From the Editor: Nunchucks to Gowan...Les filles, vous êtes les juges, by Nikko Snyder

(Editorial, originally published in good girl magazine No. 4, Winter 2003)

In the final stages of getting good girl out, there’s always something that refuses to fall into place. This time,after every other article had been edited, proofread and laid out, Eight Dollar Boyfriend: Strip club lessons and phallacies still didn’t have an illustration. Unable to stomach how lame it would be to print a piece on male strip clubs without at least one juicy image, I bit the bullet and did what any dutiful publisher would have done. I got on the horn and made an appointment to meet the owner of Montreal’s infamous/only hetero male strip joint Club 281 (featured in EDB) to see if I could score some pics for our piece.

I entered the club with Candis and Robyn supportively in tow,bracing myself for the inevitable: an evening of nunchucks, the Village People and ripped bods. Oh yeah, and many, many penises. The owner was exactly as I imagined a strip club proprietor would be, with sufficient charm and 70s sleaze, and a deliciously velvety basement office. With a little sweet-talking and a lot of “Pas les nus! Seulement les spectacles!” we managed to secure permission to take photos (pas nus!) not only at the club, but also off the website if need be. No sweat!

But when we got back upstairs and sat down, news of us “photographers” spread like wildfire, and by the time the show started about five of the dancers had approached us to request politely that we not take their pictures. After flashing our first shot we were announced to the entire club, and were then gently but firmly told than none of the men, save one, were willing to be photographed for good girl.

I don’t know why I assumed that getting permission from a strip club owner to photograph employees was the same as getting permission from the employees themselves. I’m pretty certain that I would not have made the same assumption had it been a female strip club. I take for granted that privacy should be a necessary right for any woman working in the sex industry, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to show the men at 281 the same respect.

Intellectually I know that in many ways things just are different for men and women working in the sex industry, and that it’s impossible to think about male and female strippers (not to mention women’s and men’s relationships to them) without taking into consideration the bigger historical/patriarchal picture. But no amount of intellectualizing changes how I felt sitting at that table. To have those men come up to us, one after another, was humbling, and by the end of the evening my own sexism was staring me down along with everyone else in that club. By the time we escaped from under the crushing thumbs of eight dollar drinks and table dances and the piercing eyes of the other audience members, I was thoroughly traumatized.

Why tell this story to introduce good girl’s isms issue? After working with and thinking about isms for the past six months, our strip club fiasco seems to encapsulate the nature and dangers of isms perfectly. I can define sexism, write about it, and use it to shape my own identity and try to understand the people around me. I can have all the understandings and assumptions about it I want, and yet they can all come crashing down at the drop of a hat (or pants, as the case may be).

The very nature of isms is that they define, and while these definitions can be useful, they also beg to confine and put boxes around people and ideas. What I have to remember, in this issue of good girl and in life, is that my own isms reflect only one tiny piece of a fluid, constantly evolving puzzle. I can call myself a feminist and rage against sexism, and then find myself to be sexist. I can hate racism and still not make myself innocent of it. I can try to put boxes over myself and others, but I can’t be too surprised when the boxes don’t hold.

My point? What you find in good girl are just pieces of this puzzle – moments in time, from one brain or another, trying to make sense of a complicated sea of grey. To change and evolve means to keep letting our assumptions get busted down, built back up and then busted down again. It’s how we can let ourselves learn, so enjoy!

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