Channing Tatum's Magic Mike Live Show Intends to 'Worship Women'

Speaking to People on the red carpet for the premiere of the Amazon series Comrade Detective—a lot, I know—he said that the show’s immense success is because it’s made for women. “We just kind of did something that we thought was important, which was actually make it for women, and not for women to come and worship men,” he said in a statement that actually caused me to reconsider how I felt about a seminal scene from Magic Mike XXL, during which Joe Mangianello gets wildly inappropriate with a soda bottle at a gas station.

Does the gas station attendant feel “worshipped?” Who knows! The word “worship” conjures images of being carried about on litters with palm fans and maybe someone feeding me very cold Kit-Kats but I suppose Joe Mangianello giving a private show for one in grey sweatpants and no shirt is basically the same thing. Most of the performances in Magic Mike XXL are beautiful and skeezy tributes to the wonders of the toned male body and the extreme talents of the men gyrating for our pleasure. Tatum’s intent with the Vegas show isn’t to make women feel gross, I guess—it’s more about having a “conversation” about sex and also breaking down any pre-existing taboos about that conversation.

He said:

“Let’s not make it so like, ‘this should be dirty.’ It shouldn’t be dirty. It doesn’t have to be. It can be the right kind of dirty. It can be dirty if you want it to be dirty, or it can be just like a good time fun where you don’t feel like you need a shower afterward.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d say that watching this scene would make me feel dirty and like I had a good time and like I needed a shower at the end of it, but for all the right reasons.