The embodiment and creation of sexualised fantasy
Katherine Frank
Strip clubs catering specifically to heterosexual men are a popular form of entertainment in the USA. The clubs range from neighbourhood bars to high-end entertainment complexes known as gentleman’s clubs, and may offer an array of services – stage dancing, table dancing or lap dancing, extended conversation opportunities with dancers, food and beverages and televised sports events. Upper-tier gentleman’s clubs may provide conference or VIP rooms to draw a business crowd; many of these clubs are marketed to middle class customers as ‘classy’ venues featuring refined entertainers, differentiated from the clubs one would find in a red-light district.
It makes sense that strip clubs should multiply in the USA during the last several decades, alongside the panic about HIV/AIDS and fears about the dissolution of the family. The process of upscaling in strip clubs, with a promise of ‘clean’ and respectable interactions, alleviates fears about contamination and disease that escalated around prostitution. There are numerous other social changes that may be influencing this rapid increase in strip clubs in the USA as well: the increased presence of women in the workforce, a continued backlash against feminism and the idea of ‘political correctness’, ongoing and concerted marketing efforts to sexualise and masculinise particular forms of consumption (‘sports, beer and women’, for example), changing patterns of mobility that have influenced dating practices and the formation of intimate partnerships, renewed commitments to monogamy for certain groups of married men, and changes in the nature of work that involve more out-of-town travel for business and thus more anonymous opportunities to purchase commodified sexualised services, to name just a few.
I began researching strip clubs in 1995 and worked as an exotic dancer off and on for six years during this time. In the period 1997–8 I conducted fieldwork in five strip clubs in a fairly large southeastern city that I call Laurelton by seeking employment as a nude entertainer. As strip clubs are highly stratified in terms of ‘classiness’, I selected sites ranging from the most prestigious clubs in the city (offering valet parking, luxurious atmospheres, expensive lighting and sound systems, dozens of dancers on multiple stages, etc.) to lower tier ‘dive’ bars (dimly lit, sparsely furnished and located in red-light districts or simply known as smaller neighbourhood venues). Although the degree of nudity varies in strip clubs around the country, Laurelton laws allowed the dancers to strip completely. Dancers were required to perform onstage for tips; they were also, however, expected to circulate among the customers to sell ‘private’ table dances. Depending on the rules and layout of the club, the dancer might disrobe on a customer’s table so that he could view her from below, on the floor between his legs while he was seated or in front of his chair on a slightly raised platform. A club might have between one and four stages with dancers on each, and any number of nude women might be performing among the audience at any given time. In addition to my fieldwork, over the past decade I have continued to observe in strip clubs around the country and to interview both customers and dancers.
A focus on bodily exposure distinguishes strip clubs from other types of bars and nightclubs (although this boundary may be eroding somewhat with some of the increasingly risqué fashions for women) and the focus on sexualised looking in a public atmosphere differentiates strip clubs from many other forms of adult entertainment such as pornography, prostitution or oral or manual release in a massage parlour. Yet, the desire to visit strip clubs is more than just a desire to passively observe women’s bodies, even for the most voyeuristic of customers. There are many ways to potentially ‘see’ naked women – peeping, viewing pornography, reading medical texts or developing intimate relationships with them, for example. These visits, then, must also be seen as a desire to have a particular kind of experience rooted in the complex network of relationships between ‘home’, ‘work’ and ‘away’, an experience that I have elsewhere analysed as ‘touristic’ (Frank 2002a).
Although a strip club may be a space of touristic leisure for the male customers, it is, first and foremost, a workplace for the dancers. Granted, stripping may be a means of rebellion for young women in addition to being a lucrative job, especially for those in the middle classes (Frank 2002b; Johnson 1999). However, the fact remains that the parties to the transactions are coming to the encounters with different purposes. These different purposes and meanings are not rooted in essential gender differences; rather, they are informed by labour relations as well as social positionings (including, but not limited to gender). Certainly the categories of worker and leisure seeker are not absolute: customers may conduct business activities at strip clubs, for example, and most customers are also workers in other arenas. Likewise, there may be some dancers for whom stripping feels more like leisure than work, at least on certain days, and a large component of the job involves engaging in practices associated with leisure – drinking alcohol, dining, conversing, flirting, having fun (or at least appearing to) and, especially, being undressed. Yet in the immediacy of the encounter, the money nearly always flows in one direction – from the customer to the dancer (until the dancer is asked to pay the establishment a cut of her earnings). Further, even though a man may conduct forms of business on the premises, it is precisely because this space is inherently ‘not work’ that it has been chosen. Thus, while one or both of the participants to any transaction may be ‘playing’ at any given time, this play is firmly situated within a larger framework of cultural and economic relations. It is within this framework that the dancers’ bodily revelations and performances of identity become meaningful, and hence profitable, both for themselves and for the clubs.
The relationship of nudity to forms of power and control has long been bolstered by the regulation of bodily exposure by state and local governments in the USA, as well as the ways that those regulations are proposed, implemented and debated in public forums. Although I do not have space here to detail the development of modern exotic dance out of other entertainment forms such as vaudeville, burlesque or cabaret shows, it is important to realise that the history of striptease is shaped by the history of regulation and the conflicts surrounding sexualised displays and behaviours in US public culture. Distinctions made between art and obscenity, lewd or acceptable behaviour or moral or immoral forms or representations of sexuality can be seen as ongoing arguments that are carried out in legal forums, academic treatises, public culture and the media and living rooms around the country. Frequently what is indecent in one decade is commonplace in the next (think of the scandal over the bodily exposure of famous burlesque star Lydia Thompson in the late nineteenth century – she wore tights and made them visible to an audience) (Allen 1991), yet that does not mean that the transgressions of the day are perceived any less seriously by their participants or treated less harshly.
Regulations against striptease have often been justified in the name of social control and public safety. Such public safety campaigns can also be seen as reflecting a social class bias, with working-class or lower tier forms of entertainment being penalised more harshly than those designated ‘art’ and enjoyed by relatively privileged audiences (Foley 2002; Hanna 1999b; etc.). Striptease is seen as dangerous and socially disruptive by conservative segments of the population and thousands of taxpayer and private dollars are spent in attempts to eradicate strip clubs in communities across the nation. Because of their lingering working class associations, and the persistent, often erroneous belief that they are indelibly linked to prostitution, crime and other ‘negative secondary effects’, strip clubs have already been subject to more severe regulations than other kinds of entertainment, and some municipalities have attempted to use restrictive regulations to close down adult businesses altogether: requiring extremely bright lighting, prohibiting tipping, requiring bikinis or cocktail dresses at all times, stipulating excessive distance rules to separate the entertainers and the customers, etc. (Hanna 1999a). In 2000, despite a lack of sound evidence that strip clubs cause negative secondary effects, the Supreme Court upheld legislation regulating exotic dance in the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, ruling that ‘nude public dancing itself is immoral’ (Foley 2002: 3).
The intricacies of the many battles fought in locales across the country throughout the twentieth century would be impossible to detail here, as would the complexities of the justifications that continue to be given for regulating, harassing, shutting down or allowing venues that offer the display of sexualised female bodies to their patrons. Instead, it is important to realise that regulation and scandal does not just repress unruly ‘natural’ desires in the name of civilisation and order, but actually helps to create and shape those desires (Foucault 1978).
Nudity has an assortment of sometimes conflicting meanings, including but not limited to: innocence, naturalness, authenticity, vulnerability, sexual power, truth, revelations of one’s inner self, humiliation, degradation, a lack of self-respect, immorality, sexual accessibility and a prelude to sexual activity. Public nudity is embedded in a host of additional symbolic and emotional meanings, again often ambivalent and frequently revolving around issues of power and control. The use of stripping an individual of his or her clothes as a form of military action, punitive measure or means of humiliation is widely understood as a means of exercising power. At the same time, people who willingly or purposefully shed their clothes in public are often criminalised or stigmatised and seen as dangerous (powerful?) or pathological – ‘trenchcoaters’, streakers, nudists, strippers.
Prohibitions on nudity have long been seen as part of the repression of natural sexuality and the body by society, both in academic theories and in folk understandings; thus, nudity can appear as transgressive, even dangerous to the civilised order. Patrons of strip clubs, being subjects to and of the same discourses as other individuals, also bring ideas about nudity as transgressive, dangerous and liberating to their visits to strip clubs and their encounters with dancers. The notion that strip clubs were somehow an expression of a transcultural, transhistorical ‘natural’ male sexuality that was repressed in everyday life was important to many of the customers. Similarly, the idea that strip clubs were places in which one was at risk for physical or moral contamination was also motivating and eroticised for the regular customers. Customers sometimes described themselves as ‘adventurers’, dancers as ‘brave’ and ‘wild’, and strip clubs themselves as places ‘outside of the law’ (Frank 2002a).
In strip clubs, customers also bring their own sexual histories to the transactions, as well as their beliefs about gender, sexuality and consumption. Although few of the customers claimed to be religious, and overwhelmingly expressed support for the dancers’ right to disrobe and the ‘naturalness’ of such an act, their enthusiasm usually waned when they were asked how they would feel if it were a wife or daughter onstage. Many of the regular customers were married to women who had more conservative views about nudity and sexuality than they did. Some customers stated that they were never allowed to look at the bodies of their wives or partners, even during sex – in these cases, nudity might be fascinating, awe inspiring or even upsetting. Even for those men who did have access to private revelations of the female body, the fact that they were paying for live, public performances meant that there were additional emotional layers enwrapping their interpretations of their encounters – mixtures of shame, anxiety, excitement and desire. If it is true that ‘there is no apprehension of the body of the other without a corresponding (re)vision of one’s own’ (Phelan 1993: 171), some of the pleasure in these commodified encounters arises from complicated, and concurrent, fantasies of security (rooted in the ritualised performances of sexual difference that unfold in the clubs) and fantasies of rupture or transgression (rooted in the feelings of degradation, vulnerability and freedom that many of the customers felt would accompany their own public nudity) (see Frank 2002a).
Perniola writes that in the figurative arts, ‘eroticism appears as a relationship between clothing and nudity’. That is, eroticism is ‘conditional on the possibility of movement – transit – from one state to the other’ (1989: 237). This is so in a strip club as well – although perhaps a few customers would still be titillated if the dancers took the stage already nude – but with an added, gendered transit as dancers also move between categories and potentialities, performing as ‘fantasy girls’ who may be simultaneously, or alternatively, virgins and whores (Egan 2003). Although costumes are variable, ranging from the dominatrix to the schoolgirl, two themes continue to reappear in dancers’ self-presentations and adornments: sexual availability/knowledge and innocence/untouchability. These themes emerge in a paradoxical relationship to each other – no dancer is actually sexually available within the confines of the club (or we are no longer talking about stripping) and no dancer is innocent in all social circles when her transgressions (disrobing in public and for money) become known.
Terrence Turner discusses the Kayapo of the Amazon, who exhibit an elaborate code of bodily adornment despite the fact that they do not wear clothing (lip plugs, penis sheaths, beads, body painting, plucked eyebrows, head shaving, etc.) and writes: ‘[T] apparently naked savage is as fully covered in a fabric of cultural meaning as the most elaborately draped Victorian lady or gentleman’ (1980: 115). Dancers, in this sense that Turner is referring to, are probably less naked than the rest of us under our clothes. One of the first things that a new dancer learns is how to adorn, present and move her body in ways that are legal, profitable and comfortable. Dancers continually modified their skin through grooming (cleansing, hair removal, texturising of the skin) makeup, scents and tanning. Hair has deeply symbolic meanings in many cultural systems (see Obeyesekere 1981; Rooks 1996; Turner 1980; etc.) and may become meaningful in different times and places through colour, length, style and so forth. The hair on the head, as well as the hair elsewhere on the body, is connected to gender systems in the USA: women are expected to remove hair from their legs, armpits, bikini line and face, for example, yet long hair on the head is generally associated with femininity. Longer hair has the advantage of being able to highlight particular body parts – it can be pulled in front to hide and then reveal the breasts; in a rear view pose it can brush the top of the buttocks; it can conceal or emphasise the eyes. Hair colour may also be used to send signals to customers and is associated with particular looks and personalities – the bubbly or sexy blonde, the exotic brunette, the feisty redhead. Although wilder styles and colours were found at the lower tier clubs, particularly among younger dancers, the upper-tier clubs tended to be more standardised. Dancers almost always conformed to the expectation of hair removal on the body, or were penalised for not doing so by the management or customers. In addition to removing leg and underarm hair, in the nude clubs most dancers also removed all of the pubic hair from the labia.
Accessorising the body did not stop at the skin or the hair, of course, and numerous kinds of plastic surgery are undergone by dancers perfecting their look: breast implants, breast lifts or reductions, lip injections, nose jobs, liposuction, tummy tucks, labia standardisation, etc. Other kinds of body modification included tattoos and piercings, especially tongue and clitoral piercings, and were increasingly common in the younger dancers (something that many of the older male customers commented on as marking a difference from their generation). While breast augmentations and other kinds of standardising surgeries usually served to enhance a woman’s value in the industry, tattoos and piercings did not necessarily do so. Dancers also modified their bodies for the job through dieting and physical training such as working out and bodybuilding.
Although nudity itself has been referred to as the ‘primal costume’ (Lewin 1984), there are few, if any, dancers who do not continue to fashion their nude bodies through accessories like high heels, boots, boas, jewellery, makeup or other specialised or theme costuming options. Performance theorist Katherine Liepe-Levinson writes that, for strippers, ‘Costumes are environments for bodies, and like the interior design of theatres, they not only frame those bodies, but also engage the wearers and viewers in environmental reciprocities with cultural symbols of gender and desire’ (1998: 137). Costumes help shape customer perceptions of dancers as they mingle with the audience, and thus sometimes influence which customers a dancer will interact with on a given night. Further, even as a dancer undresses, her body may retain traces of her outfit and garner complex valuations of classy or ‘trashy’ associated with particular kinds of adornment and the way that she wears them.
Dancers often appropriated standard cultural fantasies in their self-presentations and often self-consciously mixed behavioural patterns with symbolic fashion choices. Some women designed their approach to customers based on the bimbo stereotype – bubbly, giggly and light hearted – and might wear bikinis, brightly coloured clingy gowns or theme costumes depending on the rules of the club. Similarly, some dancers presented themselves as the girl next door – as students, friends or even possible lovers (although only in fantasy), and might wear cut-off shorts and tank tops, sundresses or ‘tasteful’ gowns. Others took up the position of bad girl – dressing in black and leather, talking dirty, promising dominance or adventure. Still others switched approaches depending on mood, type of customer and what the other dancers were doing that evening. One would rarely find a whole club of dominatrixes because the customer base usually would not support it; by the same token, one might find any number of plaid-skirted schoolgirls circulating among the audience. Sometimes costumes were chosen to fit body types – a small breasted woman, for example, might have a more difficult time pulling off the ‘sexy secretary’ than one who was literally spilling out of her business suit. Although the schoolgirl look was profitable for dancers with a wide range of body types, for different reasons, a very flat-chested or young looking dancer might be advised to try out the look. Many dancers also avoided particular looks that they found physically or morally uncomfortable. Some did not like little girl looks, for example, while others would not wear items associated with S&M.
An aesthetics of feminine excess (Waggoner 1997) works well in the sex industry, as everything can be overdone as a means of generating attention: necklines can plunge, skirt lengths can rise. Makeup can be exaggerated. Fetish boots might have platform heels and rise eight inches from the floor. Dancers may employ signs of wealth and glamour, and costumes can be extravagantly accessorised in a manner far too opulent (or trashy) for the average middle-class woman. How these signs are read by the customers varies, although is often patterned by the setting. In everyday life, of course, generating too much attention can be risky or annoying for women and the clubs could thus offer a safe place in which to try out forbidden looks or movements (Frank 2002b; Johnson 1999).
Over the last few decades, strip clubs have become ever more interactive and derive a great deal of their erotic charge from the promise of highly personalised encounters through the sale of table or lap dances. Unlike the burlesque shows of earlier years (Allen 1991), the highly choreographed Parisian striptease written about by Roland Barthes (1957) or the spectacular topless revues found in tourist locations such as Las Vegas, ‘house’1 dancers working in contemporary gentleman’s clubs usually mingle with the audience members individually, possibly spending more time conversing or dancing at a single customer’s table than in disrobing on stage. This increased interpersonal interaction requires new strategies on the part of the dancers for generating and maintaining customer interest, often involving performances of authenticity (‘You’re different from the other customers, I’ll tell you my real name’) and revelations of self (‘Let’s get to know each other’) (see Frank 1998).
In a piece on Parisian striptease, Barthes writes that it is based on the fundamental contradiction that woman is ‘desexualised at the very moment when she is stripped naked’ (1957: 84). The classic props used in striptease, he argues, ensure that the nakedness that follows the woman’s act is ‘no longer a part of a further, genuine undressing’. Instead, it ‘remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object’ (1957: 85). The dance routine is also a barrier to the true erotic for Barthes – as through a series of ritualistic gestures it hides the very nakedness that it is supposed to reveal. Professional stripteasers ‘wrap themselves in the miraculous ease which constantly clothes them, makes them remote, gives them the icy indifference of skillful practitioners, haughtily taking refuge in the sureness of their technique’ (1957: 86). He notes, however, that eroticism resurfaces in the amateur contest, where beginners undress ‘without resorting or resorting very clumsily to magic, which unquestionably restores to the spectacle its erotic power’. With ‘no feathers or furs’ and ‘few disguises as a starting point – gauche steps, unsatisfactory dancing, girls constantly threatened by immobility, and above all by a “technical” awkwardness (the resistance of briefs, dress or bra)’, amateurs are denied ‘the alibi of art and the refuge of being an object’, which gives their disrobing an ‘unexpected importance’ (1957: 86). Barthes, of course, is discussing striptease that took the form of elaborate costuming and lengthy stage shows which included little contact between the stripper and the individual members of the audience. Nevertheless, the popularity of amateur contests in contemporary strip clubs, the allure of ‘new girls’ and the customers’ confessed dislike of professionalism all support Barthes’ contentions, at least in part.
What Barthes perhaps did not realise, or what has perhaps changed since he wrote, is that some dancers have themselves become mythologists of sorts – self-consciously fashioning ways to produce an illusion of further unveiling in a room where any number of women may simultaneously be nude. Such a strategy, of course, does not work for every woman; neither does every woman need or want to use it – there are some customers, after all, for whom nudity itself is thrilling enough to compel financial generosity or who enjoy the spectacular rather than the individualised parts of the experience. Yet, such ‘intentional’ unveilings could indeed be profitable and dancers use a number of strategies to produce such intimate exposures – telling stories about their personal lives, feigning or summoning up attraction for the customer or embarrassment about being undressed in front of him or providing customers with real names or cell phone numbers, for example (Frank 1998). Dancers also sometimes crafted mistakes in their performance or attire to appear inexperienced or new.
The lack of ‘professionalism’ exhibited by dancers new to the business implied to some men that they would not be as skilled at manipulating men out of their money. To others, it seemed to provide a tension between purity and defilement which was particularly exciting. Contrariwise, there were certainly interactions that made dancers feel uncomfortably exposed, emotionally or physically, although the particularities varied for different women and boundaries were maintained in a variety of ways. Some dancers found regulars too emotionally draining to deal with, for example, and instead sought out quick encounters with men that they did not intend to see again. Customers sometimes used financial incentives to lure dancers across their boundaries of propriety or privacy. Women with the most financial need would find themselves more vulnerable to such requests.
A tension between purity and defilement also played out through customer talk about beauty. One frequently given justification by men for their visits to strip clubs is that ‘all men like to look at beautiful women’ or that ‘women’s bodies are works of art’. The appreciation of female beauty, then, was sometimes given as a justification for visiting the upper-tier clubs where the dancers were supposedly ‘prettier’. Men who were travelling or visiting with business associates would also often choose the upscale clubs because of their reputation for beautiful women (reputations earned through vigorous marketing and timely photo spreads in magazines like Playboy’s Guide to Men’s Clubs) and because these clubs were seen as providing the most opportunity to impress friends or clients. Dancers at the lower tier clubs were sometimes referred to in a derogatory way as ‘whores’ and described as ‘overweight, tattooed, and not very bright’. As symbols of conspicuous consumption in the clubs, beautiful women could also maintain the respectability and class status of the men who spent time with them. Just as the differentiation of a high-art nude from a centrefold in aesthetic terms can sometimes differentiate the consumers of each, an encounter with a beautiful woman could serve to partly legitimate a stigmatised behaviour in the strip club: a man could claim to be enjoying her in a purely aesthetic manner, which is generally seen as more respectable than looking at her for the purpose of pornographic (masturbatory) fantasy. This claim, however, is often made to balance out the ‘obscene’ body with which a customer is also faced with in such a scenario.
Beauty should not be seen simply as a ‘natural’ occurrence, however, for it is implicated in other social systems. Although a certain degree of physical attractiveness and athleticism may be a job prerequisite for working in a strip club (unless there is an extreme shortage of women willing to work as dancers), hierarchies within the industry are affected by social class. Skeggs writes that ‘physical attractiveness may work as a form of capital (corporeal capital)’ but also as a form of class privilege (1997: 102). Class privilege in attractiveness may also take the form of specialised knowledge and tools, as well as the resources to procure them. Women who have the most options as far as where they work, which customers they interact with, what kinds of service they are interested in performing and for retiring from the sex industry when they decide to do so, are usually those who are able to conform to middle-class standards of appearance (and sometimes also of behaviour, comportment and interaction).
Some dancers at every club enhanced their appearances through techniques such as hair extensions, plastic surgeries, year-round tanning, etc. Access to such techniques, however, as well as the quality of the results, was connected to social class and economic assets. Even the application of stage makeup and accessorising one’s costume carried with it certain kinds of cultural capital as well as learned skill and financial flexibility. Cultural capital could also influence dancers’ interactions outside the club, especially knowledge of the appropriate level of sexualised comportment and appearance for different situations. Women who had large implants or kept up a ‘stripper look’ or behaviour in other spheres could face harassment because of this decision and because of their visibility as women who transgressed expected codes of feminine display. Customers distinguished between dancers who they found attractive in the club and dancers that they would find attractive in other spheres as well – the girl you could ‘take home to mom’, the ‘girl next door’.
Strip clubs are a contemporary form of adult entertainment and the performances and interactions that unfold inside must be understood in their political, economic, historical and cultural contexts. Strippers cater to the sexualised fantasies of their customers, and their various styles of adornment, comportment, movement and interpersonal engagement draw on both personal and cultural systems of meaning in complex ways.
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