by Alana Massey
The song ultimately doesn’t work because it is sung in the first person; there is no romantic or sexual object to inhabit. There is only the dreaded occupation of inhabiting the song’s first-person narrative coming to terms with the destructiveness of war. But I am reasonably seasoned at these auditions at this point and get the job anyway. And so I start again the process of embodying the narratives of other imaginary women with whom I cross paths on the club sound track.
Some songs are famously about individuals. “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel is about Rosanna Arquette’s eyes. “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette is about Dave Coulier’s apparent predilection for oral sex in theaters, among other things. “Heart-Shaped Box” by Nirvana is about Courtney Love’s… you know. I have never heard any of these songs in a strip club. What I have heard far more often are songs directed at an unidentified “you” or about an unidentified “her” and subsequently let the predominantly male voices singing them inform how I might make use of their words for my own financial benefit.
A famously popular strip club song is “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, sometimes delicately referred to as the “I wanna fuck you like an animal” song. The song is rotten to the core, but its lyrical simplicity makes it a favorite. I often wonder to whom it was directed. What incredible creature prompted such debased carnal desires in Trent Reznor? Who simultaneously made him desire animal coitus but also reportedly brought him “closer to God”? On more than one occasion onstage and on the strip club floor, I was that person, responding to the song as if it were being sung to me. I danced in a way that was aloof but accessible, that demanded customer effort in a way some men loved and others profoundly despised. Other times I was Reznor, not quite singing along but signaling enough desire with my eyes that the man whose lap I sat in would upgrade to a private room, where we were mercifully spared such graphic lyrics, as “Closer” was over. I hated dancing to this song in the club because I loved it in my personal life. I hated sharing feigned animal desire even for a few minutes. A song that had felt like mine became about so many men and about me and about every person in the club. It lost the particular smell of the Lower East Side apartment where it was true; it ended without the pleased sigh of one man’s particular climax as he hit the pillow in 2008. I made thousands of dollars dancing as if I were the woman at the center of that song, but I lost a lot to it, too.
One of the best songs specifically about stripping is by Chris Brown, though admitting as much is heresy in my current social circle. The now infamous episode in which he assaulted Rihanna and left contusions on her face remains an open wound to many women. I suspect this is often the case for people who have witnessed only the physical of domestic violence in that particular event. I detest Brown’s violence and his apparent refusal to accept the consequences, but only as much as I detest plenty of powerful, famous men whose violence was not as well documented in a public spectacle.
When I first heard a song by Chris Brown while working, it was after 3 a.m., and I and the woman on the second stage exchanged exasperated sighs that we were continuing the charade that men in New York City strip clubs give half a shit about our pole-dancing skills. I saw Brown’s name appear on the TV screens that hang in the corners of the club and momentarily imagined the two of us refusing to dance in solidarity against him. But rebellion is the luxury of the paid, and neither of us were especially well paid that night.
In “Strip,” Brown’s voice is beautiful and his demands are simple. “Girl I just wanna see you strip right now ’cause it’s late,” he sings. He is the perfect customer. He does not want to know why you work at the club, when you get off, if he can see you later. He does not tell you that he never spends time in “places like this,” nor does he suggest that you leave such places entirely without offering some alternative but equally lucrative position to you. He just wants to see you strip. The customer with this demand is the great relief in a job plagued by men who demand so much more than what your title describes. They ask so often that you strip off more than your clothes, but also the character you’re playing. They ask that you answer their questions and that you love them for no reason other than the fascinating beat of their own unremarkable hearts.
“Shine bright like a diamond,” Rihanna whispers in a song that I loved to dance to and that men seemed to feel ambivalent toward. Rihanna repeats herself sometimes twice, sometimes three times in the song to make certain we have heard her instructions. When I have been onstage for “Diamonds,” it has prompted me to look upward at the spotlights, obeying the command recorded years ago and far away, as if Rihanna were presently watching from the sound booth. It is a romantic song, but I’ve always thought of it as a song directed at a distressed friend by another, assuring her that she is more treasured than she can presently imagine. This is likely because I have used it that way. I would repeat the song’s central command in a deadpan voice to work friends on breaks and after shifts, smoking cigarettes and making grandiose proclamations about the big things we had in store for our impending windfalls. I don’t know if I said these things because I believed them to be true or because I wanted them to be true, but I don’t see those two places as that far from each other anymore.
In one club where I worked, all the girls had to line up on the main stage at the start of the shift and have our names called out one by one as we stepped forward and showed off. It felt like part beauty pageant, part Westminster dog show. It was not uncommon for them to play anthems of empowered womanhood during this interlude, a reminder of how much we all wanted to be there. Songs like “Independent Women II” by Destiny’s Child, “LoveGame” by Lady Gaga, and “Bad Girls” by M.I.A. appeared often, while an occasional lament like “Just a Girl” by No Doubt would sneak in that I took for a gentle nod from the DJ that he knew no one working in the club especially wanted to be there.
Once they played “Run the World (Girls)” by Beyoncé, a song that didn’t get its fair due as a feminist anthem or as a world-class banger in general. The song was met with criticism on its release, mostly because there is a worldwide committee of curmudgeonly old-guard feminists who refuse to accept Beyoncé as a leader or as one of their own. It was critiqued secondarily because of claims that women do not, in fact, run the world. I think often of this song in contrast to “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and how Beyoncé was right, as she often is, even when she doesn’t always mean to be. Girls run the world in the sense that they perform the invisible and unappreciated labors that keep the world on its axis. That is different from doing what everyone wants to do, which is rule the world. We don’t speak of world leaders who run countries but of world leaders who rule countries. Running a thing is to toil in tedious and uncredited roles; ruling a thing is to hold dominion over it enough that little toil is required. I am glad I heard the song only once in the context of the club, so as not to be driven mad by the grim reality of its literal interpretation. In the light of day and off the clock, not surrounded by the glaring differences of who it is that rules and who it is that runs that were made evident by our coarse exchanges, the song is partially salvaged.
“You Be Killin’ ’Em” by Fabolous is the only song I ever cared enough about to request. The upbeat hip-hop celebration of female beauty and power was something of a personal anthem for years. The lyrics on their own might read like a litany of cheesy pickup lines, but accompanied by its urgent and danceable beat, it is a song you can run the fuck out of some errands to. The hook alone contains four compliments to the woman at whom it is directed: “You what’s up girl, ain’t gotta ask it / I dead ’em all now, I buy the caskets / They should arrest you or whoever dressed you / Ain’t gon’ stress you, but I’m a let you know / Girl you be killin’ ’em / You be killin’ ’em.” This woman whose appeal is so all-encompassing is rare in any genre, but what is especially remarkable is that her ruthless ambition and apparent materialism are considered attractive.
Several small televisions hung from the ceiling playin
g the songs’ music videos and lighting up the otherwise dark corners of the establishment’s main room. I assumed they were primarily for the entertainment of men who had been dragged to the club by friends and needed refuge in something to look at besides the men they knew being reduced to ATMs by an army of scantily clad women. They were also a helpful distraction from the crawl through the first and last hours of dead shifts. More than just giving us something to focus on when there were no customers, they were windows to a world outside the club made glossy and bright by the commonly used palettes and filters of music video aesthetics. Despite being in heavy rotation on my personal playlists, I saw the video for “You Be Killin’ ’Em” during the one and only time I danced to it for work.
Taking the title of the song quite literally, Amber Rose plays Fabolous’s love interest while living a double life as an assassin. Interspersed with scenes of the two in romantic situations are scenes of Amber wearing disguises and murdering what appears to be an assortment of mobsters of the nouveau riche variety. At the end of the video, Fabolous answers a knock at the door while Amber is in the bathtub and is greeted by several members of law enforcement bearing warrants and pushing their way into the apartment. You’d think they would be discreet and do a sting operation to capture a world-class killer, but the kerfuffle tips her off, leaving Fabolous to find the bathtub empty except for a single red rose and the door to the balcony left open.
The video is wholly absurd from start to finish. For a song so richly colored by descriptions of luxury items and people, the video is shot in black and white to add drama. The plot and styling are presumably an homage to the narrative music videos of earlier decades in hip-hop, but the attempt at film noir, complete with opening credits and a femme fatale, is flimsy when it isn’t downright silly. There is a scene where Amber’s negligee appears red on-screen in contrast to the black and white. It is supposed to be sexy, but it looks like those sepia-toned photos you see on greeting cards, or framed in your aunt’s downstairs bathroom, with little kids dressed in oversized old-fashioned clothing and a boy giving a girl a red rose or a paper heart. Amber inexplicably wears a fur coat throughout an entire dinner date, which is frankly just not that slick. Fabolous cannot lip-synch to save his life. And in the final scene, when Amber escapes, you have to wonder how far she got without someone calling the cops on the woman wearing only a bath towel running for her life. And while I’m overthinking it, what kind of deranged architect puts the balcony off the bathroom?
These overthought thoughts did not cross my mind when I first watched the video from the stage, nor when I watched the handful of other music videos in which Amber appears. When she is on-screen, there is only transfixed attention and giddy celebration. Amber Rose is more than an unofficial mascot for strippers, she is our patron saint. Her rise to mainstream visibility was a testament to the fact that there was life on the other side of the club that would require neither repentance nor denial. And what a life it was! People think that strippers look up to Amber because she got famous for no other reason than that she was dating Kanye West. That isn’t the reason she’s famous, and it isn’t the reason we love her. Amber was already making a name for herself as a model and video star before Kanye came along. As for dating Kanye, I could walk into any strip club in Manhattan, throw a handful of quarters, and hit four strippers who have dated a famous man at some point. (But I wouldn’t do that, because it is rude and there’s nowhere to store change on stripper apparel.)
There are plenty of famous women to admire besides Amber Rose who similarly found their way to the top on the arms of famous men. There are also plenty of famous women who publicly acknowledge that they were strippers. Most famous ex-strippers tell tales of redemption from these sordid ways. More gratingly, several claim they were no good at it, which is really just code for “too good for it.” (I see you, Diablo Cody.) But Amber carried this piece of her past into the spotlight with her and treated it like the asset it was instead of the albatross everyone expected. “All the girls were really cool… I was young, beautiful, I was onstage, I wasn’t really ashamed of my body. I made lifelong friends,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2015.1
Though the media treated Amber like an art project that Kanye West pulled from his own imagination and sculpted in bronze and neon, Amber was not a stripper in distress awaiting his rescue. She reportedly stripped until she was twenty-five, with modeling jobs and her first music video cameo coming that same year: “What Them Girls Like” by Ludacris. Transitioning from the club to a successful career outside the adult industry is a testament to the transferable skills learned as a stripper. There is wisdom and art in harnessing one’s own desirability and fitting it into the spaces required by the typical strip club patron and then taking them elsewhere as needed. Amber’s success became the bridge between the lived reality of being a stripper and being the one-dimensional fantasies strippers are asked to play, with and without their consent.
Among the most important contributions Amber made to dismantling these fantasies was openly discussing that she was in relationships with women for years before dating Kanye.2 Her bisexuality poured cold water on the myth that strippers are all dick-crazed banshees who see the money as a mere bonus. Amber also changed the tradition of audiences’ not often hearing from music video models outside the brief period around the premiere when they are trotted out before the press to discuss what an honor it was to work with a real artist. But Amber’s presence in videos often eclipsed the star power of the artists therein. Strippers who have so often played the animated backdrops and occasional slow-motion booty shots in music videos got a vicarious moment in the sun when the focus was on Amber. Meticulously crafting an image that subverts expectations about women with certain pasts, Amber outstayed the welcome generally extended to such performers and established her own place in the entertainment industry. And though she and Kanye as a couple would be together only two years, Amber stayed on the radar through product endorsements and fashion campaigns, an Instagram of otherworldly sex appeal, a self-help book, and what looks like a genuinely great fucking time.
A radio appearance by Kanye West in early 2015 is instructive of how successfully Amber took ownership of her own image after the breakup. West claimed that he needed to take “thirty showers” after dating Amber before getting with Kim Kardashian in remarks about a recent spat between Khloe Kardashian and Amber on Twitter. More than anything, the remark shows that Amber is impossible to diss artfully. West is arguably the greatest hip-hop wordsmith of his generation, yet he was reduced to making frat-house jabs at Amber for a job she had years ago that she is not ashamed of. A predictable public pile-on soon followed and included her own ex-husband, Wiz Khalifa, briefly adding and later retracting his claims that Amber was an unfit mother by virtue of her past.
Amber responded by arranging a SlutWalk, one of a series of protests designed in response to a rape culture that lays blame on women for their own assaults and for gendered mistreatment more generally. Though SlutWalks have been critiqued for their inadvertent exclusion of marginalized women who experience sexual violence more often and in different ways than the women who started them, Amber’s had a distinctly more inclusive feel for which she was commended. In one of the most commonly circulated images from the event, Amber holds up a protest sign that reads “Strippers have feelings too.” It is a simple message that appears intended to be funny on its surface. But I read in it a radical statement about the women employed throughout the adult industry onto whom customers project so many fantasies and then demand impatiently that those fantasies be reflected back. I read in it a demand to hear the real women onto whom social anxieties about the nexus where money and gender and sex meet are projected relentlessly but who are not granted permission to voice their own. It is the audacious claim that we are more than the echo chambers for imaginaries of womanhood. And it is a promise that if we didn’t want to, we wouldn’t have to do a happy little dance on their behalf forever.
All th
e Lives I Want
Recovering Sylvia
JUST DON’T END UP DOING a Sylvia Plath thing” is not advice that is given to save lives. It is advice given to save face. It is not a warning against the pitfalls of a rotten marriage or the disappointment of publishing only a single novel. It is not intended to help anyone prevent isolation or despair. It is certainly not a thing people say to stop you from sticking your head in the back of an oven. No. Telling people not to do as Sylvia Plath did is universally understood as a good-natured suggestion that a writer not put too much of herself into her creations—lest she accidentally write about something as ordinary as being a woman. For feelings remain the burden and embarrassment of girls. They are not the stuff of art.
Sylvia has become the most recognizable stand-in for the tedious, ill-advised twentieth-century confessional author. Despite her coming of age among a cohort of men describing their own venereal disease as if the pustules themselves were matters worthy of the canon, it is Sylvia’s interior life that is so often pointed to as a case of something crass and self-indulgent. To this day, even as Sylvia is long dead by her own hand, her cautionary tale is not about lives poorly lived but about feelings too earnestly expressed. Nearly half a century after her death, we remain more interested in girls’ being kept palatable than being kept alive.
The number of hands that have been wrung and fingers that have been wagged at girls who dare to give voice and name to their interior lives suggests that the written history of the world is absolutely awash in the stuff. But the female voice, and the girl’s voice especially, is characterized mostly by the deafening silence it emits from the canon. To read the historical record without context suggests that female self-awareness was a genetic anomaly that emerged in the eighteenth century and remained exceedingly rare until the second half of the twentieth century. Those who dare to document their lived experience as worthwhile are brave new girls indeed. As brightly as these girls shine, there remain wet blankets around every corner attempting to extinguish the flames in their hearts. They are dismissed as excessively feminine and juvenile, two words that mean the same thing in the hearts and minds of critics who would sooner praise a six-volume gaze at a Norwegian man’s navel than consider the possibility that there are treasures in the hearts of girls. There is no girl that such critics have tried to extinguish more diligently than young Sylvia herself. In the years following her death, she has been accused of culpability in suicides that took place fifty years after her own, along with single-handedly ushering in the idea of suicide as glamorous by people who have apparently never heard of Ernest Hemingway or Jesus Christ. The fact of the matter remains that young women are easy to destroy and doubly easy to destroy if they are already dead. Fortunately, it is also historically the habit of young girls to practice witchcraft, and so the girls keep bringing Sylvia back to life.