Visible vs Invisible
"I was born in 1968, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I dreamed of fighting the good fight but I never dreamed my first attempt at activism would be as a stripper." Julia Query opened the film with this statement, letting us know she wanted to be known in this world or “visible� but didn’t think it would end up the way it did. In this film, I think there are many different ways of being seen (visible) or not seen (invisible) throughout this film. Yes it depends on what type of sex work that is being taken place; like in the main type of sex work in this film; peepshows. Three of the peepshow's 13 windows were made of one-way glass; the customers could see the dancers, but the dancers couldn't see them. For years, the Lusty Lady attracted amateur pornographers who'd set up shop behind the one-way windows.
They videotaped and photographed with alarming regularity, usually without knowledge, and always without consent or compensation. So in this situation the dancers are “visible� and the costumers are the “invisible� ones. This gives the costumer the privacy of who they are but also makes the girls more vulnerable because they can’t see what the person is doing. The rest of the peepshow windows, you are able to see through both ways. The customers are separated from one another and the dancers, making both able to see one another but having something in between them. Like said in the Carol Queen article, “When whores see a client or when a peepshow worker or stripper interacts with a customer, the presence or absence of respect has much to do with how sex-positive the client or customer is, and something to do with our own sex-positivity. It also depends upon each person’s degree of self-respect and presence or absence of sexual shame,� this having a lot to do with the visibility and contact or boundaries of the worker and the client. “Sex industry� refers to a range of practices involvling the exchange of sex and/or sexually related goods or servies for money. Jill nagel says “I believe that as long as women are arrested for the crime of being sexually assertive, for standing on the street without a socially acceptable purpose or a male chaperone, I am not free. As a women and a feminist, I believe we will never have rights, opportunities, choices, work options, or an income eqivalent to men’s unless we can stop being afraid of being either raped or called “whore�. The sex industry is a very controversial this in this world and is pictured in many different ways.