Magic City is one of America’s best-known strip clubs. Many rappers have referenced it in their songs. Lots of celebrities and dignitaries have been there. Amazon Prime released a five-episode docuseries about it last year. Founded in 1985, it has since become a massively famous Atlanta cultural institution. For this reason, the city’s NBA team was planning a Magic City Monday event to honor the nightclub and its workers, some of whom are college students. The Atlanta Hawks formally announced this on the team’s website, but the league ultimately made them cancel it, according to The New York Times.
This special night was supposed to occur during the Hawks’ matchup against the Orlando Magic. Before the NBA stepped in, San Antonio Spurs center Luke Kornet wrote a blog post in opposition, even though the game at which the tribute was slated to occur was not scheduled against his team. “I and others throughout the league were surprised by and object to the Hawks’ decision,” he wrote. “We desire to provide an environment where fans of all ages can safely come and enjoy the game of basketball and where we can celebrate the history and culture of communities in good conscience. The celebration of a strip club is not conduct aligned with that vision.” Reportedly, many others shared Kornet’s perspective.
“We have heard significant concerns from a broad array of league stakeholders, including fans, partners and employees,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver wrote in an official statement posted on the league’s website. “I believe canceling this promotion is the right decision for the broader NBA community.” This assessment reinforces a long-standing message to exotic dancers: You work in a shameful place.
Admittedly, I felt this way before I read Ivy League Stripper many years ago. The 304-page memoir is partly about being a participant in the industry, but it is much more about financing college. Exotic dancing enabled Heidi Mattson to pay Brown University’s enormous price tag and support herself during her college years. Reading the book afforded me an opportunity to think more critically about the Christian values to which I had been socialized as a child and young adult. Frankly, I had been wrongly taught that every woman like Mattson was a freak who should be ashamed. Even after reading her book, I do not personally know Mattson. Who am I to judge how she financed her college education?
My perspective on this continued to evolve when I subsequently discovered that a close friend of mine had been an exotic dancer during a portion of her time in college. I did not know this until several years into our friendship. Finding out did not make me think negatively of her or undo all the wonderfulness that we had cultivated up to that point. If anything, it compelled me to respect her more. As a son of a teenage single mom, I have the utmost appreciation for low-income parents who do whatever it takes to care for themselves and their children. Most mothers and fathers declare that they would do anything to provide for their kids—but would they, though?
My friend may not have finished college or been able to provide for her newborn daughter without stripping for a while. Many people would push back on this point. “She could’ve gotten a respectable job,” they would contend. There are at least four problems with this. First, they do not know her. I do. She is not a freak. She is a Christian and a great mother, daughter, friend, taxpaying citizen and college graduate. She now has a job that pays well above six figures that she would not have been hired for without a bachelor’s degree.
Second, critics would express their judgments absent data about the labor market when my friend was in college and without knowing much about the local context in which she was an undergraduate student. They would comment without knowing what tuition, fees and other costs were at her university during that time. I would press them to tell me what the national unemployment rate was then. As a follow-up, I would ask what the rate was for Black Americans. Third, who gets to determine what a respectable job is? Many Americans are employed in what would be considered respectable roles. Lots of them hate those jobs. The pay sucks. Their bosses are abusive. Those workplaces are sites of misery and emptiness, yet are seemingly more appropriate than being an exotic dancer.
Hypocrisy is a fourth noteworthy problem with judgmental appraisals of women who work in strip clubs. Many people have been to establishments like Magic City. Surely, thousands of NBA players, fans, corporate partners and perhaps even some league executives have been there and to other places like it. Placing all the shame on its workers feels sexist, unfairly judgmental and hypocritical to me. Posing the question “Would you want your daughter to be a stripper?” to a man who patronizes strip clubs is no doubt a paradoxically gendered double standard.
Terah J. Stewart, an associate professor at Iowa State University, authored Sex Work on Campus, which received the 2023 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education. Among its many features, Stewart’s book humanizes sex workers. Students and everyone else who works in strip clubs deserve to be humanized. So, too, do their peers who otherwise engage in sex work to survive, pay tuition and ultimately complete college. For some, poverty is the alternative. For too many others, it is college attrition, starvation and homelessness.
I conclude with one important acknowledgment that Kornet wrote in his blog post: “Regardless of how a woman finds her way into the adult entertainment industry, many in this space experience abuse, harassment, and violence to which they should never be subjected.” The inclusion of Kornet’s qualifier makes him right about this. Many women, yes. Most women, we do not know for sure. All women, definitely not.
One woman experiencing abuse in her home, in the higher education workplace, in corporations, in the military, in a strip club or anyplace else is one too many. Collegians and others who engage in sex work have agency. But they do indeed deserve protection. Pulling the plug on Magic City Monday does nothing to protect them. Instead, canceling the event generalizes all strip clubs as shameful places—but only for the women who work there, not for the men, women and genderqueer patrons who pay to be entertained.
Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.
