I bet capitalism looks good on the dance floor, I don't know if it's looking for romance or...

This post from Feministe takes the line that it's possible for an exotic dancer to be a feminist. I'm essentially agnostic on the question, but the author makes a smaller point that I would like to dispute when she uses her observations at the Magic Carpet (!) to refute Pat Buchanan:

Pat Buchanan said:

“Rail as they will about ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism.”

Spend about ten minutes in a strip club and you’ll realize that is false. At the Magic Carpet on any given weekend night, there are about twenty women on the floor who could give lessons to Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. [...]

. . . bottom line, there’s no reason why this level of focus and ambition (without being an asshole) cannot extend to other job environments. From what I saw of and learned from my Magic Carpet colleagues, I have no doubt that if this were the case, we would be deadly at all levels of employment.

What she says about the Magic Carpet girls may or may not be true, but in no case is it a refutation of Buchanan's point. When anti-feminists express skepticism about women's ability to succeed in the "fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism," the quality they're suggesting that women lack is neither ambition nor talent but something more like thick skin. Clawing one's way to a leadership position is not an easy ride, emotionally speaking; it involves a great deal being called a failure and told to shape up or go home, and demands an ability to engage in professional conflicts without putting them in the context of personal relationships. This impersonal toughness is very different from either ambition or a knack for strategy.

Ability to navigate the politics of a place like the Magic Carpet speaks to a woman's canniness, but not her toughness, nor her ability to take a beating to her self-confidence. Quite the opposite, being an exotic dancer is a constant reminder that one is attractive and desired, so such a woman's self-confidence is the last thing being called into question. There are plenty of women Feministe could point to that display the kind of thick skin that hard-nosed male businessmen possess, but it's wrong to assume, based only on their shrewdness, that these exotic dancers are any of them.