Stop selling sexism

Why shouldn’t strip clubs be banned?

If you say you want to ban strip clubs, “everyone’s gonna act like you’re saying we shouldn’t have Sainsbury’s”. So says Grace, one of the women interviewed by Dr Laura Garano for her “Life near Strip Clubs” report, published to coincide with the launch of FiLiA’s #NoMoreStripClubs campaign. The clubs, Grace contends, are so normalised that demanding their disappearance would sound absurd. Yet according to Garano’s findings, that is what most women who live and work in their vicinity would like. 

Speaking to women in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Manchester, Garano found that 55 per cent were in favour of banning the clubs, and only 8 per cent against. As someone who lives in Cheltenham, with its pop-up strip clubs every race week, I am very much part of the first group. As Garano told Woman’s Hour’s Kylie Pentelow, so-called sexual entertainment venues “restrict women’s freedom of movement”, as the men who visit them “carry harmful attitudes about women into public space, into friendships and into intimate relationships”. So why should it be odd to want them banned? Given the number of politicians who claim to be in favour of ending sexism, shouldn’t it be a no-brainer? 

Everything about strip clubs is so staggeringly obvious. You do not need a degree in gender studies to understand the power dynamics, the symbolism, the lessons about women and men that are not forgotten the moment a man leaves the venue. It is all so plain to see it feels almost too easy, as though there is some mitigating factor feminists must have missed. In Cheltenham, the association of racing and strip clubs sends a particularly stark message: mistreat horses by day, women by night. It is as if men are the only humans in town; everything else is livestock, and so what if some of the livestock gets hurt? It’s a price the humans are willing to pay. 

As with all aspects of the sex trade, there’s a curious attitude towards harm. The equality impact assessment for Cheltenham Borough Council’s sexual entertainment policy mentions “an inherent risk for performers given the environment in which they operate”. Ignoring the word “performers”, it’s language one might associate with working as a firefighter or bomb disposal expert, yet the risk in question is male violence, and the response is not expecting men to change their understanding of what constitutes a good night out. It is far easier to make women, as Favaro’s writes, “take longer routes home, use different office exits, cross busy roads to avoid passing the venues”. Women who do not work in these clubs can always make their worlds a little bit smaller; as for those who work inside them, well, if they say they are happy, men are free to disregard the sex-, class- and race-based inequalities which shape the industry and lock women inside it. 

That Favaro’s research focuses on women who live and work near strip clubs, rather than the workers themselves, is significant. Defenders of sexual entertainment venues have long sought to argue that such women have no right to object, on the basis that these women are privileged and unaffected (not, you understand, that the women inside the clubs are oppressed — or if they are, it’s only because the privileged women are threatening to deny them their jobs). Any ability to understand that you cannot have designated dehumanisation zones without affecting the wider world vanishes the moment the male erection is under threat (the writer Lindy West expressed this in a rather extreme form in a 2009 review of the Hooters restaurant chain). Women who attend council meetings to object to licensing decisions may be accused of “whorephobia” or even of being jealous of the performers and worried about “losing” their husbands to them. Some of the more pretentious strip club fans may even identify themselves as “intersectional feminists”, embracing that version of “intersectional feminism” which ignores actual intersecting axes of oppression in favour of boldly refusing to “stigmatise” one’s own exploitation of others. 

If ending misogyny is a serious political priority, politicians cannot keep pretending that objectification for fun … is no big deal

The Labour government has committed to closing the loophole which allows any venue to host unlicenced sexual entertainment up to 11 times a year, providing events take place at least one month apart. Originally intended to avoid the need to licence one-off events such as having a strippergram attend a birthday party, this has been exploited in places like Cheltenham by operators who switch venues from one night to the next, thereby bypassing local licencing control. To focus only on fixing this, however — or on “regulating” more — is insufficient. If ending misogyny is a serious political priority, politicians cannot keep pretending that objectification for fun — the odd lap dance after a hard day betting on the horses — is no big deal, nothing that a little more legislation couldn’t render totally harmless. This is objecting to the final product while giving a free pass to all of the stages that go into creating it. Frankly, I am tired of being expected to plonk my teenage sons in front of Adolescence and talk to them about Andrew Tate, but tell them nothing about what happens where they live, right now. 

In strip clubs the endorsement and practice of misogyny is recast as its containment, as though any attempts to ban it outright would only drive it underground. It is simply not believed that changes to the law can lead to cultural change, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as smoking bans, the introduction of seat belts, or even the end of Page Three. Opponents of strip clubs are accused of naivety about male sexuality (the term “adult” entertainment always managing to insinuate that opposition is a mark of immaturity). Yet any attempt at a moral justification for strip clubs relies on wishful thinking about female personhood — that it doesn’t exist, or if it does, it’s not all that important. 

“The Left,” as Andrea Dworkin wrote, “cannot have its whores and its politics too” (though the left does not seem unduly bothered by this). Meanwhile the right obsesses over cultural differences being misused to justify misogyny, ignoring that strip clubs are a prime example of this (the poor, beleaguered working man must not be denied his fun). When one throws into this the “feminist” defence of the sex trade, asking to ban strip clubs can indeed feel unrealistic, if only because ending sexism is viewed as unrealistic, and certainly less important than a bit of fun for the lads. Those who issue licences at least need to be honest about this. Should selling sexism be as normalised as selling groceries? If not, what would it take to change it?