dancer. She chose this route because she thought it would be fast cash and easy access to lots of money.
For this article I chose to read “Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture”. The article goes on to discuss a book about sex and today’s popular culture. An example it used was the Flirty Girl Fitness DVD. The DVD is a weight lost video but with a new twist. It uses exotic stripper dances to help lose weight. Today society is obsessed with wanting to be thin and lose weight. They see celebrities and models that are thin so they think that this is the way to be. What better way to sell a work out DVD than using stripping? There is such a thing as pole dancing classes. Women can pay a fee to learn how to pole dance or do a strip tease. Some women do this for fun, or some do it as a gift for their significant other. Marie Roach became curious about stripping when her friend dropped out of graduate school to become an exotic dancer. Basically she wanted to differentiate the difference between stripping and prostitution. To find out more about stripping she decided to conduct research. The way she went about it was to interview people who worked in the sex industry. She visited strip clubs and interviewed the strippers, the djs and also the patrons who visited the strip clubs. She also interviewed performers in the neo-burlesque movement, sex workers, and political advocates for the rights of sex workers. Most of the people she interviewed claimed that there was a line drawn between stripping and prostitution. She noticed that exotic dancers had different reasons for why they were not prostitutes.
The intended audience is for people who can relate to the author. The author’s “consistent contextualization of her voice as a white, heterosexual, married mother with a religious studies and women’s studies background assures readers of a self-aware and bias-conscious author”. (Barak). People who are curious like Roach herself. Rather it is exotic dancing, escorting or prostituting. It is trying to point someone in the direction of picking up Roach’s book. Some women want to justify having a sex profession with wanting easy money. “The journal stated that readers are left wanting further investigation of those paths”. (Barak).
The key points I idea that I drew from the article, that the point that Roach was trying to make, was a slut is a slut. She compares sex workers to people who sleep around with multiple partners for no money. She calls it a “Slut-positive” identity. Women do not understand that being a sex worker is nothing but a parody of being a woman. This makes me want to pick up the book and read it for myself because as stated before, I have a friend who is a sex worker. She has been presented with plenty of opportunities to have a “normal” job, but does not want to take them. If you call her a prostitute be prepared for a fight because she will argue with you about why she isn’t a prostitute, and what sets her apart from a prostitute. I feel like the book will make me understand my friend more.
I think the article was well written. It makes you want to pick up the book and read it. The only thing that was annoying was the big words. I had to look up a couple of the words to understand what it meant. I felt like with the article having harder to understand words, it might have slightly misrepresented the book, or make one feel that the book may have hard words itself.
References:
Barak, K. (2010). Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture. The Journal of Popular Culture, 6
Retrieved May 4th 2011, from http://0-journals.ohiolink.edu.olinkserver.franklin.edu/ejc/article.cgi?issn=00223840&issue=v42i0006&article=1136_ssapc
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