The Great Feminist Denial by Monica Dux

Author:Monica Dux
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522859102
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

6

Pole-dancing for beginners

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

—Gloria Steinem

Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does

—The Onion, 19 February 2003

The latest way to bash feminism is with a pole. If feminism is all about pole-dancing and pole-dancers claim to be feminists, it follows that feminism went wrong somewhere. If women were liberated, they would not be taking up pole-dancing (or stripping or burlesque or hip-hop dancing or any number of scantily clad, body-moving activities) for the alleged purpose of (pursed lips) ‘empowerment’. Feminists are not worth taking seriously if they are advocating these practices or not doing enough to stop them. Or, if feminists are addressing the omnipresence of bare flesh in the West, what are they doing for women who have to cover up because their cultures punish them if they don’t? And what about teenagers and girls, who are growing up in a climate of corporate paedophilia and hyper-sexualisation? What is feminism going to do about this sordid mess?

When it comes to sex, feminists can’t get it right. After it was revealed that the then opposition leader Kevin Rudd went to a strip club in New York, the ‘silence of the sisterhood’ was decried as evidence of apologist leftie feminism. Following the Advertising Standards Bureau’s dismissal of viewer complaints against the notorious Nandos chicken pole-dancing advertisement, it was feminist board member Catharine Lumby who was singled out for special criticism. Novelist Melanie La’Brooy, sick of all the gyrating flesh on high rotation at her gym, asked, ‘Just how does pole dancing free women?’ She chastised ‘feminists—male and female—[who] ought to have grown by now’.1 When Sandra Lee, resident feminist at the Sunday Telegraph, received an invitation to the launch of a pole-dancing organisation, she thought it was a joke. No, it was just another example of feminism in retrograde.2 After Ariel Levy critiqued what she coined ‘raunch culture’ in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, possible responses included a modesty movement (flagged by Wendy Shalit, another feminist) or somehow reclaiming an ‘authentic’ sexuality from the clutches of popular culture (a solution promoted by Levy herself).

To emphasise the ‘feminism equals pole-dancing’ point, various commentators have compared women stripping for fun in the West with women being forced to cover up in the Islamic world. At worst, feminism leaves itself open to charges of hypocrisy and neglect. At very least, feminism is caught in a paradoxical situation, complicating and confusing traditional political allegiances. So liberal-minded La’Brooy, incredulous at how ‘raunch culture ended up triumphing in Western feminist democracies’, found herself in the ‘disconcerting position of empathising with Indonesian Islamic fundamentalists’.

‘Raunch culture’ and ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ have frequently been identified as two sides of a Janus-faced World Patriarchal Order or better yet—for the dual purpose of feminist- and Muslim-bashing—the primary site of the clash of civilisations. According to Miranda Devine, ‘decadent’ western culture is the ‘elephant in the room’ when discussing the apparent reluctance of Muslims to integrate into Australian society: ‘Better to dress little

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