Strip

by Catlyn Ladd

  I hurry back to Rodney’s table. “Yes,” I tell him. “I can go.”

  “Excellent. I would like to meet you at the restaurant and then I’ll drive from there. Is that acceptable?”

  “Yes,” I repeat. “That’s perfect.”

  I discover that the play will be outdoors. This complicates clothes a little, as I have to dress for potential uneven ground and elements. I settle on a tight but stretchy skirt, black with a white Chinese dragon picked out in embroidery. I pair it with a black, lacy tank top and silver sandals. Over the whole thing I throw a silver pashmina. I also pack an umbrella and light coat.

  For makeup I go light but dramatic, with sweeping cat’s-eye eyeliner, glittery shadow, and dark pink on the lips. Upswept hair with loose curls on top completes the look. I hesitate over jewelry and then settle on two jointed silver rings but no spikes.

  Rodney waits in front of the restaurant and opens the door for me with a flourish. Our table is waiting inside, and I’m careful to order a single glass of white wine of medium price from the extensive list. I’m also careful to order food that’s easy to eat and not likely to drip or get stuck in my teeth. It’s just like a date but not a date.

  Rodney eats with gusto and the conversation pauses as we both savor the flavors set before us.

  “There’s a reason this place has a good reputation,” I say, closing my eyes to better examine the profile of contrasting tastes in my mouth. “I can never get the flavors to layer like this.”

  “You like to cook?”

  “I do,” I admit. “I’ve always loved to cook. Grocery shopping is one of my favorite things.” I pause to consider. “Provided that I can shop with no regard for prices.”

  “I don’t imagine you have to worry about that,” Rodney says.

  “I don’t.” I smile at him. “My job allows me to buy good food, pursue an education, and wear pretty things.”

  He raises his glass. “Here’s to pretty things.”

  I clink my glass against his. This lifestyle can’t last forever; I don’t want it to last forever. I want to be a grown-up one day, with a career, and a forever home. I don’t want to have to be strategic about whom I tell about how I make money. I’m not ashamed about what I do for a living but sometimes it’s too much trouble to explain. Sometimes people require me to defend my choices and I’m not always up for that. Just like sometimes I’m not up for telling people my politics or religious choices.

  The research on exotic dancers suggests that strippers are always on stage in the sense that we constantly manage people’s impressions of us. We manage what customers see, but we also manage our private lives, choosing to divulge what we do to some people and hide it from others. Academics think this makes our lives wrought by tensions and contradictions. They argue that we either burn out or begin to self-medicate in order to deal with the stress that comes from constantly managing who perceives us and how.

  I don’t think the academics get it. (I am one now so I can say that.) Women, and to some extent all people, manage how others see them. Everyone has secrets that they keep. Sometimes it’s because these secrets cause shame, but often it’s because we all deserve, even need, privacy. Some argue that it’s exhausting to keep secrets, but that’s because they’ve misunderstood secrets for lies. I have never been ashamed of being a stripper. My understanding of myself evolved, continues to evolve, but that doesn’t mean that I regret who I was. Or who I became. And being careful about whom I tell has nothing to do with being guilty about who I am. Some dancers and ex-dancers may feel that way but I do not.

  I share some of this with Rodney over dinner that night. He listens closely and then says, “It seems to me that humans have entirely too much entitlement and too many expectations of one another.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re all constantly trying to get to know one another. Then, when we think we know a person and we find out something new about them, particularly if it’s something we find shameful or startling, we feel betrayed. Like they lied to us.”

  “But, in some deeply ontological sense, do we ever know one another?”

  He takes a long swallow of wine. “Everyone dies alone,” he says finally.

  I’m following his thinking. “We can never truly know another person.”

  He looks up at me, his eyes shining in the candlelight. “But that’s okay,” he says. “Because it’s so much fun to try!”

  I laugh. “There’s that paradox again.”

  He leans toward me in the candlelight. “Don’t you find that stripping is the supreme paradox?”

  I think about it. “Yes,” I say finally. “But so much of being a woman is rooted in the existential contradiction of what it means to be human.”

  He gestures expansively. “Continue.”

  “I am a biological entity with a particular experience of physical reality,” I explain. “But culture writes expectations onto my body that shape my perception of myself. My very potential. These expectations concern the color of my skin, my sexual expression, my intellect. Due to the limitations of biology, I can never truly know what it is like to be another person.”

  “The Cartesian crisis,” Rodney murmurs.

  I nod. “This problem is exacerbated by the constraints that this society puts on me as a woman. I am supposed to be chaste and demure. I am certainly not supposed to take my clothes off for money. And I’m absolutely not supposed to enjoy it.”

  “Do you enjoy it?” The flickering light casts shadows across his expression.

  I hesitate. He’s getting off on this, I can tell. He has women playing to his intellect and also taking off their clothes. But I decide not to care. I’m getting off on this, too.

  “Sometimes,” I answer honestly. “A lot of the time. Sure, there are aspects of the job that aren’t fun but most of the time …” I laugh. “Most of the time it’s a blast.”

  I worked at this club for two years and I learned a lot about Rodney. I went out with him many times, to plays, the opera, a couple of book readings, the symphony. He worked as the CEO of his own tech company, hence the money. He lived with, and cared for, his invalid sister. He also lived with three cats, but they weren’t allowed in his study because he smoked in there.

  In spite of his regular appearances at a strip club, he struck me as very asexual. He enjoyed watching, liked when I dressed up to appear on his arm, but he never made even the slightest advance toward me. His sexuality was voyeuristic. Like in his beloved Shakespearean plays, he loved getting behind the masks of the strippers he courted and yet he seemed fully aware that all he would ever find is another mask. We were beautiful actors on his set and he moved us, and removed us, at will.

  When I got married, I told him and he treated me no differently. In fact, he approached my spouse, who often came in to play pool and shoot the shit with the regulars, and shook his hand in congratulations. Then he invited me to a performance of Madame Butterfly.

  I think Rodney loved finery. He loved beauty and surrounded himself with fine alcohol, good books, deep conversation, gorgeous women, interesting men, a nice car, gourmet food, and cigarettes. He embraced the paradox of being. Anyone or anything that fit his aesthetic was welcome. But he limited his relationships to those he could control, never opening himself to vulnerability.

  Women are trapped in the dialectic of the male gaze. Our value so often lies in their regard. Rodney was the paradox: his esteem trapped me in my own need to be recognized as an intellectual and it freed me, transforming me into my sexual self. This is the passion of thought.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  This Is My Body Moving Electric

  The rhythm is a pulse, driving me on. Lights on my skin, flickering sweat. My thoughts stop. There is only music.

  Here on the stage I embody sexuality. Power lives in my veins, in the lines muscles make under my skin. I feel like anarchy, like broken taboos, like liminal space. I feel like god.

  Dance is an act of creation. In
the beginning, the Greek goddess Euronome danced the world into being. The great Hindu sagas are still told in dance all over India. Dance is often related to the female, a manifestation of her creative power. Sexuality is a metaphor for the act of creation, and thus dance, sexuality, and the ability to bring forth life became overdetermined representations of woman.

  Dance is magic. It is a powerful visualization technique. It weaves spells both for the dancer and for the viewer. Dance unites the performer and the audience and is thus a symbol of sexual congress, the most intimate physical unification of bodies.

  Around the stage is a wall of pressing bodies. Men, and a few women, laugh and cheer and throw money. Bills coat the stage. One of my regulars shoulders through the crowd and holds out a folded rectangle of money. I step to the edge of the stage and pull out the strap of my T-bar, meeting his eyes, which crinkle in appreciation. “You’re beautiful,” he says. I throw back my head and laugh. He slips $100 into the outstretched band of elastic.

  I lie down on my back and stretch out. Hands appear in the air above me and dollars rain down. In ten minutes I make $1000.

  It is my birthday celebration. For six weeks leading up to the day when I celebrate turning 23, I pass out business-sized cards that I have had made. On one side is a photo of my breasts with my fingers, sheathed in spiked rings that are hinged with my knuckles, crossed over them. On the other side is the date of my party and the information that the holder of the card will get into the club free on the night in question. All the club’s regulars are in attendance plus a healthy smattering of men who have used my card to gain free admission to the local gentlemen’s club.

  Right now, they are all here for me. The other stages are closed, so for the duration of two songs it is all only about me. The clothes I remove are custom made specially for the occasion. There’s a chocolate cake lit by candles for me to blow out at the end of the set. The piles of money are swept from the stage into a garbage bag.

  It is the last time I appear naked on stage. At 23 I retire from stripping in order to utilize my master’s degree and enter teaching, the vocation that will become my permanent profession.

  In the coming years I will achieve tenure, a doctorate, and a critical feminist lens partially shaped by my years as a stripper. I will write this book, documenting my experiences. Twenty years later I still sometimes dream of the stage. I hear a certain song and it all comes rushing back: the smell of the club, the thrill of the taboo. My body begins to move, electric.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Athena, Stripped

  Are women “active agents in their own oppression” (Murphy 327)? I’ll leave that for the readers to decide.

  I have told the stories contained in this book as accurately as I can. I did not engage in intentional ethnography while a dancer. I viewed my job as a way to make money that was lucrative, easy, fit my night-owl hours, and worked with my school schedule. However, I did pay attention. I kept a journal off and on, and recorded my thoughts, observations, and experiences. The observational work on strip clubs that has been done to date has been done by mostly female researchers who, if they strip themselves, typically do so for a single night or weekend. The other literature is memoir by dancers themselves who are not trained researchers and write for a popular audience. I am both: I worked as a stripper for a significant amount of time and I am an academic. Thus my observations are rooted deeply in my lived experiences, but I bring a methodological frame to my account. While I changed identifying details in order to obscure the identities of the people involved and while some of the people represented here are composites, these stories are true as I experienced them. The only person who is represented with complete accuracy is my spouse, Greg, and he gave his permission for me to write the segment about how we met.

  I have tried to honestly represent myself in these pages, including my naiveté, vanity, and occasional unkindness. The reader is free to pass whatever judgments they may upon my actions and insights. In no way do I mean for this narrative to be definitive of the entirety of the world of strip clubs. I was not an academic when I became a stripper. I was a junior in college with no sense of my educational future. As I have stated on several occasions, I am white, well educated, and privileged in multiple ways. I cannot speak for all women who choose to take their clothes off for money. All I hope is that we listen seriously to sex workers and accept their insights as authoritative.

  I intentionally left many of these stories open-ended. While I include my own thoughts and observations, I tried mainly to be as true to the events in the clubs as I can. Some readers will see exploitation and abuse. Others will see liberation and empowerment. If I have done my job well, most readers should see both. Here lies the truth: like a woman’s existence in First World twenty-first-century patriarchy, sex work is complicated. In fact, I argue that the clubs are a microcosm of the experience of being female in this culture. We find immense power through our sexuality but we are also reduced to it. We can use that objectification to gain power or we can be crushed by it.

  The real world is the same: women are always judged on their sexuality, though hopefully they have other characteristics that can be recognized. My regular clients were drawn initially to how I looked, but many of them became friends on the basis of intellectual and emotional bonds that, in spite of occurring within a fantasy world, were very genuine. I learned that my sexuality does not always prevent me from being seen, heard, respected, and honored for my wit and intelligence.

  Ultimately, the club allowed me to come into my power. It allowed me to heal from the intense bullying I experienced in middle school, bullying often targeted not on me as a person but on me as a girl. While being recognized for my intelligence in college, I was recognized as sexy in the club. I grew into a whole person nurtured by both of these environments.

  Our culture tells us that women are the objects of the male gaze, that our bodies are the voids upon which men project all their fancies. This is what it means to be objectified, to have one’s body become a canvas upon which the male artist draws his revenge fantasies, his secret longings, his hidden desires, his insecurities, his murderous rages. Culture makes woman a mirror reflecting the man.

  But women have eyes. The mirror looks back. “Stripping encapsulates and dramatizes such personal and political issues through juxtapositions of public nudity and business suits, money and desire, youth and age, idealization and stigma, rebellion and safety” and people, particularly women, are interested because “these questions and tensions emerge within [our] everyday lives and stripping makes the contradictions of theory tangible” (Frank 507). My experience as an exotic dancer allowed me to frame academic theory within personal experience. Now, when I speak before a women’s studies class, I do so with more authority than if I had not been a stripper. What others theorize, I know.

  I know that my body is scrutinized and judged in a way that male bodies are not. I also know that I can give my words the weight of my intellect and that most people will listen when I speak confidently even if I am topless and wearing 6-inch heels. I know that my white skin is a privilege because I have seen amazing, powerful, strong women of color passed over in favor of people who look like me. I know that coming from a well-educated family that expected me to become well educated and successful in my own right separates me from women who come from impoverished backgrounds. I know that relationships between males and females and gender-fluid people can be analyzed through the feminist lens of power relations, and I also know that theories of power fall short in the face of complex human connections that form between the staff, dancers, and clientele in strip clubs. I know that the strip club is merely a microcosm of patriarchal culture in all its complexity and messiness.

  The strip club is not “either” and “or.” It is “both” and “and.” It is neither. It is the unique experiences of each individual who has ever taken their clothes off in exchange for money.

  I was raised a feminist by progressive,
well-educated parents. Working as a stripper for five years allowed me to learn what it really can mean to be a feminist. Being a stripper is not the only way to live the experience of feminist theory, and not every stripper has the same experience as I did. But it is part of my journey and I would not take it back for the world.

  I am a trajectory, a journey. In grade school I had friends, but I proved too different for middle-school conformity. I wore weird clothes, I had been too many places, I spoke too precisely. The beauty of the Ozark mountain wilderness is corrupted by small-mindedness. By seventh grade the attacks had become vicious, tearing down everything that gave me a sense of identity: the way I dressed, the books I read, the way I looked. I began to fear school with a terror so thick I could taste it. I tried to make myself small and become invisible.

  But I can’t. My personality is too big. I can’t stop wearing the flamboyant clothes I love, speaking my mind, showing my intelligence. By eighth grade I feared even stepping into the hallways. I can only remember those halls as dark, monsters in the shadows. I survived only by escaping.

  Thirteen years old, I dance with my shadow, music player in hand, breathless, in love with the rhythm of my own body moving, music in my head. I stretch in silhouette, watching my form thin, admiring my rounding hips and upturned breasts. My shadow is the image I see in the magazines I smuggle into my room, long-legged, flawless, reflection of the youth our culture worships. My shade on the wall is perfection, not what I see when I look in the mirror. I am Narcissus, falling in love with the illusion of what I think I want to become.

  Nineteen years old, I step onto stage for the first time, the unfamiliar feel of a G-string cupping my body, forbidden and erotic arousal tingling through me. In the last five years in high school and college I learned the power of my sexuality, the control I gain by teasing and withholding. This is the test of that power, pushing the limits past societal taboo. I am everything repression fears and I love it. The heavy beat builds in the powerful sound system and the music sweeps me away. I do not see the men watching, only my body reflected in the mirrors from every angle, skin glistening with sweat and oil. The man before me leans forward, sliding bills toward me but I look past him, admiring the effect of the lights in my golden hair. I am stripper Barbie, a parody of the American teenager, deranged, Kali on a death trip. I see the admiration in the eyes watching me, proving that I am as beautiful as I always wanted to be, transformed by makeup and high-heeled shoes.