Margaret Atwood defends women's right to work in strip clubs because she thinks it's 'empowering'

[stumbledin]

Speaking to Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 5 Live's Headliners, the 79-year-old said women who work in strip clubs can 'feel in control of the room' and earn more money than coffee shop staff.

Ms Atwood, whose new book The Testaments was published this week, told BBC Five Live that people protesting against the clubs should 'put their energy somewhere else that's really really important – like with environmental protests.'

The author said it was important to ensure women were not exploited, adding: 'Some of the most empowering women in the American West were the madams who were running the brothels because in that era they were saving up the money up for the girls, they were setting them up after they made that money they were taking care of them and it was much better than having a pimp.'

Ms Atwood also spoke out about different kinds of feminism, adding: 'I don't refuse the label of feminism, I say, 'which kind are you talking about?'

'I am the kind that endorses organisations like Equality Now. I am not the kind that says things like all men should be pushed off a cliff or all that all male babies should be killed at birth.'

(This is the Daily Mail so not sure if accurate transcript. Did anyone listen to the interview?)

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7457063/Margaret-Atwood-defends-womens-right-work-strip-clubs.html

Wasn't there an AMA from an exotic dancer recently?

Wasn't there an AMA from an exotic dancer recently?

:)

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/3288751-retired-lap-dancer-ask-me-anything?pg=32

You cannot know someone is trafficked by looking at them. Or necessarily by talking to them. They may not have a haunted expression or a brand.

The stereotypes around trafficked women can make it harder for them to access help.

This with bells on

I have met women who claimed to be trafficking survivors who were not.

I have also met women who claimed to be empowered sex workers but who are actually trafficked

It is a very complicated and nuanced situation

That's it from me for now

Back on topic. Atwood has always leaned in a little to the pubic acceptable face of feminism. She is an author more than a feminist, a very skilled story writer unlike someone like Germaine Greer who is an active feminist.

She may have said this but context is always crucial - Greer's words, for example, are almost always taken out of context for shock value and to suit the slant/bias a journalist wishes to put on her words. It generates click.

I suspect if you really went into it with Atwood she knows what it is like for women and she knows they are objectified and oppressed through biology but she is likely susceptible to the whole 'lived experience, empowered woman' trope which is pushed by mainstream media - and she wouldn't be the only one.

I like her books because I like her writing. I don't necessarily read Atwood for her feminism, I don't agree with her on a few things but I enjoy most of her books As for what I read for feminism there are other people I prefer for that - including many articulate women on here.

*clicks plural (one click wouldn't be worth it)

If a pimp or club owner wanted to push some propaganda about how empowerfulising and profitable stripping was, and how trafficking and abuse was a complete myth, how many posts would it take before some nuggets of misogyny accidentally slipped out directed at the women countering his bullshit?
How long might such a person be able to stay in character, I wonder?

#saggytits

About 5 minutes?

Together with the carefully constructed sexy, six foot customer and concluding the only reason the roles aren't reversed is because men are too heavy.

That well known barrier to male empowerment - weight.

Well I for one am completely convinced having read Courtney55’s whole truth and nothing but the truth account of her real experiences. I’ll be back to comment further, I’ve just got to feed the unicorns and speak to my accountant about my billion dollar investments first.

I'm so tired of people saying stuff like Attwood did. Its not about the tiny minority of the privileged who choose, it's about the vast majority who have no realistic alternative.

And coupled with her “pushing men off a cliff/killing baby boys” comment....
You don’t have to call yourself a feminist, but ffs don’t hand ammunition to the anti feminists!

I saw that a bit differently. I think she's acknowledging that a lot of women call themselves feminists who have strange ideas of what that means (hating men etc) and she's saying "nope, I'm not a man hater but i am a feminist". The ire is then directed at those who are clearly man haters (you can tell by what they say)

If she's done nothing else she provided the source material for something which has grabbed people's imaginations and has wakened people up to the fact that these things don't happen overnight. The VERY best thing about the Handmaid's Tale on TV has been watching the flashbacks of the slow creep of the erosion of women's rights. People are now comparing that to what is happening to us (in the west/global north) and realising that it really might be the start of the slippery slope.

But she's also a writer and a human and therefore nuanced and flawed like the rest of us.

Nah. She posited 2 types of 'feminism', one which exists and the other which doesn't. But which people hostile to non-wishy washy feminism pretends exists. I'm not saying she's actively hostile, but that was an outstandingly stupid comment at best.

“I think she's acknowledging that a lot of women call themselves feminists who have strange ideas of what that means (hating men etc) ”

Why would she acknowledge something that only exists in the minds of anti feminists?

It’s a tone-deaf statement at best and, on the surface given the source, jarring but she is in line with current liberal feminist thinking that the sex industry should be regarded as just another job therefore viewed as a legitimate and unstigmatised career for the women who work in it. I think in the wake of the hype around the televising if THT, we tend to forget she is a privileged middle-class writer of fiction, albeit fiction which pays lip service to feminism, not an adherent or exponent of feminist theory but I’m still not giving her much of a pass. She bloody well knows better or she should.

Of course, like many liberal feminists whose hearts are in the right place if their heads are totally not, she’s largely missing the point that most women in the sex industry are not there through active choice, no one dreams as a little girl of growing up to be a sex worker or, at least, not for very long*. They’re there because they have very few other options and often because they’re forced/coerced. Fiction writers are of course entirely free to write (make up) whatever they want, sex work and workers have been romanticized, glamorized and palatably sanitized in fiction since forever but she didn’t do that in her own bloody book so why is it ok for her to do it in real life?

*Disclaimer: when I was 10 or 11 I saw the movie Gypsy and was immediately fired by an ambition to one day hold huge audiences in glittering concert halls in thrall with a suggested but not actual exposition of gorgeous nudity like a latterday Natalie Wood. That this goal was almost immediately supplanted by a burning desire to swan around in a flowing white habit in emulation of Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story says something about how influential on young minds portrayals of women are in the written and performing media, not sure what.

And I guess it could take a bit of the sting out of the likelihood of you being beaten/abused/assaulted by a customer much higher than me by my customers.

And yet in ten years, neither myself or anyone in any of the places have encountered this. How can that possibly be???

Any of the places I've worked that should say.

Well in my sheltered comfortable little life I’ve only met one pole dancer: DD’s mate from six form college, thrown out of home by abusive alcohol mum, struggling to pay rent on a bed sit and stay in college. Struggled to get enough hours doing care work.

Got a job pole dancing in a club, was plied with coke and very much pressured to do extras. She was 18.

She went back to the care work but ended up dropping out of college. Didn’t sound very empowering to me.

I think her comments about feminism are sadly similar to those made by Doris Lessing.

It seems to be something about being a woman who as an individual writes powerful words about women but somehow doesn't want the public to put her in the "feminist box".

And I think that is because the "feminist box" is the one that the media has created.

Particularly in the early days of Women's Liberation the media would come up with shock jock stories about extreme "libbers" ie they were keen to make feminism seem to be about hating men (ie deranged women) rather than women fighting to their rights against male priviledge.

And so sad that two women who in terms of their writing would obviously research and think things through chose to just take an off the self charactature (spelling?!) of feminism.

I think Fay Weldon has also contributed to this.

Until yesterday I believed that although Atwood is a very mediocre writer (which is only an issue when set against her reputation as some towering literary giant) at least her heart was in the right place.

But there you go.

Atwood has always leaned in a little to the pubic acceptable face of feminism.

Sorry, Pankhurst, but the inadvertent irony of this made me giggle. If it's any consolation, just before I submitted my PhD thesis I had to do a find and replace for "pubic" / "public" as I constantly kept mistyping the latter.

Apologies for lowering the tone. As you were . . .

I appreciate spelling it out is flying spectacularly over the fake feminists heads. And as I have neither the time or the Crayola to explain it further to those that are too ignorant or self righteous to understand, I'll leave you with a GCSE level version of it....

One "vet" speaks to the papers. Headline reads "My hell in back street practice, where I wanked off 20 labradors a day to make a living"

The rest of the vet community: "what the holy fuck???? Where the hell are you even working, that's not what vets do??!!"

Fake feminists: "We must stand together to save the vets. Poor exploited degraded vets!!"

Vet community: "Er, Hi? Can you fuck the fuck off with your patronising and very incorrect views on us. We're fine. That's not reflective of our industry at all. Thanks."

Fake feminists: "These poor deluded vets don't even realise they're being exploited. They don't even realise it's wrong to be wanking off labradors. However shall we save them, strong educated women that we are"

Vet Community: "Ok. That's enough now. Stop reading shit you know nothing about. It's offensive and utter crap. I'm telling you as a vet, that's not our job. In fact, there's 20 of us right here to tell you that. We are very proud of what we do thanks. You're actually really fucking rude with your unfounded opinions, just exactly how up your own arse are you to tell a whole community of vets they don't know what their own career entails"

Fake feminists: "Denial!! All denial!! Look what the veterinary industry has done to you!! We have our evidence!!"

Vet Community: (collective facepalm) "Literally can't explain this any simpler to you. It seems for some reason you don't want to accept we're more than fine. But eagerly want to jump behind the bizarre one off story from the papers. Tell you what, you do you my lovelies, and enjoy your clueless crusade. We're going to carry on being just fine regardless. Please find the elusive lone Labrador wanker and give them all the help they need. Ta-ra"

Fake feminists: "Close the veterinary practices!! Save the vets! We shall not be silenced!"

Totally not goady. Especially that first bit. About the Crayola.

Far too tired from writing an actual academic feminist paper today to wade through Courtney's recent tripe.

Crayola feminism just about sums that poster up . I prefer that to the term "liberal feminism" and will use that instead in future!

I think her comments about feminism are sadly similar to those made by Doris Lessing.

I think this is a good comparison, Stumbledin. If you're a writer, I think you're painfully aware of the danger of alienating your readership if you take a stance on political issues that could in any way be construed as "extreme" (even if it isn't). Some writers stay very carefully quiet about political and social issues (I have some in particular in mind - but since they aren't saying, I won't speculate), others very publicly align themselves with what they perceive as "middle ground" (I'm a "he-for-she" type of feminist type of assertion), and only a few nail their colours unequivocally to the mast (John Scalzi would be a prime example of this last).

That’s an interesting point Stumbledin. So her views are still shaped by her younger experiences of women’s lib when the prevalent method to suppress the development of feminism was to label it anti- men rather than pro-women. I’m a child of the 70s and grew up believing feminism was anti-men, the understanding that it is in fact pro women was later on for me and the realisation, very liberating. Shunning the ‘wrong’ type of feminism means you retain the coveted approval of the patriarchy. This makes the actions of the women who carved out women’s only refuges, feminism in action, even more inspiring.