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| While women clashed over the issue of sex work, Stringfellow just thrived | While women clashed over the issue of sex work, Stringfellow just thrived |
| (about 1 month later) | |
| Peter Stringfellow’s stint in prison – he served a fortnight in Leeds for selling stolen carpets (rug-running, if you will) – was character-building in every sense. He credited to it all his subsequent attitudes to the law, becoming a tax-paying, straight-and-narrow citizen, which sounds like a floor rather than a ceiling, but in the business of strip-joint entrepreneurship may be more unusual than in other fields. The more practical consequence of his time inside was that it set him on the path to self-employment. And most probably in the 60s, nightclubs of the Stringfellow sensibility were pretty mainstream: he hosted the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Tina Turner, although didn’t, so far as history relates, require them to remove their clothes. | Peter Stringfellow’s stint in prison – he served a fortnight in Leeds for selling stolen carpets (rug-running, if you will) – was character-building in every sense. He credited to it all his subsequent attitudes to the law, becoming a tax-paying, straight-and-narrow citizen, which sounds like a floor rather than a ceiling, but in the business of strip-joint entrepreneurship may be more unusual than in other fields. The more practical consequence of his time inside was that it set him on the path to self-employment. And most probably in the 60s, nightclubs of the Stringfellow sensibility were pretty mainstream: he hosted the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Tina Turner, although didn’t, so far as history relates, require them to remove their clothes. |
| Andrea Werhun: 'It’s a really good time to talk about sex work' | Andrea Werhun: 'It’s a really good time to talk about sex work' |
| In regular living memory, though, he always had the air of a slightly bilious relic. In an egalitarian age, the idea of a social space that women would avoid, for reasons of discomfort or derision, was very dated. Had the arc of history tended towards gender justice, strip joints would have just died out with Benny Hill. But then the 90s happened, and Loaded was born, and all the signifiers we had understood as sexist – breasts everywhere, fishnets, pole dancing – suddenly weren’t. | In regular living memory, though, he always had the air of a slightly bilious relic. In an egalitarian age, the idea of a social space that women would avoid, for reasons of discomfort or derision, was very dated. Had the arc of history tended towards gender justice, strip joints would have just died out with Benny Hill. But then the 90s happened, and Loaded was born, and all the signifiers we had understood as sexist – breasts everywhere, fishnets, pole dancing – suddenly weren’t. |
| Nothing about the human condition had changed, power hadn’t been redistributed, the patriarchy hadn’t been smashed, and suddenly soft-pornification was supposed to be fine. Yet it was ironic: objectification wasn’t objectionable, because nothing meant what you thought it meant. | Nothing about the human condition had changed, power hadn’t been redistributed, the patriarchy hadn’t been smashed, and suddenly soft-pornification was supposed to be fine. Yet it was ironic: objectification wasn’t objectionable, because nothing meant what you thought it meant. |
| There was something dicey in all this: to know you are being inauthentic isn’t the same as authenticity. I knew that intellectually because the philosopher Paul de Man was huge in the 90s, but I only understood it in my gut when Spearmint Rhino opened in Tottenham Court Road and held open auditions in the mid-90s. I went along for a joke, for a feature (I was working at the Evening Standard, but I’m pretty sure this was my own idea, nobody made me). | There was something dicey in all this: to know you are being inauthentic isn’t the same as authenticity. I knew that intellectually because the philosopher Paul de Man was huge in the 90s, but I only understood it in my gut when Spearmint Rhino opened in Tottenham Court Road and held open auditions in the mid-90s. I went along for a joke, for a feature (I was working at the Evening Standard, but I’m pretty sure this was my own idea, nobody made me). |
| It was all so hilarious and post-modern: they want topless women – I’m a woman, I know how to take my top off, what a blast. I’d literally walked on to the stage before it dawned on me: these women are professional dancers; they spend their lives looking perfect, according to some idea of perfection that, like a Marvel character or Barbie, merely reminds you of the female form. Never mind feminism for a second. This is huge money; this is a cotton mill in human form. The means of production are integral to the workers (they’re their breasts, after all) but are still not owned by them. If there’s a joke here it’s a grim, Marxist one. It has sod all to do with irony. | It was all so hilarious and post-modern: they want topless women – I’m a woman, I know how to take my top off, what a blast. I’d literally walked on to the stage before it dawned on me: these women are professional dancers; they spend their lives looking perfect, according to some idea of perfection that, like a Marvel character or Barbie, merely reminds you of the female form. Never mind feminism for a second. This is huge money; this is a cotton mill in human form. The means of production are integral to the workers (they’re their breasts, after all) but are still not owned by them. If there’s a joke here it’s a grim, Marxist one. It has sod all to do with irony. |
| Peter Stringfellow - a life in pictures | Peter Stringfellow - a life in pictures |
| That fin-de-siècle playfulness was intellectually corrupted because it was dishonest: it pretended to be ludic rather than exploitative, but somehow, the guys at the top ended up with all the cash, which is much more like exploitation than japing around. But what came after doesn’t strike me as much better. All the moral and modesty arguments against lap dancing and nudity have disintegrated, and the 00s saw the first fully nude licences and sexual entertainment venue licences (of which Peter Stringfellow was the first UK beneficiary, in 2006). But feminists’ arguments have ossified into a stance where they cannot listen to, let alone accommodate the views of sex workers and strippers, because they’re still – in a 70s second-wave style – considered victims by definition, and therefore anything they say that doesn’t give expression to that victimhood is false consciousness. | That fin-de-siècle playfulness was intellectually corrupted because it was dishonest: it pretended to be ludic rather than exploitative, but somehow, the guys at the top ended up with all the cash, which is much more like exploitation than japing around. But what came after doesn’t strike me as much better. All the moral and modesty arguments against lap dancing and nudity have disintegrated, and the 00s saw the first fully nude licences and sexual entertainment venue licences (of which Peter Stringfellow was the first UK beneficiary, in 2006). But feminists’ arguments have ossified into a stance where they cannot listen to, let alone accommodate the views of sex workers and strippers, because they’re still – in a 70s second-wave style – considered victims by definition, and therefore anything they say that doesn’t give expression to that victimhood is false consciousness. |
| The bizarre evolution of the sex-industry debate is that those who oppose it are ranged against those who work in it, with figures like Peter Stringfellow occupying this arch-villain role that he didn’t seem to mind, and died basically untouched by. | The bizarre evolution of the sex-industry debate is that those who oppose it are ranged against those who work in it, with figures like Peter Stringfellow occupying this arch-villain role that he didn’t seem to mind, and died basically untouched by. |
| • Zoe Williams is a regular contributor to the Guardian | • Zoe Williams is a regular contributor to the Guardian |
| Gender | Gender |
| Opinion | Opinion |
| Sex trade | Sex trade |
| Sexuality | Sexuality |
| Feminism | Feminism |
| Women | Women |
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