Photo by Flickr user anheuser. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Matthew Yglesias of TheAtlantic.com cites a proposal by Ann Freiedman to explain the peculiar phenomenon of vegan strip clubs (This one’s in Portland, OR. Its not the first.)
One common thread here is that all of these efforts are aimed at making veganism appealing to men. The Maxim-like PETA ads, the Vegan Vixens, the strip club: All are saying it’s okay to buck the stereotype of Real Men Eat Red Meat, because here are some naked ladies to reassure you that you’re still a superhetero manly man! Almost as if they’re saying, you won’t even miss eating meat, because you’ll get to look at so much of it! Or as Diablo puts it, “We put the meat on the pole, not on the plate.“ It’s a substitution. This trend seems to confirm much of what Carol Adams observed in the Sexual Politics of Meat — and then turn it on its head.
And then Yglesias offers his own counterproposal
I think this misreads the vegan strip club concept. Strip clubs in general aren’t in the business of using sex to sell booze and food, they’re using sex to sell sex. The vegan strip club isn’t using strippers to sell veganism, it’s using veganism to sell stripping to Portland-area guys with self-conceptions as liberal nice guys. After all, food quality is probably not a significant factor in strip club marketing.
My take? I once worked in a popular low-rent university-area music bar owned by a guy who (I discovered towards the end of my stint) who had, at one point early in his career, had once tried to get around the porous but extraordinarily strict local blue laws, had opened a “fine-arts photo studio” where men could rent cameras to “photograph” nude models who were, in every regard, strippers. (Supposedly nobody ever bought film.)
Yup, sleazy. Sleazy but telling. If you try to explain men as the obligate, leg-humping sex class, overwhelmed with a sense of privilege and only primitively concerned with decorum then the PETA-style women-as-meat-substitute theory works pretty well. (I suspect it’s what drives some of their weirder ads.)
But, in fact, the subset of men who really don’t care probably just go to the closest, or possibly the most price sensitive one.
Instead, as with on-line porn sites, there seems to be more potential supply than actual potential demand. That doesn’t mean men wouldn’t go (we’re no more original saints than sinners) but it does mean that, like my erstwhile employer, to break through a lot of men’s reluctance to, literally, go there.
My guess is that at least out here in the Northwest where even hunting supply stores stock granola bars, vegan strip clubs are still going to be pulling from what’s still a fairly limited demographic rather than recruiting new customers in.
—-
Note: Long as I’m talking about strip clubs I keep meaning to reinforce the point that stripping is the ultimate expression of the “no-sex” class paradigm: men go in knowing that no matter how much they pay or the strippers promise, they’re going to leave by the front door while the strippers will return to their dressing rooms. Paradoxically this reassures men that their view of the world order is intact, that no matter how many clothes they take off or how much they gyrate or whisper sweet nothings women really don’t want to have sex with them and that they, men, never be quite worthy enough to “earn” sex.
Submitted by 1937 (not verified) on Thu, 2008-02-14 09:22.
That photo makes me sick. Way to alienate much of the thinking world, PETA.
[Hi, Christina. Yup, even as street theater it's dysfunctional on too many levels. Unless maybe they've got some serious numbers to back it up, which I've never heard. Instead I think it's more of an effort to just demonstrate to themselves and each other how passionately pro-animal they feel than any realistic intention of changing actually minds. --fl]
Submitted by 1937 (not verified) on Thu, 2008-02-14 13:27.
That photo makes me hot and horny, but it just says to me that human pets do belong in cages! Doesn't have any effect on my attitudes towards non-human animals.
[And maybe I'm just being naive but for some reason I suspect most PETA folks would be shocked by your perspective, SE, since -- if they think those sort of dramatics are effective then they may not think much about BDSM at all. --fl]
Submitted by 1937 (not verified) on Thu, 2008-02-14 16:19.
peta in general makes me insane (yeah, i'm biased due to career, but still). way to trade up "exploitation of animals" for exploitation of women.
and you know, i've really always wondered why it's so important to get the MEN on board with peta's message. clearly, the nudie girls (both in the flesh and in the ads) aren't aimed at the standard chick...but there's no nudie boys corollary to be found anywhere. heck, there's no stereotypical 'no-sex-class' style "feminine" ads, either. is swaying the opinions of females to their side just not worth bothering with?
[Excellent point, of course, fireweaver. It's that assumption that masculinity is unitary again, and that weird auto-double-standard whereby if one stereotype has men preferring to eat meat then, why then women by definition must prefer not to. Therefore no effort. (Again, I agree with you that by aiming at such cartoonish stereotypes too many of their campaigns aren't just silly, or self-demeaning, but *ineffective!* If they were *effective* we'd just stop eating meat and going to circuses. If they're not then we have to keep putting up with... inept symbolism. ) --fl]
Submitted by 1937 (not verified) on Thu, 2008-02-14 23:51.
I don't know about the last part Figleaf... A vast majority of strip clubs have brothels upstairs. So just because you don't leave with them doesn't mean you don't get your end away. :\
[I'm only familiar with local strip joints which are mostly grandfathered in to neighborhoods and therefore monitored rigorously by generally nettled local residents. But I'm sure you're right about other areas, Dana. I'm still going to draw a distinction between stripping and prostitution (although both are obviously sex work) because the majority of strippers make the distinction and appear to resent colleagues who cross the line. --fl]
Submitted by 1937 (not verified) on Sat, 2008-02-16 10:05.
And a lot of men who I know, who claim not to be sexist but go to strip clubs, justify it by thinking that the women "want" to be there taking their close off for me.
[I can't say I know a lot of people who've worked as strippers (possibly because, after all, it's not that easy to tell) but the few I know who have have had any number of reasons. But as you hint, Christina, none have mentioned wanting to take their clothes off for customers as their chief motivation. That's not to say *nobody* feels that way -- there's the whole new-burlesque movement after all. I'm pretty sure most of those are performance artists rather than working strippers. --fl]