Album Review: Stripped by Christina Aguilera

Thanks to a number of intersecting forces (the Internet, the rise of upscale topless clubs, Howard Stern’s nightly flesh parade on E!), the image of stripping as a degraded, exploitative profession now competes in the culture with a kind of postfeminist countermyth: the acrobatic yuppie sleaze goddess as self-empowering cash machine. The fascination of Stripped, a documentary about the world’s second-oldest profession, is that it refuses to kowtow to either (oversimplified) version of reality. Instead, it reveals how stripping, in a world where sexual imagery has become a corporate megabusiness, could be at once exploitative and empowering.

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