Letter: Strip away those prejudices - just say no to Barbie

WELL thanks William Leith for the write-up, as if the job as a decent striptease dancer isn't hard enough, especially now, as you pointed out ('The Naked and the Deadened', Sunday Review, 12 July). Everybody is struggling at the moment and can you really blame women, who have the guts to show their bodies off, for trying to make a living at it? Why make them all look so cheap and nasty?

As to the remarks about haggard, stretched grey-white women in their (totally-over-the-hill) thirties . . . I am 38 and proud of it. My skin is smooth, golden and healthy. I have an athletic amazonian frame and muscle-tone that makes some men jealous, but most men full of admiration. The main feature of my act is an erotic joie de vivre. I celebrate my sexuality as something beautiful, instead of trapping it in a Victorian- or Christian-style repression, which, I believe, spawns the pornography and hardcore sleaze I deplore.

Kindly, dear Willy, do not portray us all as pathetic rejects at the bottom of a pile of garbage. Thank you, and a jolly recession to you all.

The Lovely Diana

London