Magic Or Tragic?

Magic Mike Live has been dubbed a glorious celebration of female desire, a spectacle of sweaty, sculpted male strippers who really, really care about what women want. But in reality, is it a feminist’s worst nightmare or a dream come true? We sent writer Courtney Thompson to find out

- Courtney Thompson

When Princess Marie Bonaparte couldn’t orgasm, she went to Sigmund Freud. She’d already failed to treat herself by undergoing experimental surgery to shorten the distance between her clitoris and vulva, so she approached the psychoanalyst seeking to understand her inability to climax during sex. It was to Bonaparte that he famously remarked: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”

Clearly, Freud had never been to see Magic Mike Live.

For the uninitiated, the Magic Mike journey began with the 2012 film, in which Channing Tatum and director Steven Soderbergh immortalised Tatum’s true story of becoming a stripper at 18. It spawned what has now become the Magic Mike industrial complex. In the nine years since, there have been two films, a live production that’s toured Las Vegas, London and Berlin, and a Broadway musical.

With his erotic routines, Tatum has seemingly done what Freud could never: discovered what women want. In creating Magic Mike Live, specifically, the actor writes he tried to “provocatively jumpstart the conversation about what it is that women really want”. The show, which premiered in 2017, is sold as “empowering, exhilarating and unexpected”. Tatum urges us to “imagine a world where all women were empowered to ask for more – from men, from a night out, from everything they wanted – and all of their desires were met.”