“That’s all you have on at the end of the day, the music and your shoes.” That’s how Viva Las Vegas, the subject of the documentary Thank You for Supporting the Arts, describes her day job at Mary’s Club. But when the Portland stripper/writer/musician discusses her philosophy about stripping, it’s clear there’s much more at work. “The sacred feminine is something that just isn’t seen,” she says, echoing a sentiment that Thank You for Supporting the Arts takes pains to illustrate.
When women’s bodies do appear in art, it’s often through the male gaze. As the Guerilla Girls put it in 1989, “Five percent of the artists in the modern arts section [of the Met] are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female.” Here’s how Viva puts it: She has a background in ballet, but found it to be “a very misogynist stage,” where “a lot of choreography was by men” and relied heavily on “women fainting and falling into men’s arms.”