Moran's "Lap dancing bad/burlesque great" dichotomy is just plain weird. And actually quite annoying. No matter what she says about burlesque being more expressive of individual female sensuality, seems to me it's only more culturally acceptable because it's middle class. Not that I have seen much burlesque, but from what I've seen bar one very creative act, it's just slightly 60s/tongue and cheek stripping.
Cultural acceptability seems to hold a lot of appeal for a lot of people (not only feminists by any stretch) who like to differentiate between mass culture (stripping) and what I suppose such people like to think of as "middle class culture", but which is actually just mass culture with a bit of spit and polish (and in this case a bit of Bettie Page-ish glam).
And the issue of using sex appeal and the "sisterhood", it's complicated. Whilst my stance is as VP outlines above, I will also admit it is sad, frustrating and a little frightening that our culture seems to be statically staying, even perhaps slipping more towards "women primarily as sex objects". And that both those who play the sex appeal game and those who reject it ultimately risk being fucked over.
And so I guess a struggle for moderate feminists who are focused on these complexities and all the shades of grey (pun
really not intended) is how to hold the two together.
I suppose it depends whether using your female attributes is a game, or whether it's a hard-headed tactic, as well as how
your choices impact on the entire gender. I've seen a lot of column inches given to the "you can have it all" brigade, who ultimately strike me as
faux-feminists because they don't tend to look at how their individual choices impact across their entire gender, especially if they're in "places of privilege" themselves - it's easier to be a working mum if you're in a relationship and have an above-average income (as many media pundits who punt "you can have it all" do) than if you're a single mother for whom childcare costs are the make-or-break factor in whther you work or not.
I think it's a mistake to see it as us/them conflict though. I would definitely put myself on the side of "I do not want to rely on my sexuality to get ahead as a woman", yet that's certainly not to say that I haven't internalised ideas of what I should look like to be acceptable, and that I won 't sometimes purposefully enhance that. And I also imagine that many women in the most visual professions still sometimes get frustrated at not being considered beyond that, or are annoyed that they have to do it. I guess it's not always "either/or", and people are full of contradictions.
To be horribly old-fashioned for a moment, I think a large part of the problem with any "ism" nowadays is that many people are convinced, ironically by consumption capitalism, that they need to assert their individuality at the expense of collectivity. I say "ironically" because the usual route is touted as being through
consumption. You're special because you use
this product; you should use
that product "because you're worth it".
If you see individuality in terms of consumption, then issues of class, gender etc become meaningless in terms of how you identify yourself, they become in effect, sticks to beat yourself with, and that causes all sorts of internal contradictions between how you behave and how you
feel you should behave. I suspect that's part of what might lie behind women disavowing feminisms or buying into reductive analyses of them.
Which probably explains why, on a drunken night out recently, feminist that I am I swung myself upside down on a lamppost, pole dancer style, and then even had it as my Facebook profile picture for a while (though in my defence it was because I found it fucking hilarious!)
(edited to clear up an accidental "not")
As you say, we're all full of contradictions.
That's not how strong women look to me. I think we could all take a leaf out of Dolly Partons book personally 
