Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Stripping, the Sex Trafficking Gateway

Jada Pinkett Smith is in Atlanta shooting her CNN documentary on sex trafficking. During shooting, she had an epiphany that she shared on a CNN vlog. In her video, she shares what she has learned from interviewing women who are part of the sex trafficking industry. One of the women reveals that her entry into the industry started with her choosing to become a stripper. She began selling sexual favors intermittently and it has now become her life.
The woman began stripping with excitement, as a means of being one of those women who is aggrandized in hip hop culture, music, and now apparently contemporary culture. Hearing this, Jada and now I, realize the generational disparity. Like Jada, I was always told and my generational culture reinforced that stripping was for women from the bottom (Yes, this is the language/word used in my household). Stripping or so called erotic dancing was degrading and for women of lower or no class. That's it and that's all. There was nothing praiseworthy or respectable about this profession regardless of the amount of money earned or celebrity bedded.
What changed? When? Looking back, I now see the genesis of the cultural shift. Movies like The Players Club, which was released in 1998, ushered a more sympathetic view of stripping and became a cult classic in the process. In that movie, the main character, Diana, played by LisaRaye, is lured into stripping as a means of making more money she was making in retail to care for her child. Diana meets and begins dating a disc jokey (played by Jamie Foxx) and later leaves stripping becoming a reporter. Henceforth, stripping was idealized--becoming the contemporary fairytale, a stepping stone to a better life. I loathed the movie from the beginning and have yet to understand its appeal. The Players Club was not the only movie to depict stripping as a means to an end during that period. There was Striptease starring Demi Moore and Showgirls which was released in 1995.  These kinds of movies combined with the seemingly innocuous films like Pretty Woman change the perspective of stripping and prostitution to near fairytale status. Film was not the only industry to exalt stripping. The music industry has been the most significant influence of making stripping an appealing profession to young women who would have otherwise viewed it as a degrading profession. Insert almost any contemporary hip hop or rap song and any of several R & B songs and you'll hear at least one reference to the wonderful world of stripping. Women themselves have also joined the stripper glorification game with songs like Rihanna's Pour It Up
So what is the issue with stripping? Well, you take this pervasive cultural sanitation of a previously ignored and stigmatized profession and combine it with an industry that feeds upon these kinds of lax attitudes towards selling the simulation of sex (because truth be told, that is what stripping is) and selling sex and you have cornucopia of targets for the sex trafficking industry. Young women now view stripping as a job no different than being a hairstylist. I recently spoke with a stripper who told me she was "actually a real trained dancer." Stripping is a means to an end and not just any end nowadays. It is an avenue to become a video vixen who later becomes a reality television star and then an entrepreneur. It is a means to hundreds of thousands of YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook followers. In many a young girl's minds, it ends in fame and fortune, only that is far from how it ends for the majority of young women in the industry. Too often it ends in prostitution or sex trafficking.
It is a gateway profession which brings me back to Jada's epiphany. She says that it is her age that has distorted her understanding of this. Hearing this, I realize that I was on the cusp of this generational gap. I came of age or into womanhood during the period when entertainment first began to aggrandize stripping and had friends who didn't really think stripping was bad by any means. While others of us saw it as just an avenue to drug abuse and/or prostitution. Fast forward 15 years and more and more young girls and women see stripping as a means to meet and procreate with or marry a celebrity or to become a celebrity in their own right.
We must do better.