dispatches from Strip Nation, part 2, nearly naked joy

Last week on Halloween, I wrote a post that questioned the recent trend of fetish-wear inspired  Halloween costumes for women, and in doing so I introduced my notion of Strip Nation. Not surprisingly given the intense media hype surrounding “Slutoween,” the post garnered some attention, both critical and laudatory.

To be honest, I’m a lot less interested in what women wear to Halloween parties than I am interested in what their choices are, how media interprets these choices and what these choices mean in terms of culture at large. In my mind, the proliferation of “Naughty” and “Sexy” Halloween costumes is neither something to chastise and wag my finger at nor to celebrate and raise the big foam finger to; rather, it’s an opportunity to look at our culture in general, and our attitudes toward sex in specific. We may not be what we wear on Halloween, but what we wear gives us something not just to look at but also to think about.

Strip Nation, as I suggested in my earlier ramblings, is the dissemination of the go-go world of gentlemen’s clubs, strip bars, and burlesque into dominant culture. From the rather innocuous pleasure of body piercing to the unquestionably dangerous pursuit of perfectly pink and perfectly sculpted labia, from the pursuit of pole-dancing to the wearing of Lucite platform shoes, from the girl-next-door to the Girls Next Door, we are a country permeated by a new strip aesthetic. It’s everywhere you look, and as I suggested previously it’s problematic.

But it’s not all bad.

There’s a lot about Strip Nation that looks pretty rosy. Empowering. Celebratory. Even, and I hate this term for its near-emptiness, Sex-Positive.

Power comes from the choice to objectify one’s self for money, and strippers know this. From the day we are born to the day we die, we are all of us objectified, every day that we come into contact with other humans. Objectification is just something that we humans do. We look at others, we evaluate them, and we ask our selves: would we fuck them? We base these fuckability decisions based in no small part upon their looks (we often don’t, or can’t, act upon finding a person fuckable, but that doesn’t mean we don’t constantly weigh  people’s attractiveness). When you make the choice to perform this objectifying dance as your livelihood, you take control of this dynamic. In taking control, you assume power.

So the women who select the Red-Hot Devil costume for their Halloween party can temporarily appropriate this power for themselves, and when they choose a Sexy Cop or Hot Corrections Officer or other costume that erotically reinterprets an already inherently powerful cultural symbol, they’re increasing that appropriated power. Sexy Nurse may be powerful, but Hot Doctor = power(X)2. It’s almost algebraic.

It doesn’t have to be Halloween, though, for women to embody an empowering strip dynamic. Parties like Cake, a New York-based roving nightclub, offers chicks who want to try on sexual liberated behavior—from dancing in a bra and panties to making out with strange chicks to finding like-minded others for threesomes and moresomes—in a friendly environment are deeply imbued with stripper ethos. Strip clubs serve up the fantasy of sexually joyful girls, girls who are adventurous, uninhibited and eternally ready. It’s as intoxicating for a woman to imagine being one of these erotically free beings as it is for men to imagine being with one. Parties like Cake create a space where buttoned-up women can be unhinged girls, if only for one evening every couple of months.

Similarly, when chicks take pole-dancing or other strip exercise classes, they come to embody strippers, and it can be a profoundly transformative experience. I used to teach a strip work-out class. In the months that I taught, I saw this group of women comprised of mostly middle-class mommies learn how to move differently. Women who lived their lives in frozen pelvises, their shoulders hunched around their ears, found movement in their backs, found length in their necks. After the class ended, more than one husband thanked me profoundly. More importantly, though, these women did. I felt gratified to know that I’d made a difference in these people’s lives by teaching them how to access their inner stripper.

Nothing suggests the freedom, the power, and the erotic transgression inherent to stripping like the recent phenomenon of democratic burlesque. This topic deserves its own post—if not its own book—but the explosion of modern burlesque suggests exactly how powerful getting naked on stage can be. From the porcelain perfection of Dita Von Teese to the comic, carnivalesque, and culturally critiquing form of lesser known, and often more local, burlesque idols, burlesque has attained a popularity unequalled in its history.  Moreover, the reappropriation of burlesque by women of wide-ranging body types and sexualities has given the art form a fresh and cheeky political power.

Strip Nation has absolutely granted no small power to American women. It has allowed women to be all the best a stripper can be: visibly and proudly in charge of her own sexual self.

But being the person that I am, I can’t look at all this celebration of Strip Nation and ask what it means. What is it about our culture that makes women embody the stripper, however briefly, in order to access their own sexuality? What does the need to assertively become a sex object suggest about all the other moments when aren’t choosing to be one? What does the public performance of erotic availability mean about our private understanding of erotic availability? And why do we need to look to the most two-dimensional figure of female sexuality—the stripper—to find our erotic power animals?

These are just a few of the questions I’m interested in considering, living here, as I do, in Strip Nation.

Comments

[James D. Newman]

I've noticed the rise in voyeuristic sex in the culture, and I think that it mirrors the drop in "real" sex that followed the AIDS revolution. And it was a revolution -- I came of age in pre-AIDS America -- and sex is different now. Sex was never harmless, but it was viewed as harmless through the 60s and 70s -- and penicillin, condoms, the Pill and abortion did a lot to clear away the fear. That fear came back with a vengeance in the exaggerated sense of the danger of contracting AIDS (and it is an exaggerated danger in most peoples minds -- heterosexuals are MUCH more likely to contract Hepatitis but never seem to give that a thought, despite liver cancer). So back underground with all the nasty urges -- until the pressure builds up and has to come out in a safer way -- bang! Stripper-culture.

[Jo Weldon]

I think it relates to several things. Women hear (and say) things like, "She's too short/old/fat to be wearing that," and get the idea that dignity is somehow tied in with behaving in accordance with social guidelines for one's size and age, instead of dignity being something one assumes as a result of treating oneself with affection and respect. So they get up there and say, "I'm old and fat and I'm having a BLAST, and the only one not having fun is your sorry judgemental ass sitting there all horrified!"

As a burlesque teacher, I see a lot of people in classes who want to dance but think they're too awkward, and they think (usually with some accuracy) that burlesque and striptease movement, being based on a history of improvisation rather than codification as ballet is, will be easier than what they usually think of as dance. So when they find they can do it, and see themselves in the mirror, they just altogether perk up at the thought that if they work at it, they can do some lovely moves, without having a perfect dancer's body that started training at the age of 4.

[Chad]

Strip Nation, huh? I can see that. I totally understand your premise but I think only a person that is familiar with all the areas being discussed can understand that you have patched a quilt of unrelated events that have faint associations at best. From my perspective, your old gig as a stripper seems to be constricting your view of this topic through that provocative but narrow prism. True, stripping has had an influence in American culture, but it has not been the pervasive agent of change that you make it out to be. Stripping (like go go dancing , video models, burlesque, etc…) are more a by-product and less the actual catalyst for the events you describe. I think your failure to find the origin of “Strip Nation” is where you fail. If you knew how all of these things came about then you would know that are not related. For example, you describe the behavior of thong-clad, tanorexic chicks that are addicted to Brazilian waxes & botox (Ok, I threw in the botox) as women emulating strippers or “strip culture“, but it’s been well documented that the girls, young and older women alike, are mimicking their favorite celebs. And these exotic dancers are too, just imitating their favorite celebs. Strippers do not set the trends though they are at the forefront of what’s hot. And as you know, when a woman is spotted anywhere in either Lucite heels or an exposed thong, she is immediately attached the label of either a exotic dancer or prostitute. And there is also a much simpler explanation to why women are dressing so provocatively around Halloween these days, too. But I’m not going into any more details since this shit won’t get published anyway, lol. Sometimes I just have to vent. Happy Holidays.