ITV brought the sex industry to the kids again last night, with Simon Cowell giving a massive approval to the stripper who performed on Britain’s Got Talent at 8pm, sending the message that stripping is fun for all the family and will get you places.
So come on little girls, stripping wont just make you loved and famous, it’s actually a talent. It’s not the first time the kids have been entertained by strippers on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent. When it’s burlesque, it gets excused as an art-form, or empowering for women who have real bodies, but it’s just stripping for middle class people who think they’re trendy, and now the mainstream think it’s all ever so quirky. So what if there is intended ‘humour’? So what if she has a ‘real’ body? Stripping is stripping. Empowerment is getting fairly paid, the right to representation in parliament, the right to abort your own foetus, that sort of thing, get it? Normalising the sex industry is normalising sexism, not sex. It’s very existence undermines all women’s chances of equality. I don’t want my three year old son, who was enjoying the show, to know that this is what women get noticed and applauded for just yet. I don’t want to have to face the depressing everyday scenario of ‘Mummy why has that women got no pants on?’ just yet.
Watch former lapdancers talk about their ‘work’ and what it’s really like to be a stripper.
Read the Fawcett Society’s report on how the sex industry undermines women’s equality in the workplace.
Read my interview with a woman who worked as a stripper here.
How did strip clubs get so normalised? Find out about Object’s Stripping The Illusion campaign.
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