Live Nude Girls Unite!   (documentary)

 

Picture: C-     Sound: C     Extras: D     Program: B

 

 

The battle over what is and is not exploitation takes an interesting turn in Live Nude Girls Unite!  This 2000 documentary has two parallel stories going on about exploitation.  One is about the women who strip and the poor way it turns out they are being treated by their employers who they make “crazy money” for.  It is one thing that the women are being exploited, even when they believe they are in control.  It is another when the employers are committing the double dark crime that hey are getting away with and the women do not even know how badly they are being robbed by their bosses.  This includes a woman boss.

 

Women have been used to make money in the sex industry since it began as the world’s oldest profession.  An explosion of sex magazines, sex clubs and sex films ironically paralleled the Civil Rights and Woman’s Rights movements of the 1960s.  Remarkably, these women had NEVER formed any kind of Union in an age where the Teamsters and Unions saw a peak of power before their decline in the 1980s.

 

The club (which will purposely remain nameless in this review) thought everything would be peaceful and the boat would not be rocked.  They were so confident that their easy money was secure, that their abuse of the dancer/strippers was remarkably outrageous.  They had insane policies, which were surprisingly racist for starters.  A sick day was not allowed, which means these women would have to come in sick, making who knows how many other people sick.  If customers were getting rowdy, even waving guns, the women were always to blame and told to “talk nicer” to the “customers”.  Two way mirrors in viewing booths meant they could be taped and those recordings could be circulated for free, meaning the women would get zero dollars, as the club encouraged this as a way to pump up business.

 

When a former employee shows up passing out flyers in front of another one of these “businesses”, two of the oversized owners come out, boldly threatening both the woman and the cameraperson with snide threats of physical violence as if they cold never go to jail.  As a matter of fact, the one failure of the film is in its inability to NOT acknowledge the shocking culture of domestic terrorism that blatantly exists in this business, one that hates women to the point of psychosis.  That is why any of these women says they are in power is politically impossible and naïve.  They are still classified as “disposable whores” in a multi-billion dollar industry that has gotten away with murder over and over again.  Though these women do not appear in hardcore XXX films, how many viewers of these “works” have been taped (the very fact they are 99% shot on cheap videotape and not film makes the “actors’” more disposable than ever) lately where any given young girl was not drugged up and unhappy on camera?  If they can get away with that, you can imagine why they could care less what was going on with these live nude girls.

 

Julia Query and Vicky Funari could obviously do a follow-up work on that subject, connected to this film.  They instead take the time to examine the labor issues, the absurdity of the way they were always being treated, and why they could not take it anymore.  Not addressing the above is a problem, as the program focuses on their personal lives and sexualities.  That’s fine, but they get their victory in forming the first such Union in the U.S., yet they will always be victims by participating on enough levels.  The other question is, can they change this business from the inside out.  When it turned out these clubs were charging a “performance fee” and doing many other illegal things that even local government labor officials would acknowledge and do nothing about, that left these women generating thousands of dollars and getting next to nothing.  Doing the math, it was worse than a sweatshop!  It was either going to be a union or eventually something ugly and violent in response.  No human beings should ever have to go through this for doing something that is, however unsavory, still legal.

 

The full screen image was shot in analog color videotape and shows it, but this was a very low budget work and is so important to see that the low quality is not as much an issue.  The monophonic sound is encoded in Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono and is average, but just fine to hear what everyone is saying, especially the threats.  The extras include three outtakes, including one where they are vilified on the web for unionizing, which goes great for the extremely anti-Union organization the club owners hire in desperation.  You also get some stills and the original trailer.

 

At first, this program seemed like a joke form the trailer, that these would be jolly strippers who put a union together.  It was a surprise in how it exposed (just enough, and no pun intended) the dark underside of a soulless business.  In the (hopefully near) future, this may even serve as a vital document for some serious federal prosecutions, something the makers never dreamed.  The beginnings of a case are all here.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo