Film Review "Live Nude Girls"

Justin Orndorff

Soc 360

Film Review “Live Nude Girls”

            This film documentary “Live Nude Girls” begins by discussing how stripping or sex work can help many young women work their way through college or start small businesses.  The women in the film describe it as a “sexual service.”  The documentary focuses on a strip-club located in Seattle Washington called the “Lusty Lady.”  The women explain that you can make up to twenty dollars per hour working at the “Lusty lady.”  The women then explain how the management at the Lusty Lady discriminates against them buy firing and re-hiring them because their overweight or not pretty enough all just to lower their working wage.  So basically when the girls start to earn top wage management looks for any reason to fire them so they don’t have to pay them top dollar wage.  Management would also only schedule one women of color per shift to have predominantly white girls working at any one given time. 

            One of the main problems at the Lusty Lady was that there was one way glass so the customer could see the stripper but the stripper couldn’t see the client.  The client would come in and put money in and the client could watch the stripper dance but the stripper couldn’t see what the client was doing.  This caused problems.  The girls were turning up on porno videos on the internet.  Management didn’t do anything about the one way mirrors for the strippers.  This in turn caused the strippers to try and start their own union.

            The strip-clubs and the Lusty lady wanted to remain a union free workplace.  Most strip-clubs only hired girls or strippers as individual contractors this enabled the strip-clubs to remain a union-free workplace.  The stripper hired a lawyer named Stephanie to represent them and help them start a union after being turned down by many lawyers. 

            To prevent to the strippers from forming a union they used reverse therapy by increasing the strippers pay, but they were still unwilling to give the strippers health insurance.  Many of the managers tried to “pimp-out” the strippers as prostitutes to make more money. 

           The main stripper in the film was a lesbian and had a famous mother that was a doctor and an advocate for gay rights.  So the main stripper could tell her mother that she was gay but couldn’t tell her that she was a stripper.  Her mother could accept the fact that she was gay but couldn’t accept the fact that she was a stripper.  Strange I know but as a father myself I can understand her opinion. 

            Society views most strippers as lower-class and that they have to strip because it’s their only option in life and that most strippers are prostitutes.  I thought this documentary depicted the life of “sex workers” or strippers especially good.  The documentary demonstrated that all levels of class have to deal with the issues these strippers were going through by using the main strippers mother “Dr. Wallis” as an example.  The documentary did this when the main stripper told her mother “Dr. Wallis” that she was a stripper at the 1997 prostitution conference. And Dr. Wallis replied to her daughter that “it’s better to get money using your mind rather than your body.”  Dr. Wallis was a hypocrite.  How could she accept that her daughter was a lesbian but not a stripper?  At the end of the conference Dr. Wallis told her daughter that she wasn’t proud of her even though she was there to advocate for the “sex workers.”