"At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves"
About this Quote
Calling the audience “more obscene” is deliberately barbed. Obscenity here isn’t moral panic; it’s visibility without alibi. The dancers can hide behind a job description, a script, a costume of professionalism that turns sex into a managed commodity. The crowd can’t. Their “eager faces” betray unedited consumption. In Baudrillard’s world, the most scandalous thing is not the body on display but the collapse of distance between desire and its expression, the moment the consumer becomes legible.
Context matters: late-20th-century consumer culture, mass media, and Baudrillard’s obsession with simulation. The strip show becomes a miniature of the broader economy of spectacle where roles are unstable: viewer and viewed trade places, and the supposed liberation of female desire is immediately re-absorbed as something to be surveilled, judged, and aestheticized. It’s a nasty little sentence that exposes how quickly “empowerment” can be repackaged as another scene to watch.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Baudrillard, Jean. (2026, January 15). At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/at-male-strip-shows-it-is-still-the-women-that-we-9148/
Chicago Style
Baudrillard, Jean. "At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/at-male-strip-shows-it-is-still-the-women-that-we-9148/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/at-male-strip-shows-it-is-still-the-women-that-we-9148/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
