pretty dumb things

bitchslapping 101

Last Saturday, I went to a play. It was, and I wish I could be more charitable, really pretty awful. It did, however, give me the platform to indulge in what very likely is the bitchiest bundle of prose I've yet committed to .doc and which was published today on one of my favorite blogs, Tits and Sass. The play in question, Stripper Lesbians (or possibly Lesbian Strippers, I can never remember), raised my ire not merely for its unabashed sloppy writing but also its lack of fundamental knowledge about strippers and stripping. Here's a choice morsel of my T&S post for you:

I also had difficulty following the logic of this play. To wit: Aisha is both a stripper and, as DJ reads from Evan’s thesis, “unemployed.” DJ himself is actually unemployed, although he does audition for Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night using a monologue taken from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and appears to live with Evan post-breakup under her good graces and on the money that she earns as a stripper, despite the fact that she was a finalist in “Glamour’s College Student of the Year” for her article that “Mak[es] Anti-Sex Trafficking Sexy,” which was taken from the thesis she wrote while working at Wildlands, a strip club that does not appear to dabble in sex trafficking but has attracted the interest of Playboy, which wants Aisha to pose, to which Evan is opposed to because it’s anti-feminist, which they discuss in a scene that takes place after one showing on-stage discourse that culls equally from a Gender Studies 101 syllabus and any episode of South Park featuring Cartman’s mom’s scheisse films (suffice to say that Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, spanking and German accents make cameos). Oh, Aisha is also a cellist. She plays not for money but because it’s her “passion.”

However, I suspect my greatest antipathy to Stripper Lesbians came not so much from the kind of sense it made—which was none—and more from the fact that it didn’t seem as if anyone connected with this show had ever been inside a strip club, much less talked to an actual stripper. 

You can go here to read the rest.

I found it an interesting exercise writing about a play, especially one this rife with issues. This play held a deep-fried King Rat of problems, really, and its dusting of condescension only made it more perplexing. In short, I had to make some really hard decisions.  

For example, I had to cut any discussion of the moment when DJ, the ex-boyfriend and thus token heterosexual male, auditions for Long Day's Journey Into Night by reciting a passage from feminist bible Our Bodies, Ourselves. On the surface, it's a joke that works. It's a funny conceit for anyone--male or female--to give a monologue gleaned from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the surface concept that someone would do it to get a role in Eugene O'Neill's quintessential American drama of addiction is even funnier. 

And yet.

The passage that Stripper Lesbians playwright Kate Foster chose for the script is one centering on sex-workers. It is, in fact, this:

Some feminists have been critical of prostitutes for reinforcing sex-role stereotypes, by allowing themselves to be sex objects or for participating in the sex industry… and contributing to violence against women, as some see sex work as a form of violence in and of itself. Others insist that it is a legitimate way for women to earn money from men. As one prostitute said, "It's my body; why shouldn't I be the one to decide how I should use it?" In the words of an ex-prostitute: “I've worked in straight jobs where I've felt more like I was prostituting my being than in prostitution. I had less control over my life, and the powerlessness wasn't even up front. People didn't see me as selling myself, but with the minimum wage so little and my boss so insulting, I felt like I was selling my soul.”

Again, it could work dramatically. DJ, the former boyfriend, is angry. He is angry not only that his girlfriend has become a lesbian but that now that his girlfriend is now a stripper she is no longer his girlfriend. His anger permeates the play, driving the dramatic action, such as it is. So, ok. I can see the logic for why this is the excerpt.

It could work, but for the way that the actor performs the monologue, and the way he performs it is this: he puts on his very best crack-ho voice, slouching in the corner, pretending to smoke a cigarette, like he'd just walked off a street corner.

Because, you know, prostitutes are funny. As are strippers. And, I guess, lesbians.

There's this thing that The Atlantic and The New York Times do when they write about sexytime sexy sex, and it's kind of like my mom's face when she talks about my former strip job or my fake boobs. It's this pursing of the lips that liberals do that shows their genteel distaste for certain kinds of sex. Look around you, and you'll see the liberal in the corner clucking over the perverts. It's a thing, and it's in this play, and it's in Tina Fey, and it's in major media, and it's all about us.

This play was steeped in righteous condescension, but because the underlying message is "See? Strippers (and lesbians) are just like us!" the play gets off the hook--and the audience can feel validated as they laugh along. 

I'm not suggesting that there's not anything funny about strippers, stripping or strip clubs. There is. Lots. I'm also not suggesting that it's not a place for parody. It is. Boy howdy, is it ever. I'm just suggesting that there's laughing at us strippers and there's laughing with us. And that we're smart enough to know the difference.

 

her name isn't bubbles

My friend Bubbles Burbujas, also known as the amazing StripperTweets on Twitter, wrote a post about my joining the My Name Is Me campaign for her communal blog Tits and Sass, a website devoted to the intelligent, often funny, always real, voices of sex-workers. Bubbles says:

Google is becoming like that irritating customer who thinks he’s so clever for figuring out that stripper probably really isn’t named Fantasia, what with asking people, “No, really, what’s your real name?” Welcome to our world, online handle users! Choosing a work name is one of the first things nearly every sex worker does when entering the business. My name isn’t really Bubbles, Kat’s driver’s license says something else, and Charlotte wasn’t given that name at birth. We all have different reasons for using other identities online from the frivolous (to bitch about work without trouble) to the very serious (malevolent stalkers).

As a former stripper, I'm fascinated with identity--the ones we choose for ourselves, the ones we find society pastes upon us like so many adverts for Mila Kunis rom-coms, the ones that chafe, the ones towards which we aspire. A rose by any other name may still be a rose, but I'm fairly certain that the Society of American Florists would rebrand it if its name were stinkweed. Stripping for six years, I saw many dancers change their names when they realized that no one wanted to get a dance from Suede.

I've written often about identity; it's not just an idle concept for me. There was this post about navigating the choppy waters between my strip self and being in grad school. There was this post about choosing the strip name CeeCee, and this post about what it meant. And then there's the pice that I wrote for Tits and Sass on the weirdness of being a sex writer. I don't know if I became interested interested in the smoke and mirrors of identity because I was a stripper or if I became a stripper in part because identity was always smoke and mirrors.

"I am my mane, my mane is me," my friend Rita would say every night she geared up to swivel another shift at FlashDancers. And, really, it's as good a strip mantra as any I've heard. Flattening your self into glossy swinging strands can seem to work well in the ever-plastic world of a strip club. It's way more snarled in the world of the real, which if you're a stripper includes the plastic playland of silky Lycra, Lucite shoes and fake names. 

Real, fake, digital, analog, call it what you will, it's always complicated.

 

 

tits and sass and wits and class

I'm a friend of Bubbles, one of the unstoppable forces of seduction and intelligence behind the sexworker blog site, Tits and Sass. I'm half in awe and half in love and more than a little scared by Bubbles, particularly her hipster cred and music nerd chops. An added bonus to our relationship is the ability to drop phrases like "as my friend Bubbles said" into conversation; however piquant that may be, the actual friendship is far more meaningful and rewarding.

Bubbles asked me to contribute a piece or two to Tits and Sass, and my first one, "Shaking Tail and Spinning Tales, From Shaking It to Spinning Them," is up today. The piece explores the intersection of stripping and writing erotica. Here's an excerpt:

Strippers and erotica writers choose to write under names not only because they fear personal and professional reprisals—sex is a dangerous business, even if you’re just depicting it in words; you don’t even need to airfuck for cash to make sex dangerous; never mind the zip code, just living in the Congressional district of sex is dangerous and implicating—but because the fantasy of being someone else isn’t just for the audience. In some way, it’s there for you as the stripper or the writer too. I call this “The Sasha Fierce Effect.”

Beyoncé created her alternate wild-girl persona Sasha Fierce in order to do the stuff on stage that she as Beyoncé wasn’t entirely comfortable doing. If, like a person with multiple personality disorder, you fracture your self into discrete (and ideally discreet) units, you might find you can deal with the perceived dangers of that freakish enterprise. 

Go here to read the rest. It's free. While you're at it, take some time to read the site's coverage of the Ashton Kutcher/Village Voice sex-trafficking "Real Men Don't Pay for Sex" kerfuffle. Both sides could gain from reading what Tits and Sass have posted, frankly. 

In my post, I namedrop a series of posts that I've written here (as well as a couple of Penthouse articles, stories for anthologies and the like). For those readers who might like to read those posts, I thought I'd give some links. Here they are, in order:

The one about the time my boyfriend bound me, blindfolded me, and made me come like a yowling banshee. 

The one about the time I had the world's fasted threesome.

The one about the time I was the girlmeat in the boy sandwich.

The one about the time I fucked a clown.

The one about the times I gave head. Really, there's a lot of head giving.

The one about the time I first squirted.

The one about the time I admitted my ambivalence over nipple clamps.

And if that's not enough, here's the whole smut enchilada, and here are the oral parts and the anal parts. It's like Freud's stages, but without the shaming or the cigars. And finally, here are all my strip tales, starting at the beginning. Because as long as we're talking about tits and sass, we might as well go full circle.

 Ps. I also write about a lot of stuff that has little if anything to do with sex. Because there's also rock 'n roll, zombies and Buffy.

object lessons

 Last November, I stood dressed in my tattered skivvies for Molly Crabapple. She sat on the floor with her legs folded under her looking like a wayward flower-seller. She drew me, pausing periodically to hold up her brush mathematically to capture the angle of my arm or my thigh. We talked about the healthcare debate and academic life, and when I tipped a pot of ink over onto her carpet, she was kind. I blotted up the mess, and she said the shadow blotch added character.

Two of these illustrations are now available on t-shirts. You can buy them at Fred Segal, if you live in LA; you can buy them at Atrium starting in mid-June, if you live in Gotham; and if you live otherwhere, you can buy them online. I have bought one of each of the t-shirts myself so that I can wear myself in stereo. I can, from time to time, endorse my own narcissism, a quality I like to rebrand á la Gala Darling as a tepid flavor of radical self-love. (I can’t quite call my self-love radical; it remains timid as weasels and twice as unpredictable.)

 Molly’s drawing of me called “Strut” by Dirtee Hollywood is at the framing shop. Soon it’ll sit bright and shiny and new on one of my old and dingy walls. It’s art, and I love it, and I know few people who can say that they have adorned Fival Stewart’s chest. I have, or an image of me has, anyway. I am one degree of separation away from Twilight franchise teen-tart tit. Che Guevara and I now have something in common, presumably.

Make no mistake about it: posing for an artist is gratifying in profound ways. It’s fantastic to stand for five or ten minutes, to take pride in holding a pose, to feel your muscles quiver tight as a racehorse, to keep your chin tilted just so, to hold tight and hold tighter, and to see at the end yourself represented through someone else’s gifted eyes and talented hand. I’ve modeled for artists only a few times in my life, and I’ve never felt anything but a rarified form of aerie elation. It’s a bit high-making, in all honesty. It beats drugs because rather than a hangover and a headache, you inevitably get a lovely two-dimensional parting gift rolled in your hand.

Which is to say, in short, that there is joy in being an object. I have loved the slipping feeling of turning into a thing and losing my being. I spent so many years as a stripper in a happy vague state of bland awareness, and I enjoyed much of that time. Consciousness is a curse, I’ve often felt, and felt keenly, bright and sharp and shiny as an expensive German knife. My consciousness has often been unkind; it has lit my life in the unforgiving gaze of overhead fluorescent lighting. I have been grateful for the Lethean waters of objectification.

Though I’ve not known why until recently. At the beginning of March, a team of researchers from the New School for Social Research released their findings from a study of objectification of women. The study, as reported widely on the web, suggested that women are objectified, their cognitive abilities falter. The researchers suggest that this decrease in cognitive function is due to a splitting of self—an awareness both of oneself as viewed and as viewing one’s self being viewed—and that this splitting of consciousness makes it, well, hard to think.

Objectification is hard, let’s go shopping.

The research leaves a lot to be desired. For one thing, it acts as if women’s objectification of women is inconsequential. For another, it acts as if women’s objectification of men doesn’t exist. It also studied only 25 women, and the methods of the study—filming women from the neck down, asking them to fill out a questionnaire about their own self-objectification, and then subjecting them to cognitive tests—seem to this layperson to be a bit fragmented. There’s no question that the study leaves a lot to be desired before we take it as anything more than an interesting cocktail niblet.

And yet. My experience as a professional is that there is a delightful slip-sliding of self that happens during an attenuated moment of objectification. I can’t speak for all strippers across all time, but I can say that one of the things I most treasured about becoming CiCi (at least in the first few years) was how much it made my mind go blissfully blank. I felt like a silver screen, a blank spot for the projection of fantasies, and I liked it. I called it "my blonde lobotomy," and I still hold it close with nostalgia, even as it cloys with the scent of too much perfume and tanning lotion.

I miss that blonde blandness. Granted, not all the time—and certainly that was one of the many reasons why CiCi died that long slow death; I grew to resent the object-becoming, I fought the fugue, and I stayed more solidly myself—but when I’m with my lover, I like to be an object. I like to feel my mind go blank, white and flat, clean as a clean sheet of paper. Ready to be drawn upon, or merely drawn.

I write today as I wrote yesterday as I will write tomorrow as a feminist. Yet I can’t say that there isn’t value in being objectified, in losing yourself to those sublime blank moments. The problem isn’t becoming an object; it’s staying one. That’s what I’ve learned from my time in two dimensions. You can choose to be three-D in a shiny neuro-second. In a moment, you can take back your presence. I’d be interested to see these sociologists study a passel of strippers. I’ve no doubt they could turn off and on the objectification faster than a strobe light

These are object lessons, and they’re illustrative. Pretty pictures don’t tell the whole story, neither being one nor making one. Speaking as a sentient carbon-based life-form with an insatiable need for lip-gloss, I quite like being an object from time to time, even if I enjoy being a fully embodied person most of the time. Nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

tattoos numbers 9 and 10

Yesterday I met with Stephanie Tamez, the woman whom I refer to as my tattoo artist, to consult about my new tattoos. Stephanie is a tiny, quick person with the affect of a highly tattooed sparrow, if sparrows were themselves tattooed and rather than more often being tattoos themselves. I walked into the studio with a general feeling of befuddlement tinged with resentment that I had to have a consult at all, but Stephanie, it turns out, is a much wiser woman than I when it comes to the decoration of dermis. She quickly talked me out of my initial concept and she, being both an artiste and a merchant, convinced me to get a completely new design around my existing, raw, and kind of ugly tribute tattoo and to put the two textual tattoos elsewhere.

So I've now an appointment on 4 May for the work around the existing tattoo, a frame that will take the form of some Victorian filigree, which will be, according to the infinitely more expert Stephanie, both "organic" and "visual." I'm on stand-by for the two textual tattoos. The Addams Family quote will go on the inside of my forearm right under my inner elbow so that it is balanced against my Joyce quote on the inside of my wrist. The Buffy quote will be placed between the already existing Joyce quote and the to-be-added Addams Family quote so that it wraps around my forearm, more or less bisecting my forearm horizontally, and such that the phrase "love's bitch" features on my forearm. If you can picture that, which I can because I spent a good forty-five minutes taping paper to my arm, you're doing better than I suspect. Pictured below are the graphics of the two textual tattoos. I'll post pictures when I get them done.

Who doesn't love new skin art? No one I want to have lunch with. I'll make an exception for my parents because, you know, they raised me and all.

For no reason that I can think of, the Addams Family quote (it translates to "we gladly feed on those who would subdue us," not just pretty words) is the actual size, but the Buffy isn't. I guess you can click to embiggen it.

in which little miss morph-a-lot fails

Sadly, the book deal for the book that was to be my first book, although not my book but a book written by me, has gone south. Suffice to say that it was no one’s fault; I wanted more money; they wanted to give me less; we couldn’t agree on numbers; life goes on.

Though I can’t spill the whole pot of bubbling beans, the book in question was a collection of erotica written centered on the employees of a business this particular corporation would like to be known as “an upscale gentleman’s club,” but which I would term simply a strip club or, were I in a sassier frame of mind, a “titty bar.” It was, essentially, a book that splayed its fictionally tanned, toned thighs across the Venn diagram of erotica, journalism and corporate branding. The book’s agent, the corporation in question and I all agreed that I, being both a former “entertainer,” a writer of erotic fiction and an occasional journalist, would be perfect for the project.

As it turned out, the project wasn’t perfect for me, or I should say that the money offered for the project was much less than perfect, and so I chose to walk. I wish the corporation, the agent, and all involved the best.

I’m sad about this loss, but this post is less about the travails of my first Book That Wasn’t and more abut how bone-vibratingly surreal it was for me to go to the club of corporation in question, meet with the club’s P.R. guy and the book’s agent, and talk with the various employees of the establishment/gentleman’s club/strip club. Because what I found when I stepped through those double doors and into the inescapable shuk-shuk-shuk bass-thrumming atmo of every titty bar between Bangor and Beijing, was that you can take the woman out of the strip club, but you can never take the stripper out of the girl.

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.

now on newsstands near you, december edition

The December edition of Penthouse, along with my article on being a moral manwhore is now out and available at a newsstand near you.

It's all kinds of illustrated.

Go ahead, pick one up and let me know how you like it. Honestly, I hope you do.

kissykiss,
chelsea g

dispatches from Strip Nation, part 1, halloween

If the general media hue and cry is to be believed, there’s nary a girl over nine or a woman under ninety who is not dressing like a whore this Halloween. In recent days, there’s been a tremendous amount of media attention—both that of conventional media and that of its alternative counterparts—spent on how the range of female costumes has ranged widely from the mildly naughty to the downright fetishistic, with hardly any choice left for those chicks who want to dress up and not look like they’re selling hand-jobs for crack or taking a break from La Maison de Latex down the block.

It’s not like the sluttification of Halloween is a new thing. In season two of Buffy first aired in 1996, Buffy tried to convince her then very straight-laced best friend Willow to bare a bit of skin for the holiday.

“You're missing the whole point of Halloween,” says Buffy.

“Free candy?” Willow asks.

“It's come as you aren't night,” Buffy says, “the perfect chance for a girl to get sexy and wild with no repercussions.”

Oh,” says Willow, “I don't get wild. Wild on me equals spaz.” And then after gamely donning the navel-baring rock chick ensemble, hides her hottie light under a ghost-costume bushel, unable to follow through with the public performance of her inner wild girl.

I’m not particularly interested in getting my panties in a moralizing wedge over the choice of a fully-fledged adult woman to dress as a naughty nurse, or even over an uninformed kid’s choosing to wear some garb that’s age inappropriate. As much as I’m disinclined to suggest that this Ho-rrific trend is the second sign of the apocalypse—we all know the first was Xanadu, the Broadway musical—I am, however, interested in looking at what it means that the go-to Halloween garb for adults seems to be some variation of streetwalker.

I briefly attended a Halloween party this past weekend. In attendance was a Sexy Cop, a mini-skirted Marie Antoinette, a Gold-Digger, a Naughty Nurse, a Hot Devil and a woman with a deerstalker cap dressed as Sherlock Ho. (There was also a Tinkerbelle, a Marilyn Monroe, and a denim cut-offs wearing Amy Winehouse, but while those costumes may have some kind of intrinsic erotic charge, none of them were designed with sheer T&A-showing titillation in mind, so I’m not counting them.) Not including me, who dressed as a homicidal maniac, which meant I looked like everyone else, over half of the women at the party had dressed to thrill.

I have to wonder if women who choose to costume themselves in Fritz the Cat-esque appropriations of fetish and streetwalker wear do it for the facile reason that most people give: that Halloween gives the repressed a big Get out of Jail Free Card for their repressions. It just seems too simple an explanation for me, that old chestnut about how, as cultural philosopher Mikhail Bahktin suggested, the carnival give people the big fat transgressive blank check to live lives, however briefly, opposite to their own. Frankly, looking around me on Halloween, I’m not buying that.

Because for one thing, women have a limited lip service granting permission to be sexual. More than any time previous to our current millenium, we women own our own sexuality in a variety of ways never previously possible. We can talk about it. We can engage in it. We can attend workshops about it. We can educate ourselves. We can rightfully expect a life full of lots of orgasms of various shapes and sizes and colors. And most importantly, we can decide when or if we will ever reproduce, at least in most states and under most insurance plans. We certainly have the appearance of feeling joyously empowered with our own _____________ (insert favorite term for vagina here).

So perhaps this donning the fishnets and vinyl cowgirl gear has more to do with that pussy power (“pussy” remains my favorite vaginal term; don’t expect me to use “vajayjay” anytime soon), but I don’t think so. Because there’s something about this kind genre of costume’s use of excessive sexual force that gestures less towards empowerment and more towards something else.

To me, when “good girls” dress “bad” on Halloween, they are drawing the line in the sartorial sand between they, who have never chosen to support themselves by stripping in front of, talking on the phone to, or having sex with complete strangers, and those of us who have. They are, in effect, putting on these salacious clothes once a year to show that they have never had to be bad; therefore, they can choose to wear their badness as negligently and temporarily as a cheap Ricky's costume. And then once the cold, hard light of 1 November hits the sky, they can revert, like a showered if hungover Cinderella, to their properly chaste and culturally upright positions. No harm, no foul, no lasting memories of a stray hand, a cruel word, or an unexpected sex act tying the body, the money and the feeling into one greasy knot.

But even that explanation is a bit facile, even if it is correct, and I think it is, however unconsciously for the lion’s share of Sexy Hogwarts Students tipping over tonight in their Lucite platforms. Because this trend wherein women are dressing like they should be called next on main stage, as much as it speaks to their defining their 364-day selves against their Halloween fantasy, also speaks to the seduction of what I’ve come to call Strip Nation.

Strip Nation is the place where little girls wear body glitter for fun, where pole dancing is a fitness pursuit, where chicks have standing appointments for monthly Brazilians, and weekly tans, French manicures and matching pedicures. It’s the place where women purposefully show bra straps and g-strings. It’s where average women have the lower-back tattoo, body piercings, and t-shirts that read “Diva.” It’s the where women get breast implants, labiaplasty and anal bleaching. It’s a place where family restaurants have waitresses wearing orange short-shorts, and where drag-queen restaurants have banana deep-throat contests, and where eighteen year-old girls win them.

Strip Nation is where we live now. It’s not a bad place to live. Strip Nation gives us Carmen Electra and body butter. Strip Nation lets us shake our booty with abandon. Hell, Strip Nation, combined with Hip-Hop Nation—it’s a unified country of dual principalities—has given us the word “booty.” Without Strip Nation, we’d still be pogoing and wearing flat shoes and high-waisted pleated pants.

Strip Nation can be a lot of fun, but it’s a deeply problematic kind of fun. I am proud to have been a stripper, but I know that stripping is best kept in the strip club because stripping is about serving up a fantasy based on the most simplistic heterosexual male’s formulation of an uncomplicated woman. Most simply, Strip Nation provides a dreamscape based on a model of a two-dimensional woman and men’s desire for them. And while that is all well and fine for an eight-hour strip shift, it has major issues when it goes rampant, out into the streets, and disseminates like a virus into the culture at large.

I wonder how much women choosing to dress like a stripper for Halloween—whatever the flavor of the specific fantasy—isn’t centered on an unquestioning slide into the happy amnesia of Strip Nation: a place where men will be men, women will be girls, and no one need have a thought cross their untrammeled brows. I wonder how much the Naughty Nurse, the Sassy Satan, the Wanton Witch, the Reform School Drop Out, the Pirate Wench, and all the heaving bosom, exposed thigh rest, has more to with the prefeminist nostalgia that Strip Nation embodies. I wonder how much the naughty Halloween costume hasn’t less to do with getting one’s freak on as it does with doing so in a way that feels like you don’t have to think about it when you do.

Tomorrow, Halloween will just be a bunch of garbled stories and memories, gone for another year, But we’ll still be living in Strip Nation. Look around you, it’s everywhere. Fun, yes. But at what cost?

spandex & lucite shoes: part 42, on how a good man is hard to find

As I close in on narrating the final days of my strip life at FlashDancers Finishing School for Young Ladies, I feel the need to take time to wrap up some odds and some ends, and some odd ends. What follows is a kind of character sketch of a kind character, a man called Nunzio. If you're interested in reading more about the strip life, here's the whole index, and here's the very first post.

Nunzio was the night manager of FlashDancers, but that statement really doesn’t give the full import of the man. The other two managers for day and for weekends were the brother and the sister of Barry, the sometimes corpulent and always visible owner of Flash. To them, Barry’s flesh and blood, his betters, educationally at least, for they both had an M.A. in something less lucrative than the running of a titty bar—and what isn’t, really, Barry, who left school in tenth grade to mop jizz in Times Square jack-off booths,  gave the management of the lesser shifts at Flash. The greater shifts, those of the moneyed weeknights, went to Nunzio. This division of labor alone speaks to the importance of  this man.

To Nunzio, Barry gave the important shifts: Tuesday through Saturday nights, five nights a week, from around 7:00 p.m. until the money was counted in the wee hours of the morning, a time by which we strippers were snug in our beds or discoing around Manhattan whacked out on coke or whatever it was we did after work and before daylight broke a new day.

Nunzio always looked as if he had been styled by John Gotti’s classier cousin. He was invariably impeccably dressed in a suit, a discreet pocket square in his breast pocket, a subdued shirt, a coordinating tie. His white hair was always exactly the same length, as if it was groomed so often that it neither grew nor was cut. He always looked the same: unruffled and unflappable, a calm grandfatherly eye in the lurid Flash storm.

Nunzio had come to Flash a package deal with the property. He had been bought by the oft-times muscular Barry and his posse of invisible backers when they had purchased the club. In an almost mythic union, Nunzio had begun his relationship with the subterranean night club in the 70’s as a manager when it had been a disco, had stayed manager through its days as a gay dance club and was now the feckless captain of its strip-bar incarnation. I imagine that he will always be there, no matter what the club becomes in the future, a form of some epic penance for enraging some small demi-god of the semi-underworld, or some fairytale reward for doing some small sprite a tiny happiness.

In any case, Nunzio seemed attached to the room itself. Watching him work, I’d see him glide with unfathomable poise through the crowd; it parted compliant before him. I’d see him emerge from the secret room walled behind the row of tables in the back, a fortress of shiny black plastic and mirrors making nearly indictable its existence next to the Champagne Room, and wonder what secrets he was privy to. What he knew from watching monitors, from reading ledgers, from unearthing the undoubtedly hoary secrets of FlashDancer’s murky depths.

I can only imagine, really, for he would never be one to tell me.

Nunzio’s voice sounds a lot like Robert DeNiro’s as the kindly father in The Bronx Tale. He has those Bensonhurst-Mulberry Street-Arthur Avenue flattened vowels, those tell-tale dropped final consonants. He sounds like he has lived a life looking forward to a pot of gravy and pasta on Sundays, and he has. I, unlike most of the Flash girls, took time to talk to Nunzio—I talked to Barry too, and to the DJs, and to anyone who would tell me his or her story—and so I learned the bits and pieces. I learned his Flash history, found out the bare bones of his family (one of his many sons graduated from the school where I did my Ph.D.), discovered where and how he lived, as much as I could, which wasn’t nearly enough.

One thing I knew: Nunzio had an unshakeable faith in aspirin. No matter what ailed you, Nunzio advocated aspirin. Headaches, heartaches, backaches: aspirin. Aches of the spirit, bouts of nihilistic darkness, clouds of ambient anxiety: aspirin. Occasionally, he would also advocate a drink, but mostly his go-to panacea was aspirin. Which I suppose speaks to the generation that Nunzio was from more than anything else—he may have been dragged along for the new millennium ride, but he was clearly a man of the pre-counter revolution 60s. Nunzio was a very sexy man, but he clearly didn’t swing.

A good thing, too, for more than one strip club has lost its bearings when its manager has lost his lust, or his control over it anyway. No one knew if Nunzio found any one girl more attractive than another, for he treated all of us pretty equally. Clearly, he liked some of us more than others, myself included. He liked me quite a bit.

“CeeCee,” he’d tell me as I had come to him once more to advocate my going home early, or to present my side of some inequity I’d suffered at the ham-fisted hands of patron or bouncer, “you should be a lawyer.” And then he’d smile indulgently.

Once I remember I came to him, one very boring night when I was just not making any money and my feet hurt and I couldn’t, just couldn’t, play the strip game any longer, not one moment longer, not one second, and I raised my hands in front of my chest like a begging dog and whined.

Hmmmm…. Hmmmmm… I pleaded, making a puppy face.

Nunzio looked me up and down. Pulled his head back, raised an eyebrow. “All right,” he said, “you can go home provided you never do that again,” and in one sentence he both gave me what I wanted and communicated his deep personal disappointment in me, so much, in fact, that I felt shame as I packed my dance bag and tripped off into the night.

Not that Nunzio was always fair to me. One time, during my body of death phase, when I had arms that made gay guys ask me how I got them and a six pack of abs, he waved me over to the Manager’s podium. “CeeCee,” he said, a grin twitching his lips, “Some guy just asked me if you were a man.”

No way, I said.

“Really.” Nunzio said, “he took one look at your arms and thought you were a man.” And then he laughed. I never was sure if it really happened, or if he just thought, early sixties Kennedy-era Italian grandfather that he was that I was getting a bit too butch for my own femmey good.

Another time, I was dancing for this older man at a table of just awful Israeli men. They were all talking about me in Hebrew, cackling and barely hiding rude body gestures. I kept my distance, my dancer radar going all haywire, but when I turned my back and bent over, a standard move in my table dance repertoire, the nasty man I was dancing for slipped his finger inside my g-string and ran it down the back, along the cleft of my ass, brushing his knuckle along my anus, my vulva, my clit.

In one motion, I stood, turned and slapped him across the face. Tony, the big and ugly brick wall of an Indian bouncer, saw the whole exchange—the evil group, the nasty grope, the ensuing slap—and yelled across the room, “Nunzio, CeeCee slapped a guy.” I was spitting with rage. He was supposed to be protecting me, this misogynistic lump, and he was tattling on me? What the bloody hell?

I grabbed my dress and stomped off to Nunzio in a nearly naked huff. Tears were spitting from my eyes, I was so angry. I had been grabbed before. I had had my breasts mauled. I had had my ass bitten. I had been pulled by the hips to sit on a naked erection. I had had men spooge through their khakis and onto my back. I had never, ever, felt the unwanted touch of finger on my genitals. And to have my protection tattle like a Nelly Larson was just foul icing on the already putrid cake.

“CeeCee,” Nunzio said, “you can’t slap people.” In his calm face, I blurted out what had happened, this incoherent story of abuse and betrayal, a foreshortened inarticulate tale of epic emotion. Nunzio listened and then said, “CeeCee, slapping is not the answer.”

I stared at him levelly. I could see in that moment the toll this job took on him, his self control at having  to battle his own sense of decency in this mock universe where regular rules did not apply, the endless and ceaseless sound of girls whining, the long hours, the wife’s mistrust, the children’s embarrassment, the nocturnal life of an essentially decent man who happened to be the manager of a subterranean titty bar.

I narrowed my eyes and said nothing. “Go have an aspirin,” Nunzio said, and I did.

One Sunday in Chelsea, while sitting outside eating brunch with Wiley, a stripper pal, I saw Nunzio by daylight. He was wearing a polo shirt. He was wearing shorts. He was, as ever, dapper, each garment pressed within an inch of its life. Accompanied by two of his sons and one of their babies, he recognized us, smiled a big genuine grin and came over to talk.

We made small talk. He handed me his grandson to hold. Not because I’d asked to—babies always make me feel a bit uncertain what to say; I want to make conversation, but there is so little we have in common—but because he wanted to see me with him, I think. Maybe to make me uncomfortable, but maybe too to make me part of his normal life, his sunlit life, if only for a moment, if only until the baby’s mother came, and seeing me for what I did, all supertan and extrablonde and Russ Meyers busty, whisked her child out of my arms, as if I would somehow harm it by association.

Nunzio, though, he had no fear of me. He knew me for what I was, which was what he was too, a good human, regardless of where we worked. He knew the job did not make the man.

Rather, the man elevated the job, if he was a good man, and Nunzio was always and ever the epitome of a good man.