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The ongoing movement to glorify the slut has lately taken a stiletto-heeled, sauntering step farther. For a large sector of the American population -- spanning race, class, and gender lines -- the prevailing aesthetic is Modern Prostitute. The slut thing was different. Promiscuous people, one could argue, simply like lots of sex. Their passion doesn't merit prejudice. So you could say that the de-stigmatization of sluts was progressive. But prostitutes and others who sell sex: Most of them do not want to. Most do it only under duress, as a last resort. Sex-positive? I don't think so.
Yet now it's super cool, especially among the young, to dress like those who sell sex. Top performers dress and act, at least onstage, like those who sell sex. "Who's dancing the dirtiest? Lady Gaga tries to out-thrust the Pussycat Dolls," reads a headline in the Daily Mail. Accompanying photos show both acts thrusting indeed while clad in bras, panties, boots, and torn stockings. Squatting spread-legged, Lady Gaga displays half-bare buttocks to an audience. Squatting with groin in fist, a member of the Pussycat Dolls "fought back with a crotch-grabbing display of her own at Birmingham's Indoor Arena," reads one caption.
Students at the high school I pass every day sport outfits that aren't just suggestive but astounding: bikini tops, corsets, crotch-length skirts, inspired by their favorite singers who are inspired in turn by millions of women worldwide who do what they do not by choice but to support pimps or drug habits or to pay back whomever smuggled them out of their desperately poor home countries.
Last month the Jonesboro High School dance team in Jonesboro, Georgia, became world-famous after performing a strip-clubbish routine during a basketball game: lots of booty-slapping, straddling, hop-squats, and those jerky aggressive repetitive fast-motion pelvic thrusts that are so hard to imitate ... I mean, just for the purpose of demonstration. At one point in the routine, eight chairs are brought onto the court, eight boys emerge from the stands to fill them, and each dancer performs for "her" boy. Uploaded to the Internet under the title "The Sluts of Jonesboro," the video went viral before being taken down.
"Mothers can buy bra sets for their babies or rubber stilettos, little girls can go on the Miss Bimbo website to create a virtual doll ... and buy it breast implants," we read in New Scientist.
This shift was helped in part by several memoirs published over the last few years in which educated middle-class young women describe how they quit their ordinary day jobs to become strippers, lap dancers and prostitutes -- for fun, for cash, to prove a point. Diablo Cody, who later won an academy award for writing the screenplay for Juno, was a college graduate working in an ad agency when she started stripping and lap-dancing in sleazy Minneapolis clubs for what she calls "a huge adrenaline rush." Pussy Ranch, the Web site she created to detail her new adventures, was immensely popular, leading to a book deal. In the book, a memoir called Candy Girl, she remembers: "I desperately wanted to be a stripper." After her first shift in a local sex-club, "I felt like a common whore," she enthuses. "It was the best day of my life."
Style is a mass movement, a form of groupthink, an expression of an era's hopes and dreams. In previous eras, mainstream fashion borrowed from the costumes of other professions, making fads out of cowboy gear (jeans, boots), sailor gear (bell-bottoms, sneakers), soldier gear (tank tops, T-shirts, khaki, fatigues), athletic gear, and more. What does it say about us that the profession inspiring the look of today entails making private parts public for strangers, a profession loathed by most who actually have to do it?
