Arnon Grunberg

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Control

On stripping – Vered Lee in Haaretz:

“For four and a half years, I sat in the dressing rooms of almost every strip club in Tel Aviv. I didn’t hear a single girl say it was her dream to be there, that she enjoys it, or even that any of the clients seemed nice to her. On the contrary, all the veteran girls, the ones who now claim that the client criminalization law is hurting business, I’ve seen them with my own eyes, heard them with my own ears, saying how they’re ‘dying to quit this stinking job,’ and ‘waiting for the day they can have a normal profession, a home, a family, and a little less shame to carry.’” (From “Exposing Themselves”)
For 15 years Shani Nardimon, a rehabilitative criminologist and psychotherapist, worked for ELEM Youth in Distress, an organization that helps troubled Israeli teens. She is a co-founder and former director of Halev 24/7, which treats teens and young adults on the sexual exploitation continuum. In her work at ELEM she met a 16 year-old girl, M., who worked as a stripper at bachelor parties. “Every night she had two or three parties and a driver to take her from one to the other,” Nardimon says. “All her friends were from the world of stripping. Some worked at private parties and some at strip clubs.” M. introduced Nardimon to the scene. “At first, she presented it as a wonderful world and hid what she was really going through. She made a lot of money, and that gave her a sense of control. She bought a lot of clothes and rented an apartment on her own.” (…)

‘“The term ‘stripping’ has been given many definitions in the professional literature, describing an exotic dance for adult entertainment purposes,” says Einat. “Stripping takes place in many settings – clubs, parties, private homes, and cyberspace. Studies in this field, which began in the 1960s, have primarily focused on the factors that led strippers to enter the profession, how they cope with stigma, and their relationships with their customers. We focused on social and cultural aspects – behaviors, modes of dress and status symbolize that characterize the subculture, the power struggles between strippers and club-owners – which range from care and paternal relationships to pimping – and their relationships with one another.”’

(…)

‘“I was a witness at the Bourse Nightclub on a night where one of the girls was raped. When the manager was called for help, she took the girl to the VIP room and let me in too. She sent a girl to get a bottle of Jack Daniels. She poured glass after glass and told the girl how she had to behave. When we left the room I told the manager: ‘You’re a woman, and if you work here, you’ve gone through this too at least once in your life, so how could you do that?’ She told me if she had to hug and console every girl who endured something awful (rape or violence), they wouldn’t be able to work. “You chose to be here, live with the consequences. If you don’t want to get raped, go work in high-tech.’” (Mor, 24, six years stripping)’

(…)

‘On one visit, the club-owner offered Nardimon a job as a stripper, which gave her a glimpse at the recruitment process. “Sometimes owners personally find someone and make them an offer. The main method is to get another stripper to try and convince the potential recruit, using a ‘friend-brings-friend’ method. The workers tell her they make lots of money, but they don’t mention prostitution and what really takes place there.” What is the profile of a stripper? “I tried not to ask them about their childhood or about sexual abuse they’d been subjected to, but they brought it up on their own, organically. According to the research, there is a strong correlation between childhood sexual abuse and secondary trauma and working as a stripper. All of the survey participants described dissociation mechanisms, their ability to adopt strategies to emotionally and mentally disconnect during sexual encounters with clients.” How do you view strippers? “I relate to them as survivors, and to stripping as the exploitation and objectification of women. Some of them may not see it as exploitation or identify with that, but it is exploitation. I don’t believe for a moment that any one of them ever fantasized about being in this situation. Strippers manage to distance themselves from being branded or stigmatized as prostitutes, since they’ve created their own subculture. If you ask them, they’re exclusive, they’re better, they’re not like those women working in brothels. They don’t see themselves as part of the sex industry.” Einat: “Strip clubs employ a sophisticated mechanism of camouflage, to preserve that lie. The women dissociate and consume alcohol, with club owners and clients enabling the lie. Strippers distinguish themselves from the rest of the sex industry, teaching each other to believe the lie that they are not engaging in prostitution. It’s insane, because night after night, when you come home from the club and take a shower, you know exactly what you’ve been doing.” In your view, is stripping at a club prostitution? Nardimon: “Unequivocally. A lap dance, which costs 25 shekels ($7.70) is prostitution. Its whole purpose is to serve as an intermediate stage meant to lure customers to private rooms for the purpose of engaging in sex acts that cost more. At the end of the process, which is quite common, the strippers become women engaged in prostitution. Moreover, the existence of private rooms in these clubs reflects the deception. The law forbids the renting rooms for the purpose of engaging in sex for money. This is why club owners hide it, but every club has these rooms. A room costs 400 shekels, which owners share with strippers, with the average time spent in these rooms being 15 minutes.” According to Nardimon, strippers create their own status symbols. “It starts with their fake names, and then songs they choose, clothes, shoes and where they buy them. A steady customer offers a stripper very high status. Since these customers spend a lot of money on her, she doesn’t have to be with many men in one shift. A celebrity customer can also contribute to one’s status. Low-status women are subjected to ostracism and violence. They even fight over space in the dressing rooms.”’

(…)

‘Are you in favor of shutting down strip clubs? “I understand strippers who complain about the law prohibiting lap dances and attempts to close the clubs where they make their living. I understand the claim that you can’t close everything all at once and expect them to find a way forward. But we, as a society, cannot allow it to continue. In my view, the state should compensate them and open appropriate rehabilitation channels.”’

Read the article here.

Stripping is the preliminary stage of prostitution and even that’s often, as this article makes clear, a euphemism.

Within every subculture status plays an important role, status is often but not always connected to money, and where fights for status take place subtle and less subtle acts of violence are committed.
MeToo was an attempt at making these acts more subtle and less violent.

This is probably too broad, given the topic strippers in Israel. I’m pretty sure by the way that the experience of strippers elsewhere is broadly the same.

Also, disassociation as a coping mechanism is also common among perpetrators of mass murder, according to a book by the sociologist Bram de Swaan. (I recently wrote an essay about this book.)

The question that is left unanswered is how to deal with it.

I’m skeptical about the prospect of outlawing prostitution. Outlawing strip clubs will make the market of stripping probably smaller, but the market of prostitution will largely remain the same.

So how to make this huge market a better place for the sex workers?

My proposal, already a few years old, centers on the belief that we need to elevate the status of the sex worker. As long as the sex worker is suffering from a stigma, her work place will remain a grey zone where violence is perceived by too many customers and pimps (male and female) as part of the game, as a just dessert for someone who ‘chose’ an unworthy profession, selling sex.

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