books

Strip: The Making of a Feminist

Published by Changemakers Books, 2018

Catlyn Ladd has smashed that wearisome dichotomy “Madonna-whore,” and replaced it with a better tension for women to master in the 21st Century: the sexual-intellectual. Working in strip clubs for five years while obtaining her undergraduate and first graduate degrees, Ladd is uniquely positioned to offer insight into a world that is caricatured, denigrated, and misunderstood. Most provocatively, she argues that in strip clubs she became a feminist. 

The exotic dancer exits in popular culture most often as scenery. When she is allowed to speak, she does so to the male protagonist and is either the conniving woman attempting to relieve the hero of the cash in his wallet, or fallen woman in need of rescue. She is rarely named, existing only as a backdrop, red lights flashing on pliant flesh like a crime scene. She is white, blonde, slim, with large breasts. She is stripper Barbie, plastic porn. 

This book attempts to bring nuance to a subject that is often overlooked, ignored, or otherwise silenced. To all readers of human culture interested in the anthropology of what it means to be a sex object in modern America, this book is about much more than stripping. It argues that gentlemen’s clubs are a microcosm that distills the female experience of patriarchal culture. On the body of woman is written male desire. In the eyes of woman, gazing at the male, culture can truly be seen.