Further to my two articles about Playboy last year, here and here, those of you who have the requisite plug-in installed might want to watch this smart and very short film by Laurie Anderson. [Provided they let you stream small video files, it’s safe for work.]
[via Exploding Aardvark]
Immensely reasonable. One question: why have you classified an article that deals with pure economics under “sex”?
Because the misuse of the word “gender” makes my teeth ache.
On second thoughts, you’re right. I’ll change that now.
He he! 🙂
Anderson’s very clever, isn’t she? Because all the right-wing patriarchists will pass this link around saying “see! I told you! these are *good* jobs!! Nothing to worry about here.”
But listen carefully. The woman’s got three kids, she needs the money. It’s *because* the garment district is such a lousy employer that she has to choose this degrading job. Nothing else pays as much, sure, because people who a) have the requisite youth, body and looks, and b) don’t have political or religious or other objections, are in short supply. And, naturally, supply and demand will set the price.
But Anderson is showing the system. If this woman came up and said, “hey, what are you protesting about? I *like* doing this. This is the most exciting, rewarding and self-actualizing thing I’ve ever done with my life”, OK, *that* would be some kind of challenge to what Anderson was protesting. This is simply another piece in the same jigsaw puzzle.
What you certainly *can’t* infer from this piece :
* that the job *isn’t* degrading. The fact that it’s degrading has nothing to do with the salary, and everything to do with how the role fits into the more general framework of relations between the market and human sexuality. You might as well try to argue that a professional hit-man isn’t a murderer if the salary is high enough.
* the Playboy club is a good or enlightened employer. Even relative to everyone else. Not if they’re simply paying market prices.
Why is the job degrading?
The onus is on critics of Playboy is to show that it is a bad employer.
“Why is the job degrading?”
Yeah. Maybe “degrading”‘s the wrong word. Whatever adjective it is that you’d use about a jewish guy, being obliged by poverty, to act in an anti-semitic propaganda movie.
“The onus is on critics of Playboy is to show that it is a bad employer.”
I’m not trying to make that claim. Without evidence to the contrary we can assume it’s simply a “normal” employer.
So the female employees of Playboy are forced by their financial difficulties to portray themselves as a minority which must be expelled or destroyed because they represent a threat to the rest of society?
There’s a few plots from religious writings that run along similar lines, but I can’t say I’ve noticed that as a recurring motif in the world of soft porn fantasy. Perhaps I’ve been paying too much attention to the articles and not enough to the pictures.
Sure, there are differences. It’s not an exact analogy. But the *morphology* is the same.
1) person is member of type X.
2) person needs money.
3) so person takes part in a public spectacle which affects the audience’s perception of people of type X.
4) the new perception is harmful to members of type X.
I’m sure there’s no argument about 1. 2 comes from taking Anderson’s story at face value (and not infering some other motive to the dancer)
You probably want to be sceptical about 3 or 4.
Obviously the harmful perception in this case is not “threat to society” but something that combines “women are mere means to the end of men’s pleasure” with “women are a kind of luxury good available to the rich” with “women are passive” and a dozen other messages. These messages arn’t exclusive to soft-porn, but they are *concentrated* in the soft-porn format.
” Perhaps I’ve been paying too much attention to the articles and not enough to the pictures. ”
But, of course, here we’re talking about a dance, so I’m not sure there were any articles with the spectacle. 🙂