LE BON MOT DE JOAN JOBE SMITH

What does to be a female artist in a “Man’s World” as James Brown says? What is the status of women in the 60s?

Oh, it was really a Man’s World in the 1960s. James Brown was SO right. Don’t you remember how Aretha begged for RESPECT? But, alas, in 2015, it’s still a Man’s World. It scares me to think that in at least 2/3 of the world, the contents--and especially the cover--of my Tales of An Ancient Go-Go Girl would be damnable and irrefutable evidence of my apostasy, my whoredom, my lurid tawdriness to justify my being allegedly-deservedly hanged, beaten or stoned to death in the streets—by men. While undisciplined male sexuality is lauded as good and manly; and the industrialization of sex has become one the world’s most profitable “commodities.” In the 1960s, go-go bar owners with their slave-driving bossmen got rich off us go-go girls, working us so hard on 9-hour shifts, 6 or 7 days a week dancing and serving beer—with NO breaks except for three-5-minute-per-shift bathroom visits (the bossman outside the Ladies Room door with a stop-watch timing us). Every Saturday night, bossman fired one of us to set an example to the other go-go girls. And the owners owned mansions, yachts, bought minks for their ladies, made so much money they later started up a sex magazine—and got richer. Ah, but it’s much worse now. Now the girls, now lap-dancers, pole dancers in the nudie Gentlemen’s Clubs, exploited as I once was are now extorted, too: they have to pay the owners to work there. Hey, James Brown, music’s fine swingin’-singin’ man: What you wanna sing about THAT?