Hypocrisy
February 17, 2008
Some people think a vegan strip club is hypocritical. I disagree. (And I’m not alone.)
Eric Prescott at An Animal-Friendly Life wrote:
“[S]upport for such an establishment completely contradicts their support for veganism.
“You don’t need me to quote Carol Adams to understand how commodification of animals’ as food is tied to the commodification of women as sexual objects through the same oppressive mentality. In fact, we can simply quote the proprietor himself: ‘We put the meat on the pole, not on the plate.’ “
In response to those people, I wrote this at An Animal-Friendly Life. Here is a slightly edited version:
I neither support or object to the strip club. But I do not find it hypocritical. In case you forgot, women can choose to participate in our economy or not. Animals do not have that choice. That is the critical difference. It’s an important one. I’d say THE most important one.
The concepts of choice and self determination are absolutely fundamental to both veganism and feminism: all beings should be allowed to determine their own destinies and no one should interfere, except in self defense. A vegan strip club is no more hypocritical than a vegan store.
If you want to make an anti-capitalist argument, make it. But don’t act like there’s an essential difference between a vegan strip club and a vegan store. Unless one is a cooperative or nonprofit, they’re both earning profit for THE MAN off the backs of underpaid, overused workers. Except the strippers often determine their own work schedules and pay rates and earn more than the average waitress at the average vegan restaurant.
Heck, if you think it’s hypocritical for a strip club to go vegan, how about vegan meals in prisons? Or what about vegan meals and uniforms in the military? Or how about vegan cops, professional athletes, plastic surgeons? Are they hypocritical, too?
If yes, then why aren’t we talking about that? If no, then why are we talking about this?
What I think some people are missing here is that most of the strippers working in this club are vegetarian or vegan. (source) When people say a vegan strip club is hypocritical, they’re saying vegan strippers are hypocritical, and they’re saying vegan strippers don’t deserve to work in an establishment that shares their values.
Shall we look up the word “hypocritical” in the dictionary?
—
Oh and if you’re tired of hearing what the club owner and anti-porn people say maybe you’ll be interested in reading what the dancers say. Check out this blog post, where one of the strippers at the vegan strip club says:
“My opinion of the club is, at this point, colored by the grip of cash I’ve made working there so far, so keep in mind that everything I say is accompanied by a desire to continue a profitable work experience.
“That being said, there’s been plenty of coverage from all corners of this club, and I’d like to add the stripper’s perspective. [...]
“Well, the food is, in fact, vegan, but it’s served on disposable paper plates, which I find to be an interesting philosphical contrast. Other than the food, and a sign in the dressing room requesting that dancers refrain from wearing fur, silk, wool or feathers on stage, there isn’t a militant vegan vibe to the place. [...]
“The food itself is vegan Mexican food[...] It’s all right. Not gourmet vegan [...] but when compared to bar food in general it’s passable. But you wouldn’t want to review this place on it culinary merits alone. [...]
“It’s also, until January 2009 at least, the only nonsmoking strip club in Portland, which is a unique perk and probably a bigger selling point to the customers than anything else. [...]
“I’m not a vegan or a vegetarian. That wasn’t a prerequisite for working at the club, and snarky Portland Mercury comments aside, none of the dancers are unshaven.”
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I’m in agreement with you here, but I wanted to try to clarify a little on this:
Just in defense of my nascent ecofeminism.
I don’t think the objection is that the strippers are hypocritical, but that the supporters and/or patrons are, because by going to a strip club they’re upholding the same system they’re fighting with veganism (because patriarchy and the factory farm industrial complex are the results of the same central problem). I disagree with that objection, but I’m reasonably certain that’s what the objection is; if not, it’s even less defensible.
Daisy Bond’s last blog post..On Exercising Your Fourth, Fifth And Sixth Amendment Rights
Daisy, I think you’re right that most people are not talking about the strippers at all. That’s one reason I wanted to talk about them.
But on that argument: “patriarchy and the factory farm industrial complex are the results of the same central problem”
My point is that a) sex work is not necessarily any more obvious an expression of patriarchy than any other kind of work and b) veganism is about more than just food and c) the central problem is greed and the pursuit of wealth - which exists in virtually all businesses and d) why should vegans and sex workers be held to a different moral standard than other people?
They say “women’s bodies are consumed” by patrons, but that’s just an expression. Women’s images may be consumed, stolen, used, as they are in other parts of society, too. But women are not killed and eaten in strip clubs. The meat/flesh analogy only goes so far. And I think it does a disservice to both veganism and feminism to compare the consumption of women’s bodies by lusty eyes to the consumption of animals’ bodies by hungry mouths. Afterwards women get to count their cash and go home. But the animals can’t do anything; they’re dead.
A much better description of how a vegan strip club *might* be hypocritical is not the relation between the sex industry and the meat industry, it’s the relation between the sex industry and the pet industry because what’s really for sale in many strip clubs isn’t women’s bodies, it’s women’s affection and intimacy.
You can buy a pet and you can buy a lap dance. The lap dance comes with sexual excitement as a side dish and the pet comes with social acceptance as a side dish, but the real commodity is affection and intimacy.
The entire service industry sells affection - from waitresses to bell hops to valets to housecleaners to masseuses to hairstylists… People don’t pay for the best work; they pay for the best feeling. They feel comfortable trusting this or that person with this or that intimate detail of their lives.
(But we won’t see the discussion of how the sex industry is similar to the pet industry in places like Feministing because they thinking breeding and buying pets is A-OK.)
Lastly, the patrons of this particular vegan strip club are probably not going there for the food and lack of dead animal skins on stage. They’re likely going there because it’s the only nonsmoking club in town and because of it’s location. The fact that it’s a vegan strip club is just a side benefit; it has more to do with the owner being vegan (and with the publicity that vegan stuff gets) than the patrons.
I think you’re right that these indictments of sex work boil down to an indictment of capitalism. The complaints are about commodification… and an emphasis on capital commidifies people and labor in myriad ways.
Which is more exploitative? Paying an army of women less than minimum wage to sew together t-shirts until their hands fall off, or owning and operating a strip club?
What if the strip club were owned cooperatively by the dancers, sharing the profits of the club among them?
Ed’s last blog post..Hand Discussion #11: My Thoughts
Elaine: agreed, agreed, and agreed. As I said — I agree with your ideas here; I was just disagreeing with your characterization of the objection with which we both disagree, if you will.
Daisy Bond’s last blog post..On Exercising Your Fourth, Fifth And Sixth Amendment Rights
Sorry, I didn’t mean that those who called the strip club hypocritical were literally saying vegan strippers are hypocritical. I meant that by saying the business is hypocritical, they’re implying the workers are hypocrites, too. And I do mean that. Because most reactions to the vegan strip club are to the idea of a vegan strip club in general and not reactions to this club owner or this club’s patrons.
I think that Carrie Underwood would go to that strip club. Found out last month that she is a vegetarian.
As for Ed’s question , I am going to say paying women less than the minimum wage (currently $5.85) for sewing t-shirts is a million times more exploitative than doing porn movies. No doubt about it.
jovan byars’s last blog post..A big thank you to Bill Clinton for calling out the anti-choicers’ real agenda
suuuuuuuuper disagreed, especially with this:
“sex work is not necessarily any more obvious an expression of patriarchy than any other kind of work “
only in a society and culture (global, here) where women are fetishized as “the sex class” would such an obvious disparity in the genders occur in an occupational field (number of women to men in sex work CLEARLY indicates a bias where women are sexual objects to be commodified and consumed); and the mere fact that we live in a patriarchy means that it isn’t a 100% unbiased and free choice for women. an analogy might be if pigs were given the choice between being slaughtered or living on a farm for the rest of their days; a truly free pig would be able to choose to live truly free, in the wild, but that’s obviously not a possible choice. women who engage in sex work do so with as much agency as is possible, but it is still a global community that disempowers women, so true agency and choice is not possible for any woman under any circumstances.
I never claimed it was an entirely free choice. I like your analogy. But, why is sex work more evil than other types of work where women are more harmed? Sex work here for women is the farm for the pig, not the slaughterhouse.
That is, women aren’t just the ’sex class’, we’re also the class who cleans, cooks, sews, reproduces, cares for children…
Hmm…this is quite thought provoking…
(I’m kind of thinking out loud here so don’t expect complete coherence here)
I guess, in these terms, the question is how to explain what makes the objectification of women’s bodies and affections in sex-work worse than the run of the mill commodification of labour-power under capitalist social relations of production?
I guess, at bottom, this is because the objectification of the body is seen as worse than the objectification of the capacity to work, or perhaps rather that sex-work is both simultaneously the objectification of women’s bodies and their labour-power?
So that, rather than sex-work merely being commensurate with the exploitation found generally in wage-labour it additionally entails the commodification (or rather objectification since sex-work is much older than capitalism) of women’s bodies themselves as mere instruments of men’s entertainment.
In this sense sex-work might be said to represent the intersection between forms of exploitation and oppression, where women’s exploitation as the socially reproductive class (which includes their being the ’sex class’) meets capitalism’s exploitation of wage-labour as the source of profit and capital itself.
Of course, there’s also left to consider the powerful social conditioning exercised by sex-work in reinforcing the objectification of women bodies as merely the instruments of men’s ends to consider.
However, an objection that I could certainly see being raised to this train of thought is to ask why it is in the first place that we see the commodification of the body as fundamentally worse than the commodification of labour…hell if I were to play the devil’s advocate I might argue that is the very dominance of capitalism itself as a mode of production which has so normalized the alienation of labour than we no longer identify ourselves fundamentally with our life-activity(work) and therefore view it’s commodification far less personally than the commodificaiton of the body itself.
I’ll have to think some more about this…
I concur with Elanie regarding a women’s freedom of choice to do what she chooses with her body.
As for a strip club that serves bean burritos… Whatever. On my give-a-shit-ometer, it barely budges the needle. Until there’s an endorsement from the Vegan Society, or even a North American vegan organization even with their crappy definitions of vegan (no, PeTA, is not a vegan organization) then it’s not a “vegan” strip club. Not everything a vegan does automatically makes something “vegan.” If a person who happens to be vegan kills another person, it’s not automatically a “vegan murder” news event. It’s just a murder. Likewise, it’s just a strip club.
Here’s where I do not fully agree with Elaine.
It’s not that there is merely a comparison or a superficial analogy, it’s that the exploitation of woman and non-human animals (and even other humans) are intertwined ideologies to the point of being inseparable.
Certainly women are not killed and eaten in strip clubs (although going solely by the language used to describe the circumstance it would be hard to tell) but they are exploited, and looking at a the greater empirical evidence of sex industries that are even supposedly benign, it has a strong history going far beyond “consumption of lusty eyes” to being down right degrading.
Slave owners were not eating slaves, but you would probably agree that the ideology of animal exploitation (specisism) and human exploitation (racism) stem from the same tree. When someone retorts that slave owners didn’t eat slaves like people eat animals and analogy is absurd, they are being deliberately obtuse similar to asserting that plants and cows are no different as living things and veganism is tragically flawed because vegans exploit plants.
Women typically (not always) pass into the strip club profession through pernicious coercion of society reinforced with the more grim side of capitalism. The service industry provides services. What service is provided from a strip club? The objectification of women or more commonly referred to as “men’s entertainment.”
The exploitation of an army of women in a sewing sweatshop and the operation of a female strip club is systemic of the same ideology. Society values and exploits women as objects of beauty. Young, thin, attractive women get nude and get paid. Skills traditionally associated with the feminine: cleaning, cooking, sewing, and child care are not given much worth even thought they are so very important because a patriarchal society doesn’t value women and treats them and their associated skills as lesser — that is until women become objects that can be assigned value for someone who has testicles.
Many anthropologists now realize that females provided the majority of the food in the hunter-gather societies. It’s been observed that in “primitive” societies, male hunters actually brought ten percent of the food from hunting. Culturally, we are taught to believe that hunting and male prowess defined our early society and defines our human heritage.
As an aside, veganism was not conceived merely in response to “the factory farm industrial complex” it goes further in seeking to abolish all animal husbandry including Old McDonald’s idyllic farm.
Women are treated to more money than they can make at a job actually producing something and animals are treated to our benevolent gift of us bringing them into the world and feeding them and giving them a place to live and a humane slaughter. Or if you reject the slaughter scenario, we protect and feed the cow and she “gives” us her milk (this is the happy farm version like in those commercials, so she doesn’t get slaughtered but lives out her life in beautiful green pastures.) When women and animals are serving their own productive interests outside of their defined patriarchal societal roles their value is near nil. Instead of avoiding female and animal objectification and exploitation all together, society regulates treatment to “the objects” to absolve any moral conflict because it is “necessary” that the situation exists — necessary to maintain the, sexist, speciesist hierarchy.
“Of course, there’s also left to consider the powerful social conditioning exercised by sex-work in reinforcing the objectification of women bodies as merely the instruments of men’s ends to consider.” Yup. A worker should be valued for producing, not be valued for being an object. But yeah, there’s all sorts of exceptions and gray areas and all that.
Now, I’m back to where I agree with Elaine.
We live in a patriarchal society, so the parameters that constitute a women’s freedom of choice isn’t without pervasive pressure. However, the idea must be extended that ultimately an able minded woman is free to choose as she wishes and pursuit happiness. If society doesn’t offer women full autonomy over their person, even at potential detriment to themselves, they will never be free from oppression.
Before I write a long, thought out response, let me leave my initial reactions to your comments:
I don’t agree that objectification is necessarily evil. I think it’s one of many tools of oppression, but it’s the kind of tool that is not necessarily destructive. It’s a jackhammer, not a gun. Guns are ONLY used to kill and assert domination (even when in self defense). Jackhammers are used to dig and demolish in order to rebuild or repair. Objectification is not the sickness. It’s a symptom.
On the notion of “actually produce something” and the notion that workers should be valued based on production:
Strippers produce and sell real and perceived intimacy and affection. They are like actors in that way. Moreover, many are performers (dancers, actors) who have chosen this line of work because they can practice or hone their craft until or unless they get a more respected job performing in movies, television, on Broadway, etc.
On the notion that women become strippers through coercion:
Some do, some don’t. I don’t think it’s honest or fair to assume all women who work in the sex industry have been coerced. Given the huge stigma on sex work, it isn’t realistic to assume women don’t factor that into their decision. Choosing to be in the industry is often giving up on being heard or understood by other women or feminists.
Lastly, though the majority of strip clubs are for men’s entertainment, there are strip clubs with male dancers and there are strip clubs that allow or encourage female patrons. And while most of today’s clubs do not distribute wealth equitably, that doesn’t have to be the case.
Thanks for putting so much thought and energy into commenting. I really appreciate it, regardless of whether or not we agree :)
Hey, I linked here from Twisty.
As a former sex worker, I am angry enough that I find it hard to be articulate, but here goes:
Sex work is not a free choice for the many women (and children), probably the majority worldwide, who are in the industry as slaves. The women claiming an empowerfuling experience from it are very very very few.
Of the women in this country who “choose” sex work, many of whom I have met and/or worked with, I have never met one who was mentally or emotionally stable enough that I really believed her decision to do sex work amounted to anything more than a method of self- destruction for which she needed counseling. I actually prided myself on being the only sane stripper/escort wherever I ended up working until I realized that I too was in the sort of denial and destruction pattern that I was seeing all around me.
Much like anorexics who find “pro-anna” communities, the ability of sex workers to find people who stroke and encourage their awesome sexyfun feminismness does not in fact mean that this is okay.
So your arguments about sex work being “consensual” and therefore not something that anybody should disapprove of or interefere with ever are sort of bunk and annoying.
It is different from other forms of capitalist exploitation, and I’m an anti-capitalist as well, so I like to think I know whereof I speak. Selling real or perceived intimacy as if it were an object is much worse than selling a book or a meal as if it were an object.
Vegan strippers are possibly hypocritical, but maybe just undereducated somewhat screwed up women who really need help, or better jobs.
The existance of a very few strip clubs with male strippers or female patrons does not somehow negate the fact that the majority of the industry is aimed at selling men pussy.
What this comes down to is nothing more or less than you thinking that sex work is okay and I (the one with the actual expertise, who happens to share my opinion with the vast majority of sex “workers” worldwide) thinking that it’s oppressive.
It is not hypocritical for someone who honestly believes that sex work is oppressive to point out that all oppression is bad, and that it doesn’t make much sense to fight oppression of animals while promoting oppression of women.
Finally, this is the internet. Nobody is ever alone. You could find someone in the next five hours willing to write you an article about why veganism is totally compatible with setting your neighbor’s house on fire and anybody who says differently is a hypocrite. I hope you link to that one too.
I know a few strippers in real life and online who I believe made the free choice to do sex work. I will grant that many do not, but my whole point is that there are areas of gray in sex work where there are NONE in animal agriculture. The fact that some women can and do consent is THE principle difference and to deny that fact is to harm both the animal rights movement and the women’s liberation movement.