Does Mommy always know best?

“Live Nude Girls Unite!” delves into a group of female strippers who struggle to organize a union. They work at a San Francisco peep-show called “Lusty Lady,” where clients can pay a quarter to watch the strippers dance behind a glass “aquarium” for 15 seconds. Our protagonist and filmmaker, Julia Query, must also overcome the challenge of telling her mother what she does to make a living.

Unfortunately, her mom, Dr. Joyce Wallace, does not take the information with a passive heart. Dr. Wallace has invested a goodly portion of her efforts toward supporting and protecting street-working prostitutes.

In the film, we she her drive a van around Manhattan with Barbara Walters, handing out free condoms to any prostitutes they encounter. However, she is not supportive of the fact that her daughter is caught up in a similar career. In fact, she tells her daughter, “I'm not proud of you.”

What factor differentiates her acceptance from the career of these women to that of her own daughter? I can only assume it's empathy. Perhaps she feels that these women did not have better opportunities awaiting them, nor the means to do so, thus she reaches out to them. However, because she had the advantage of raising her daughter and guiding her to become a successful woman, she feels as if her only child has sold herself short or lost her sense of self-respect.

The thing is: her daughter is a successful woman. However, her line of work is not traditionally viewed as such. It has a built-in reputation of being “a last resort” career path, as opposed to one that an individual willingly chooses.

Forming a union was not only one step closer to protecting these women's rights as workers, but toward being taken seriously as an actual job. Roger Ebert puts it quite eloquently:

“There is a curious notion that
strippers and prostitutes do what they do
because they enjoy it...It is possible to take
pleasure in making a ham sandwich, but you
might not want to work behind the counter when
the customer always leaves with the sandwiches.”

Ebert is saying that these women aren't doing this on their own time because they find it thrilling. They are doing it because they want to make money, and it has potential to be a lucrative business (if conducted fairly). This is precisely the reason the strippers and “Lusty Lady” want to form a union. They don't want to be exploited for the work they are doing. They want to be treated like professionals.

Words of Interest:

iconoclastic- a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions; a destroyer of images used in religious worship, in particular

ardently- enthusiastic or passionately