Men Not Liberated Enough for Sex Work

An interesting article interviewing Australian sex worker Zahra Stardust details how she came to embrace sex work, saying that "at [bachelor] parties, strippers would use measures of crowd control, humour and taunt to dominate, humiliate and ridicule their male subjects." In the past when I have criticized sex workers for reifying sex stereotypes, many women defended the role of the sex workers. Let me be clear, I am not willing to comment on whether the sex worker is liberated or successfully acting towards women's liberation, but I do know that sex work plays into the neuroses that ensnare and oppress men. Men are not able to be directly oppressed by women. It requires the intervening act of another man to oppress and reassert masculinity in men. Here's how it works when Zahra dominates her audience.

• Men at strip clubs are there for the purpose of proving their masculinity. Enjoying and objectifying women are merely means of proof. While the women are performing for them, men are able to convince themselves that, as one conservative blogger put it recently, God's law is still in order and women are still subordinate to men.
  
• Men who go to strip clubs alone are considered strange, at best. You're supposed to go with your buddies. Why? Because it does no good to prove masculinity to yourself. You have to prove it to somebody, because it isn't real unless it's recognized.
• As Zahra is dancing, her audience is commenting on her dancing in degrading ways in order to convince themselves that, despite the 1960's, they are still hyper masculine. In the world of traditional masculinity, if you are not hyper masculine you risk abuse (sometimes merely social alienation, but often physical violence is employed to prove your weakness while being ostracized). The traditional object of abuse is woman. If men are subjected to that abuse it is a way of saying, "you are like a woman."
• Lucky for all self-threatened masculine men, a strip club provides ample opportunities to act abusively towards women who are required to shut up and take it.

At the end of the article, Zahra admits to being an idealist. I think that might be the weakness of the many in the 3rd wave. They believe that men are not in need of liberation, that men are in on the joke when women use sex as a liberation tool. Unfortunately, as one who talks to a lot of men about liberation (in fact, as one who is obsessed with figuring out what it would mean to be a liberated man), I can confidently say that men are still frightened of the dynamic at play in sex work, even the most liberated of men. They may want to see the women in front of them as individuals and skilled entertainers doing the same thing with sex that great philosophers do with paradoxes, but to believe that, they'd truly have to be idealists.