Hollywood and music star Jennifer Lopez has been widely criticized by conservatives for her Super Bowl 54 halftime performance Sunday, in which she performed a pole dance, referencing her 2019 film Hustlers, in which the 50-year-old actress portrays a former stripper.
Anti-abortion activist Jeanne F. Mancini—president of March for Life—called Lopez’s performance “embarrassing,” while right-wing televangelist Franklin Graham said that the halftime show revealed the disappearance of “moral decency” in America.
Liz Wheeler, a personality on the Donald Trump-supporting One American News Network, called the performance “degrading” to women and warned that it would have “tragic cultural consequences.”
But the simulated stripper act was also ripped from another angle, in an essay published Tuesday, and written by an actual, real-life stripper.
Elle Stanger, a sex worker and activist, wrote in HuffPost that she found the “JLo” stripper show “cringeworthy,” and that it made her “annoyed, frustrated and angry.”
“Here we go again, I thought, another celebrity using the ‘shock value’ of sex work to boost her career and the media once again using stripper imagery for ad revenue,” Stanger wrote. “I got texts from a few stripper friends who felt similarly.”
She criticized Lopez’s choice to employ “stripper imagery” even though the last two years have been “a time when actual sex workers and adult entertainers are being harmed, silenced and stigmatized by bad legislation.”
The “bad legislation” referenced by Stanger is the supposed anti-sex trafficking law FOSTA/SESTA, passed in 2018, which according to recent studies has led to a rise in violence against sex workers, while also delivering a financial hit to their livelihoods.
“I made 30 percent less income in the year after [FOSTA],” Stanger wrote. “Mostly because it became impossible to post my club schedule online, share my podcast on safer sexuality, or link to my webcam shows on social media.”
Stanger said that she asked fellow strippers to comment on the Lopez Super Bowl show—and found that they were not impressed.
“I didn’t enjoy it, we work so hard for our own families to accept us,” said one, quoted by Stanger.
“JLO, get outta our community if you’re not willing to help us or speak on our issues,” another said, as quoted in the HUffPo essay.
“She looked beautiful, but she could have hired real POC strippers, but that’s considered ‘too much.’ Bye JLo,” a third stripper commented.
Finally, one “biracial Latinx stripper” who replied to Stanger summarized what appeared to the feelings of the strippers contacted by Stanger.
“JLO is an opportunist appropriating a marginalized group of women, whom she does not advocate for,” the stripper said. “Meanwhile their rights are being taken away and more with the passing of every conservative bill, disguised as stopping sex trafficking.”
Photo By IZEmtv / Wikimedia Commons
