Porn v. Strippers
A neat piece at the Timesonline about vaudeville strippers and their disappearance before the onslaught of porn, like Russia's liberals swept before their anarchist children in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. From the conclusion:
Everything changed in 1963, of course, and by 1973 the hardcore skinflicks The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat were among the top 10 moneymakers in Hollywood. Things had got a lot nastier. Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, later said that she performed much of the film at gunpoint, and never made one cent from it. Somehow, somewhere, amid all the excitement and liberation, women's rights seemed to have slipped backwards, and the old vaudeville innocence of the striptease was gone forever.
What does porn cost us? A lot, and much of it we can't see. But I'd never thought of this: It even strips away the stripping. It takes away the lure and uncertainty of love (read, "romance") from eroticism, leaving us with simple (read, "animal-like") sex. It's something Gypsy Rose Lee may have understood, saying, “The naked skin to the naked eye is just so much epidermis. [It's what's] hinted at rather than hollered about [that is erotic]."
