What’s wrong with students stripping for cash?

Is it OK for hard-up students to consider taking their clothes off as a way of paying their university tuition fees? The mere suggestion that they could earn a ‘good wage’ doing so by John Specht, UK vice president of the Spearmint Rhino chain of gentlemen’s clubs, has caused controversy. In response to Specht’s remarks, National Union of Students (NUS) women’s officer Estelle Hart commented ‘the women that are being targeted by John Specht are intelligent women who are capable of great things but in order to pay for cuts made by this government they are forced to hide that away and have their worth judged simply by sexual availability’.

Hart’s comments highlight the real question underlying the discussion: why is it so much more shocking or pertinent that students should be undertaking this sort of work than anyone else? There seems to be a real snobbish tone lurking beneath the surface; that somehow students, who are intelligent and educated, more likely to be middle-class, should not be working in such a profession. But why is it any worse for an educated woman to strip than a woman without high academic grades?

Both Hart and the NUS seem to be suggesting that these young students somehow now have no choice but to work in lap dancing clubs. The government have increased fees, leaving young, vulnerable women with no option but to strip off for cash, demeaning their worth as intelligent beings and reducing them to mere sex symbols.

But the fact that tuition fees have gone up, or indeed that students have to pay fees at all, has nothing to do with how they pay those fees. In the UK, fees are not even paid up front, as government loans are provided and paid back after graduation, so this money is not needed out of desperation. The fee rise doesn’t mean that students are now any more likely than in previous years to be forced to work in strip clubs against their will.

Young women are simply clearly savvy enough to have figured out that lap dancing can earn them good money, either to boost their student loans and grants or simply for a bit of extra cash to enjoy their time away from their studies. They are also intelligent enough to realise that lap dancing is a job, not a prism through which their entire personality and worth is judged.

Why, then, do the NUS and others have such a problem with young women making a free choice to make good money? Whether that be by taking their clothes off or any other job they may choose, surely we should be supporting their choices?

When opponents to lap dancing clubs speak of the women who work within them, they frequently describe them as ‘vulnerable’, ‘exploitative’ and ‘pressurised’. Most of these arguments, as seen in the NUS’s position, centre on the idea that women performing these kinds of roles are being sucked into them against their will. From this, it is claimed, it is not unreasonable to argue that women should be ‘liberated’ from this sort of work as it has a corrosive effect on their lives.

However there is a real irony in claiming to empower women, while simultaneously belittling their choices simply because they are considered by some to be unpalatable. Sure, lap dancing may not seem to everyone as being a particularly life-affirming choice of employment, but the same could be said for countless other jobs people choose to do, whether through a need for money or any other reason. If we really want to empower women, we should celebrate the fact that women living in 21st century Britain do, for the most part, have it better than we ever have, and that we are in the extremely privileged position of being able to pursue whichever career we choose. If for students this sometimes means stripping, let’s have a little more faith in their decisions, rather than patronising them.
Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Institute of Ideas’ Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Abigail Ross-Jackson is a writer and journalist, based in London. She is a producer of the Battle of Ideas festival, which features the debate What is Feminism For? organised in partnership with bpas, on Sunday 30 October.

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