Margaret Atwood, the 79-year-old Canadian author of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, has spoken out in favor of stripping, calling it ’empowering’, and adding that it can make women feel “in control of a room”.
Atwood, whose long-anticipated ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ sequel, ‘The Testaments’, was published earlier this week, weighed in on a feminist debate over strip club licensing.
Empowering
Atwood’s comments, made in conversation with Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Headliners program, prove that she’s not a SWERF (Sex Work Exclusionary Feminist).
“A lot of women actually do find [stripping] empowering. They feel they’re in control of the room when they’re doing it.”
Atwood, who is widely regarded as a key feminist voice for the 21st century, argued women should have the choice to work in strip clubs, a job which is often better paid than other low-paid professions.
However, she addressed the limits of this argument, adding stripping is only empowering if strippers are in control of the money they earn.
“It depends very much on whether they are being exploited or not, whether someone is taking all the money… or whether they are in control of it,” she added. “If it’s a choice a woman has made… and you get paid much better for it than if you’re working a shift in a coffee chain, then why are you not going to let that woman make that choice?”
While this is the first time Atwood has publicly expressed her personal views on stripping, it is a topic she has explored in her literature.
In her poem, ‘Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing’, Atwood’s character Helen is a countertop dancer who believes working as a cashier “selling gloves” is more demeaning than her profession.
“Exploited, they’d say. Yes, any way/you cut it, but I’ve a choice/of how, and I’ll take the money,” reads an extract from the poem, from Atwood’s collection ‘Morning in the Burned House’ published in 1995.
