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.
On my twenty-first birthday I roll in money. Bills stick to my skin and I sit up on hands and knees as music screams through me on the cheers of the crowd. The metal heels of my 5-inch stilettos sparkle in the strobe lights, and I pound myself down on the stage, drunk with lust for myself. A man sitting at the stage throws a handful of money and the bills fall like confetti. I laugh, rocking back on my heels, bent at the waist, looking between my legs at the pulsing crowd. I am sex incarnate. I am a drug. I am the most powerful woman who has ever lived.
The stage is covered in money and more falls around me, tossed by a crowd standing five people deep around the stage. The screaming rises above the music and I somersault backward out of the splits, brushing away the money sticking to my skin. This is almost better than sex. I slip the straps of my G-string low on my waist, thrusting my hips into the air, loving the way the thin black cloth outlines my pelvis, stretching across my hipbones. I pinch my nipples to keep them hard, rubbing the glitter coating my skin, watching myself in the mirror above the stage. A hundred-dollar bill floats down to land on my stomach and the crowd screams with approval.
I leave the stage with a grocery bag bulging with money. My hands shake with adrenaline shock and I gulp deliriously at the sweet drink someone shoves in my hand. Counting the money later, I will discover that I have made more than $1200 in ten minutes; I leave the club that night with $1900 in ones and fives, twenties and hundreds. Tonight I have won. I have conquered my body image. I have molded myself into a goddess. I am Athena stripped, brilliant, powerful, untouchable. I have become my own Jungian shadow. The child frightened of going to school for fear of the older boys roaming the junior-high halls has become the ghost.