Dancing for what?

Live Nude Girls UNITE! is about a strip club/peepshow in San Francisco called The Lusty Lady and how the dancers who worked there formed the first Exotic Dancers Union. It is a low-budget documentary made by Julia Query, who works at The Lusty Lady and also as a stand-up comedian. The film also explores Julia’s relationship with her mother Dr. Joyce Wallace, who is well known for her outreach work with prostitutes in New York. At one point in the film, Julia “comes out” to her mother as a stripper, expecting her mother to at least be proud of the work Julia has done with the union. Despite Dr. Wallace’s forward thinking, she does not approve of her daughter’s work, and this attitude causes a rift in their relationship. This fallout does not stop Julia from continuing her work, but it forces both her and her mother to go through a process of acceptance of one another.

In this film, Dr. Wallace essentially represents the two typical schools of though in regards to the sex work industry. Basically there are two categories the sex work falls into: liberating and oppressive. It can even be broken down further into “good” and “bad.” These categories depend on the views of two types of feminist groups, the radical feminists and the sex radical feminists. The radical feminists see any kind of sex work, which also includes sexuality itself, as exploitative and oppressive; the sex radical feminists see sex work as defying the convention of femininity and therefore see sex work as liberating.


The problem with these viewpoints is that the world cannot be broken down into black and white, right and wrong, “good” and “bad.” Yes, there are people and/or situations that can easily fit into one category or the other, but there are also other viewpoints, opinions, and situations that must be taken into consideration. The article by Bernadette Barton is a study of the “Sex War Paradigm,” different from the usual studies because Barton takes into consideration the opinions and experiences of the sex workers themselves as opposed to basing all of her information on political viewpoints. I don’t want to go into too much detail about it because I don’t want to rehash the entire article, but ultimately during the course of her study, Barton concluded that the most outstanding categories were not “good” and “bad” or liberation vs. oppression; the results revealed how easily good experiences turn into bad experiences in the strip clubs, and how much the dancer’s opinions change the longer they have been dancing. Barton discovered that most women begin dancing because they a) need the money, b) enjoy dancing, or c) all of the above, but that the longer they dance, the more cynical and disillusioned they become; they grow tired of the flip-flop between compliments and insults from the customers, they get sick of faking seduction and sultry attitudes when they are feeling exactly the opposite, and they get bored with producing what one dancer refers to as “assembly line orgasms” when the pay and the benefits are no longer worth it.

Ultimately, however, though the arguments about the sex industry influence the decisions about the rights of sex workers and are therefore important to the story, the film is about the success of the employees of The Lusty Lady and the progression they made in the fight for the rights of sex workers. These women should be seen as inspirations regardless of the opinions about the sex industry because they saw something they wanted and they fought until they got it. Their struggle is no different than the struggle depicted in Harlan County, U.S.A. or in Salt of the Earth, and I admire them for their courage and their determination.

New Terminology:

Draconian: excessively harsh and severe

Scurrilous: making or spreading scandalous claims about someone with the intention of damaging his or her reputation

Egregious: outstandingly bad; shocking

Möbius strip: a surface with one continuous side formed by joining the ends of a rectangular strip after twisting one end through 180 degrees















Paradigm: a typical example or pattern of something; a model; a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject

Reductionist: [reductionism] the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon, especially a mental, social, or biological phenomenon, in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation

Veracity: conformity to fact; accuracy

Vicissitudes: a change of circumstances or fortune, typically one that is unwelcome or unpleasant