The SuicideGirls Burlesque Tour makes me think back -- way back -- to my adolescence, to the days before I had ever been to a real strip club.
When I was 15, do you know what I thought a real strip club was going to be like? I thought it would be like a dinner theater. There would be a great big stage up front. The band would begin to play. The curtain would rise. A spotlight would come on. A woman would come out wearing a sequined gown, elbow-length gloves and a feather boa.
She would perform a choreographed dance routine to the music, during the course of which she would remove all her clothes . . . slowly, flirtatiously and with a dramatic flair, building the tension and anticipation with each item that she cast aside. By the end, she would be wearing only a tiny G-string and a pair of tasseled pasties over her areolae. Then the curtain would fall and the audience would applaud and cheer.
Imagine my surprise to experience the real thing for the first time when I was a junior in high school. It was the bachelor party for a friend of a friend. The name of the place was "The Candy Bar." It was a hole.
The biggest shock was that the women neither danced nor did they actually strip. They would do three songs. On the first song they would be wearing some kind of outfit. On the second song they would be topless. On the third song they would be nude. They would just walk up and down the platform, pausing to twirl around the catpole or squat and rotate their hips, displaying their bodies and collecting dollar bills in their garters.
I felt awkward; would it be rude to stare openly at her parts instead of making eye contact? Or would it actually be ruder, given the circumstances, not to stare?
When fantasy and reality collide, it's rarely pretty. I figured that only women who were movie-star gorgeous and had enormous breasts would be "strippers." It was a strange combination of relief and disappointment to discover that average-looking people of all ages perform nude for strangers for money.
I was mainly let down by the fact that the ancient, traditional, teasing, tantalizing art of "stripping" was simply not an element. They mainly just sort of walked around with nothing on.
My curiosity about the subject eventually led me to conduct years of informal anthropological field work.
It also led me to read several excellent books written by the women who had been there . . . here are a few that are sitting on the shelf right now.
Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture by Carol Queen
Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex and Power by Elisabeth Eaves
Nine Lives: from Stripper to Schoolteacher: My Yearlong Odyssey in the Workplace by Lynn Snowden
Strip City by Lily Burana
Queen of Burlesque: the Autobiography of Yvette Paris
Ivy League Stripper by Heidi Mattson
I recommend them all.
When I was 15, do you know what I thought a real strip club was going to be like? I thought it would be like a dinner theater. There would be a great big stage up front. The band would begin to play. The curtain would rise. A spotlight would come on. A woman would come out wearing a sequined gown, elbow-length gloves and a feather boa.
She would perform a choreographed dance routine to the music, during the course of which she would remove all her clothes . . . slowly, flirtatiously and with a dramatic flair, building the tension and anticipation with each item that she cast aside. By the end, she would be wearing only a tiny G-string and a pair of tasseled pasties over her areolae. Then the curtain would fall and the audience would applaud and cheer.
Imagine my surprise to experience the real thing for the first time when I was a junior in high school. It was the bachelor party for a friend of a friend. The name of the place was "The Candy Bar." It was a hole.
The biggest shock was that the women neither danced nor did they actually strip. They would do three songs. On the first song they would be wearing some kind of outfit. On the second song they would be topless. On the third song they would be nude. They would just walk up and down the platform, pausing to twirl around the catpole or squat and rotate their hips, displaying their bodies and collecting dollar bills in their garters.
I felt awkward; would it be rude to stare openly at her parts instead of making eye contact? Or would it actually be ruder, given the circumstances, not to stare?
When fantasy and reality collide, it's rarely pretty. I figured that only women who were movie-star gorgeous and had enormous breasts would be "strippers." It was a strange combination of relief and disappointment to discover that average-looking people of all ages perform nude for strangers for money.
I was mainly let down by the fact that the ancient, traditional, teasing, tantalizing art of "stripping" was simply not an element. They mainly just sort of walked around with nothing on.
My curiosity about the subject eventually led me to conduct years of informal anthropological field work.
It also led me to read several excellent books written by the women who had been there . . . here are a few that are sitting on the shelf right now.
Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture by Carol Queen
Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex and Power by Elisabeth Eaves
Nine Lives: from Stripper to Schoolteacher: My Yearlong Odyssey in the Workplace by Lynn Snowden
Strip City by Lily Burana
Queen of Burlesque: the Autobiography of Yvette Paris
Ivy League Stripper by Heidi Mattson
I recommend them all.