Ikkje berre shopping, men stripping er frigjerande, skal ein tru Toni
Bentley. Germaine Greer er usamd.
Magnus B
http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/06/02/boben05
.xml&sSheet=/arts/2002/06/02/bomain.html
Naked ambition
(Filed: 01/06/2002)
Germaine Greer reviews Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley
The second of the epigraphs to Toni Bentley's Sisters of Salome is a
quotation from the late, great Angela Carter: "The significance of the
femme fatale lies not in her gender but in her freedom." Heaven knows what
Carter meant or Bentley means, or what Yale University Press means by
presenting a work such as this under its august banner. Bentley is "a
former New York City ballet dancer" turned author with two-and-a-half other
books to her credit. Since childhood, she has been fascinated by a select
group of female exhibitionists: Colette, Salome, Maud Allen, Mata Hari and
Ida Rubinstein. It is her belief that "in her nudity and anonymity", a
naked woman on a stage has "what so many women want: power and safety
within her own circumscribed world".
This contention, that an exotic dancer is exerting power beyond anything
known to women who keep their clothes on in public, informs the whole book.
The author has, after all, experienced it for herself, when she danced at
the Blue Angel Club in New York, naked except for "steep black suede pumps,
black fishnet lace-top stockings, a black satin choker deep red lipstick,
and nothing else". She was probably also clad in a thick coat of body
make-up. The only evidence of her power is in her interpretation of the
behaviour of her audience. She notices one man in particular: "His desire
burned into my own gaze, showing me with a clarity I had never experienced
before the power of my own body. I then knew what triumph felt like." Why
climb Everest or run a four-minute mile or crack the riddle of prime
factors or find a cure for cancer if all you need to do is to get your gear
off under lights?
It is a cherished female fantasy that a woman has only to step out of her
clothes and gyrate a little for a man, any man, all men, to be stricken
with desire for her. We see where this gets them in the kinds of men's
magazines that sport a "readers' wives and girlfriends" section, with
photos of ordinary women hanging out of inadequate clothing as they writhe
and gurn in what they imagine to be a seductive manner. What is
demonstrated in Bentley's case, as in the cases of the wives and
girlfriends, is certainly power, but it is the power of delusion. No woman
who dances naked in public is in control of the situation; she is merely an
attraction on the bill, an alternative to the strongman and the conjurer.
Male desire, her standing ovation, as it were, is all in her imagination.
Men are titillated as much by the presence of other men as by the spectacle
itself, but they will lose the respect of their male companions if they
give evidence of actual arousal.
Salome for Bentley "is every woman who has ever dreamed of stripping for a
lover - or an audience - and she is every woman who has", yet she is well
aware that Salome is herself the invention of men, from the evangelists who
have little to say about her down to Flaubert, Moreau, Huysmans, Oscar
Wilde and Richard Strauss. Bentley credits Wilde with giving her a
plausible psychology, that of the thwarted virgin nymphomaniac. She is
unmoved by the reflection that Wilde also invented her appalling death,
crushed under the shields of Herod's guards. The story of the Salomania of
the turn of the century is well told by Bentley, but it would have been
better if she had been able to refrain from egregious statements of the
order of "Fears about the sexual woman were specially prevalent in both
Europe and America during the late 1800s" and "The psychological climate in
France during the late 19th century was rife with insecurity". More amusing
is writing of the order of "she performed a 30-second hootchy-kootchy
dressed in pantaloons with barely concealed breasts".
Nowhere does Bentley examine the commercial realities behind the promotion
of exotic dancers or what the cultural factors were that favoured the
growth of popular vaudeville and provided the rather inept and only
semi-naked dancers with their huge uncritical audiences. Despite her
determination to present the ecdysiast Salomanes as exacting "revenge for
their own social, physical and sexual powerlessness", their story resists
moralisation and remains at the level of anecdote, spiced with the
occasional uncharitable observation. Mata Hari had small breasts "with
highly discoloured, over-developed nipples" and always wore a "cache-sein"
stuffed with feathers. Though Romaine Brooks's famous photograph shows
beyond doubt that Ida Rubinstein had high-slung perfect breasts, Bentley
finds them simply small. Her account of Colette is oddly reductive, as she
concentrates on the breast Colette exposed on stage in 1907 and her
scandalous relationship with Missy, which seems to have been in part a
pose, and misunderstands the extent to which the men in her life
manipulated this gifted and generous woman for their own ends.
It would be comforting to accept the idea that dancing naked for money is
an expression of freedom, but I doubt that many of the young women who find
themselves table-dancing in clubs, in the full awareness that the only
career path leads precipitously downhill, would agree.
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