Amber Rose and Channing Tatum “had the same life.” – It’s less cryptic than one would think.
Let’s face it; strippers get a bad rep for their occupation. They are often linked to derogatory and demeaning names such as slut, whore, ho, gold-digger…and the list goes on. If you’re a stripper, it means that you take the dirty or low road to gaining income and are desperately seeking some form of fame. Your life choices are heavily criticized. If you wear a skimpy, glittery thong and twirl around a pole, it is automatically assumed that you bed several men in a day because you’re uncontrollably promiscuous. If you hear about a stripper – chances are it’s a female.
Amber Rose is no stranger to slut-shaming, or to be more specific – stripper-shaming. Even though her stripper days are behind her, she’s had to deal with degrading comments made from ex-boyfriends to TV hosts till this day.
On the other hand, there is still a substantial amount of celebrity followers who are still not aware that the Step Up sweetheart and Magic Mike star Channing Tatum used to work as a stripper himself. He was supposed to attend Glenville State College on a football scholarship – but ended up dropping out and turned to stripping as a job under the moniker “Chan Crawford”. In fact, his experience was what inspired him to do Magic Mike – which eventually normalized stripping and flipped the tables on objectification.
So, if a guy does it – it’s okay? Meanwhile, female strippers/former strippers like Amber continue to get hate and judgment from society. In order to make a point about how female strippers get waves of unnecessary bashing, she even wore a bold outfit at the 2015 VMAs that was drenched in the insults that she got pelted with regarding her past.
Amber is not one to hold her tongue though. “No one says shit,” she comments, regarding Tatum’s stripping history. “He even made a movie about being a stripper! And everyone bought it, and they loved it, and they were like, ‘Oh my God, Magic Mike, we gotta go see it!’ But if I did that, people would tell me I was disgusting.”
Apparently it doesn’t even matter if as a woman, that you’ve left stripping behind – because it will follow and haunt you for the rest of who knows how long. The ‘slut’ label is already on you. This treatment urged Amber to even lead her own ‘SlutWalk’ in Los Angeles back in October 2015; her second one is already planned for a return next month.
“I run eight businesses,” Amber continues. “I’m the CEO of my own company, and still I’m called a stripper. It’s so ridiculous. We’ve had the same life, Channing and I, and I’m dumbed down for it. It’s not his fault – it’s just society.”
Stripping – is just a job, like so many other odd jobs. It isn’t a way to “create” a person. In this growing society, it’s remarkable how the stigma is still so tightly attached to it. A job (no matter how minimal the amount of clothing) doesn’t define a woman’s (or a man’s) attitude, personality, sexuality, and intelligence. If they’re still good people, why all the hate for one woman or one man’s hustle for financial independence, just because they know how to own the body they were given?
