ABSTRACT
Exploring the representation of male strippers in almost 20 films, Andrea Waling demonstrates how male stripping for women is often viewed differently from what is normally thought of as sex work. Men’s stripping for women embodies a set of gendered norms, values, and expectations that distinguish it from women stripping for men and enables it to avoid the stigma that often accompanies women’s sex work. Indeed, men’s strip shows have been reframed as erotic entertainment and have become normalized as harmless, naughty fun for girls’ nights and bachelorette parties. In films ranging from mainstream Hollywood fare like The Full Monty (1997) and Magic Mike (2012) to documentaries like La Bare (2014), men’s stripping is represented as a legitimate enterprise, quite unlike women’s stripping for men. Men’s stripping is depicted as “humorous, ordinary, and average; as harmless, naughty, and communal; as inherently heterosexual, romantic, and affectionate; as representative of skill, technique, and mastery; and as an activity that is entrepreneurial, tactical, and promotional.” These positive depictions of male stripping for women as respectable entertainment and mild titillation have helped shield the enterprise from the stigmatization suffered by women’s sex work. Moreover, rather than providing evidence of the emergence of a liberated female gaze, cinematic representations of men’s stripping suggest the opposite because they maintain traditional gender hierarchies and emphasize conventional heterosexual romance narratives. They also value men’s muscular bodies as the results of discipline and athleticism rather than as decorative or sexual objects.
