The hands on the clockface seemed to swing round as though under the propulsive lure of the air-conditioning vents. Amanda was working with a tenacity that she relished, she was the last one in the office, silent save for the background static of a cleaner vacuuming but she didn’t care a bit. After pleading and persuading for much of the last two weeks the editor-in-chief of the lifestyle magazine for which she wrote had chosen her story proposal to run as the cover feature and she couldn’t have been more excited at the prospect.
It had been a late decision for the editor to have made which was why Amanda now found herself at half eleven on a wet Wednesday night, squinting at the words through the glare of her monitor and drinking the vending machine dry of black coffee. She had developed her story over the last month and yet was still too anxious to surrender it to the proof-team just yet. She was intensely proud and passionate about the story, more so than any other she had previously worked on, and so had been particularly cut-throat in making sure the editors gave it the attention she felt it deserved.
The story concerned a report she had heard from numerous sources around 3 months ago, about a developing gender-clash situation amongst staff at a gentleman’s club in central London. What had begun as a minor rebellion slowly became a groundswell that engulfed the whole employ of the lap dancers there, bordering on near-strike action.
Apparently the conflict between the girls and management – who were threatening the whole lot of them with dismissal – had arisen out of the girls taking a collective vow of celibacy in ironic protest at their highly sexualised industry. They would make no attempt to hide this fact of abstention from their paying clients and not surprisingly the reaction was less than appreciative. Management quickly became aware of a marked decrease in clientele coming through the doors, a bad reputation began to spread like a stain and previously healthy profit margins started to shrivel.
What Amanda thought fascinating about the situation was the way this new brand of female liberation seemed to have sprouted up from such an unlikely environment. The girls maintained that they still performed the dances without deviation from before; just they felt it necessary to stipulate to their audience that personally they were no longer sexually active.
Amanda had never particularly thought of herself as being feminist in nature, but nonetheless couldn’t help feeling a strong sense of kindred spirit with their brave stance and thought it a matter of duty – as part of their generational ‘sisterhood’ – to make sure their story gained as much attention as possible. Naturally the male-dominated editorial of the magazine had turned their noses up at the idea and brushed her proposal off, which was why she was now so exhilarated that her persistence had eventually paid off.
What Amanda was also aiming to theorise was that the club’s clientele felt disenfranchised because in order for them to feel aroused and stimulated in such an environment, they needed to have that subconscious sense that the girls themselves were highly sexualised individuals. The subversive frigidity and cleansed reality of the girls that they found themselves buying into proved too much of an awkward and untenable paradox for them to go along with.
Amanda had decided to cast the net of her theory into further shores and offered the comparison between the microcosm of sexual denial and the subsequent stifling of eroticism apparent in the club, with the oppressive culture of celebrity as a whole. With sex routinely being sold as a lifestyle commodity during every minute of every day, could it perhaps inadvertently, she pondered, serve as a crutch or a stimulant for people’s own carnal desires?
The marketing and advertising executives would sell consumables, entertainment and fashion on the acute knowledge that by pummelling the marketplace with sexualisation of their product, however overt or covert, consumers would be helpless to resist, purely out of the fear of being exposed to their peers as not conforming to sexual expectations.
If a glamour model was photographed in a sensual beach shot, for instance, the public would subliminally sense that because of her blatant sexuality, they must likewise be sexually active in order to conform and adhere to that advertised lifestyle. And if they didn’t feel they were conforming already, it would serve as inspiration to achieve something as akin to it as they were able. To be separate or isolated from that circle of eroticism was surely to become the subject of ridicule and pity that no one in their right mind would wish to endure.
Amanda hit save on the document and signed off for the night. She would pick up on it in the morning with a fresh pair of eyes since by now her contact lens felt like they were beginning to melt onto her stinging retinas. As she left the office and the vacuum drone behind her, she felt a ring of confidence unfold around her with an aura stretch. She knew that she had been dealt a promising hand, her big break after slogging it out at the arse-end of journalism for so long; she was silently self-assured that her story would propel her into a realm of far more lucrative career prospects, the momentum it would surely generate could only cast her into the ascendancy. If only she could get the message down in words that she heard in her head.
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