A Libertarian Walks into a Topless Bar: A Novelist Looks at Feminine Sexuality Today

Libertarians defend the deregulation of “sex work” based on the principle that government should not interfere in transactions between consenting adults. Prostitution, like drug dealing, should be left to the free market. Those who provide bad services will lose customers, which should result in better quality and increased safety.

I’m kidding. That’s how Bernie Sanders thinks Libertarians think. We understand that potentially exploitative situations and addictions complicate matters. It’s not because I’m heartless that I don’t think it’s government’s job to protect people from themselves. I’ve just come to realize that government intervention tends to make a bigger mess of messy situations.

Proclivities cannot be curbed from on high nor eliminated by force. And, anyway, those in power can’t be trusted. The opening of the Epstein Files sheds more light on the well-known fact that a lot of perverts are in charge. The public has been slow to realize that the only decisive way to eliminate the problem is to remove the levers of power so that psychopaths can’t lay hold of them.

Discussion, not legislation, is the solution. Cultural issues should be addressed as such. Lately, there have been valiant attempts to rescue masculine sexuality from the “me too” movement. Of course, there are healthy forms of masculine sexuality, of course there are. I think we also need to talk about feminine sexuality, which has long endured censure.

In the mid 1990s, I wrote a novel about strippers that was at odds with the various “waves of feminism” that came and went in that decade. Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels had been protesting outside the Dollhouse near Wall Street in NY because that institution allegedly promoted violence against women. The Feminist Press (housed at the City University Graduate Center where I was working on a doctorate) rejected my novel because, the then editor said, a story about strippers objectifies women. Fast forward thirty years and the same press is publishing novels about men who dress up like strippers. Now stripping is self-expression not objectification.

Before the Trump administration made cuts, government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts were throwing a lot of funding at “sex positivity” art. Everybody, even young ones, were encouraged to participate. What I said above about government meddling stands.

My novel, a social satire called The Girlie Playhouse is finally coming out in April from Heresy Press. Speaking through the narrator, “Pixie,” I escort readers into the eponymously named strip club and introduce them to the ladies, the customers, and the business. Initially, the dancers receive respectable pay from the cabaret, but soon changes in licensing laws and the need to pay off local officials compels the club owner to cut the dancers’ salaries, and then he decides to allow the customers to tip them while they are on stage instead. Soon the dancers aren’t dancing much anymore so much as performing like Skinner’s Pigeons for pellets. More and more regulations color the scene with more and more illicitness, until in the end a carnivalesque bigtits performer named Ma’m Mary, a travesty of femininity, takes over the stage.

Caught up in the demise of the cabaret is a talented young woman named Trixie who neither wants to be seen as a victim nor as a femme fatale. She’s not in it for the money; it’s not a power trip; she just likes to dance, and, yeah, she’s sexy. Can the fact that she is misunderstood be blamed on Puritanism? Feminism? Rosie the Riveter? Andrea Dworkin?

I remember, or maybe I’m just imagining it, when female sexuality was represented positively in art. Titian’s Renaissance Venuses and Waterhouse’s Pre-Raphaelite nymphs in the big glossy art books of my early childhood must have helped form my atypical notions of sexually attractive women.

Half-naked Madonnas nursing infants may have been ubiquitous throughout hundreds of years of civilization, but today, mammary glands are seen as sex toys and censored. We witness the legal lumping together of bare-breasted women with “sex workers” or “adult entertainers.” While men can happily go bare-chested in some public situations (beaches and family picnics), nursing mothers must hide in those windowless breastfeeding pods at airports and at shopping malls. The regulation of female nudity has lead to its ghettoization such that it’s shameful to use breasts in public in the way that nature intended.

I haven’t got a solution to offer, nor a proscription. I’ve only got a story to tell that might make you laugh at yourself and the way you went along with society being ashamed of desirable women or even moms.