Is it me, or is every strip club regular on Lexapro? (Or maybe the strip club population just mirrors the antidepressant-popping general population.) Something about visiting a topless bar makes you Lexa-prone, it seems. This is the new It Drug, and apparently it should be taken with a full glass of water and a high-contact lapdance.
Or maybe it's just depression in general. Something about being bummed out makes you want to see girls with their bum out? Down in the dumps, like a truck, truck, truck?
My first Lexapro-loaded customer was last year. He has, on this blog, been referred to as "Tuition Guy" or "DVD Guy" on separate occasions. He took Lexapro because he said he suffered severe anxiety because of his extremely high-pressure, high-ranking job. (Note: He designed movie posters.) Okay, I'm being mean. I really liked him before he got annoying. But anyway, he said Lexapro was great for treating his anxiety but he "didn't like feeling like he needed his head shrinked" and hated visiting the psychiatrist. He also said it made it easy to get an erection but very hard (puns intended) to come. Weirdly, he used to say he was on "LePRAXo" (and so I thought that's what the drug was called at first). Then again, he also pronounced "Biopic" the way you'd say "myopic" and when I said I use turmeric in my cooking he corrected me and said "you mean toom-AIR-ic?".
Japanese Architect is also on the drug. He started off awesome, but as the weeks go by he starts demanding more from me. (This week's request is a topless photo. Last week was that I "lick the tip." I think I made some joke about not wanting to put my tongue on gratuity.) Anyway, he's been married since his early 20s and he's miserable with his wife. He's just not attracted to her anymore, even though they're still friends. He just can't seem to get sexually aroused by her and is mad depressed by it. He also feels powerless to move out or get divorced. Anyhow, he tells me the drug sort of helps with his depression, but not really. He also tells me that his dick doesn't get up on this drug, even though he gets extremely aroused.
The third Lexa-Bro is an awesome awesome customer of mine. He's really smart and sweet, and totally gets what the job is about. He's also written some books that I recently ordered and am planning to read this summer. He actually told me his whole family is on the drug (wife, daughter, himself). He says he hopes that being on the drug will make his 16 year old daughter stop calling him a "motherfucking asshole." I'll drink to that!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Khanvict Music
So I have this new customer. He buys seven or eight dances, and then leaves. He's an Indian guy who must be close to 70, but his dye-job hides his age very well. I think he fell for me because he likes my Hindi and my heiny. Our lapdances consist of him trying to perform cunnilingus on my bellybutton and my pushing him away, then him telling me he'd give me a generous mehr if I agree to be his second wife, and various lackluster conversations in Hindi. (FYI, he also told me he fucked one of his "servants" back in Calcutta. His wife found out and was pissed, hence the move to the US. See! I told you reasons for immigration are complex!!!) The lapdance dirty-talk is repetitive and hilarious, as it mostly consists of: how much he wants to fuck me, but he would only do it after we got married; that his dick can't get hard unless someone sucks on it for about 5 minutes; recollections of the 75-100 occasions on which he's paid for sex.
Anyway, last time he came in and told me he dreamed about me. He said he lay in bed, put lotion on his hand and "massaged" himself thinking about me. Then he told me he wrote me a song, and he began singing to me in a very ghazal-singer-esque voice: "Tumhe chutne ko dil karta hain. Tumhare gaand khaane ko dil karta hain." (Roughly translated? My heart wants to fuck you. My heart wants to give you a rim job.) Basically, he's singing me an Akon song in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan style...Let's call him Akhan!
Okay, okay, I'm doing that thing again where everyone sounds like a crazy/perverted customer. Not true! Simply just fun to blog about! Irish Gold and I had an awesome conversation today about Pat Buchanan's wicked conservatism yet fierce pro-Palestinianism and the American obsession with abortion and "life" debates. I also kicked it with this new guy who said he'd never heard someone discuss the Malcolm X assassination while topless, leading to a hilarious whole conversation about what appropriate strip club banter usually consists of. Not to mention, I air-guitared on stage every time the DJ played a shitty song (i.e. Live's "Lighting Crashes"). A fun day!
Anyway, last time he came in and told me he dreamed about me. He said he lay in bed, put lotion on his hand and "massaged" himself thinking about me. Then he told me he wrote me a song, and he began singing to me in a very ghazal-singer-esque voice: "Tumhe chutne ko dil karta hain. Tumhare gaand khaane ko dil karta hain." (Roughly translated? My heart wants to fuck you. My heart wants to give you a rim job.) Basically, he's singing me an Akon song in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan style...Let's call him Akhan!
Okay, okay, I'm doing that thing again where everyone sounds like a crazy/perverted customer. Not true! Simply just fun to blog about! Irish Gold and I had an awesome conversation today about Pat Buchanan's wicked conservatism yet fierce pro-Palestinianism and the American obsession with abortion and "life" debates. I also kicked it with this new guy who said he'd never heard someone discuss the Malcolm X assassination while topless, leading to a hilarious whole conversation about what appropriate strip club banter usually consists of. Not to mention, I air-guitared on stage every time the DJ played a shitty song (i.e. Live's "Lighting Crashes"). A fun day!
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Tiring Tirade
A few weeks ago, I got a new customer, James. Or, as I began calling him, Sissy James. Sissy James gets turned on by humiliation. The first time we met, he asked if I was into domination at all. Of course, I indulged. He ended up coming in every time I was working, flashing me the bra he was wearing under his manly outerwear, and bowing his head in shame as I mocked his humility during a few "lapdances." "No, mistress, I'm not a man, I'm just a sissy." Sometimes he'd give me a $20 bill to go dance for another guy so he could feel ashamed. When I'd dance for him, I wasn't quite sure what to do, especially since I'd established that I was his goddess and he wasn't worthy of even glancing at my beauty. It was sort of hilarious, but I felt it getting kind of repetitive. I'd call him a sissy, a pansy, tell him he wasn't worthy of me, tell him he wasn't a real man, all with slight variations, on shuffle. Sometimes I'd lightly slap him across the face or pull on his hair. I'd tell him about how some day I'd put a leash on his neck and take him for a walk on all fours. But there was only so much I could do! (My friend rightly pointed out that it was fucked up to mock him for being effeminate, and that perhaps I should instead mock him for having bad gender politics! Hat tip, RP!) The last time he came in, he was wearing adult diapers under his clothes, and also brought a makeup kit so I could put lipstick on him. (He told me that I should use his face as my toilet seat. I didn't, of course, but I did tell him I'd love to.)
The thing is, I got really bored with him, as easy as the whole thing was. (I didn't even have to undress for him!) Or, not bored, but (and, perhaps for the first time ever) at a loss for words. I just couldn't do it anymore. It's like I got domme and dumber. I called him a sissy, a pansy, a nobody, a pussy, a loser, a wimp, "not a real man." And then, I would start at the beginning again. When I ran out of words, I'd ask him to worship me. But all he could produce was a very stifled "You're so excellent, I'm nothing compared to you." Bo-ring. I think he caught on that I wasn't into it, or maybe I just stopped doing it for him, because he hasn't showed up since last week.
Anyway, if you see a guy wearing a Yankee's jacket with a brastrap peeking out, tell him his goddess is going to punish him for going AWOL on me.
The thing is, I got really bored with him, as easy as the whole thing was. (I didn't even have to undress for him!) Or, not bored, but (and, perhaps for the first time ever) at a loss for words. I just couldn't do it anymore. It's like I got domme and dumber. I called him a sissy, a pansy, a nobody, a pussy, a loser, a wimp, "not a real man." And then, I would start at the beginning again. When I ran out of words, I'd ask him to worship me. But all he could produce was a very stifled "You're so excellent, I'm nothing compared to you." Bo-ring. I think he caught on that I wasn't into it, or maybe I just stopped doing it for him, because he hasn't showed up since last week.
Anyway, if you see a guy wearing a Yankee's jacket with a brastrap peeking out, tell him his goddess is going to punish him for going AWOL on me.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Maid In India
Jesus Christ, for the third time I had an Indian customer today relay to me the memory of fucking a "servant girl." Today's customer was this guy Arun who works in IT and lives in Jersey. (Sorry for helping you narrow it down to about 45,000 possible people!) He told me that when he was a teenager up until he was 21, he was always very horny. (He quantified this by telling me that one day, when he was 20, he masturbated 18 times in 1 day.) But, being from Hyderabad, there was very little time he got to spend alone, particularly with girls. Prostitutes, he said, were out because of fear of the law. Girls from college "were risky, because some issue might develop. They might get pregnant or start pressuring you for marriage. Which, I guess, is the right thing to do. So one time, this girl was cleaning my hostel. I mean, she was like a servant girl. And she used to come all the time to clean, and she was very sexy. I mean, in that village-girl way, wearing her sari and what not. She was Hindu, not Muslim. So anyway she would always complain about her husband, and how bad he was to her, and one day she just fell in my arms crying. And what could I do? I'm a man, and there's a sexy woman in my arms. There was no option. So, it happened." I was like, "oh so you lost your virginity to her?" And he was like "No, I mean, how can you call it losing virginity? I was so excited that I finished in like 2 minutes, less than that even. I like you."
Wow, though. Seriously, I know that domestic workers are often - and have always been - sexualized, often sexually abused, and usually thought of as readily available for appropriate sexual release for men who live in the homes where 'domestics' work. They're like sex workers in maid uniforms! Except instead of black fishnet stockings and a frilly white trim on a black skirt, it's a hand-me-down sari and a revealing blouse.
I appreciate his honesty. He told me that his dick was "practically Muslim" from masturbating so much. (I can only imagine what this means. My guess is that it has something to do with foreskin and circumcision, but lord knows.)
Wow, though. Seriously, I know that domestic workers are often - and have always been - sexualized, often sexually abused, and usually thought of as readily available for appropriate sexual release for men who live in the homes where 'domestics' work. They're like sex workers in maid uniforms! Except instead of black fishnet stockings and a frilly white trim on a black skirt, it's a hand-me-down sari and a revealing blouse.
I appreciate his honesty. He told me that his dick was "practically Muslim" from masturbating so much. (I can only imagine what this means. My guess is that it has something to do with foreskin and circumcision, but lord knows.)
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Banal Sex & Restrained Refrains
I think I speak for all dancers when I tell customers not to consider themselves original for saying any of the following. If I had a crumpled g-string dollar for every time I heard these, I'd be able to buy the house mom's whole stretchy-dress inventory!
-I really only just come to this place for a beer and to look at some pretty girls, but I can't believe my luck finding you.
-You don't belong here. You're way too smart and beautiful. (or any variation on the "you're not like the other girls here/you shouldn't be here" theme)
-I'd rather just give the champagne room money directly to you, so you don't have to give the house a cut. Shall we meet somewhere outside the club?
-There's a connection here, and I know you feel it too.
-With you, it isn't just about sex.
-If you don't have any customers, come sit with me.
-Nothing is sexier than brains and beauty.
-I'm actually not really a strip club guy.
----
Solid Gold Irishman got a little wacky on me today for a minute. Maybe I jinxed it. So I had spent something like 2 hours just chatting with him and giving him some lapdances during the slow hours. Any time we've hung out before he is always really self-conscious & polite about not wanting to monopolize my time, and being completely cool about my talking to other customers.
So today, I was kicking it with him and I saw this customer of mine come in. He's a really cool guy, and has a reputation as Mr. "Never says no to a lapdance", so girls were all over him. I didn't want him to deplete his whole cash stash on everyone but me, so after my stage set, instead of going back to Irish Gold, I went straight to him, chatted, and did about 5 dances for him. As soon as that was done, I got called back on stage again for another set (which included the Third Eye Blind Song "Semi Charmed Life"), and "never says no" guy left. Irish Gold came to tip me on stage and says "What happened to you?" And I said, "I was taking care of another customer." And he was like "Well I was waiting for you, sittin' over there like an idiot." I was stunned, because it's the first time he's been possessive, and his rude tone totally caught me off guard.
When I went back to sit with him he apologized and said he had no right to say that, sorry sorry. And I was nice, and forgiving. But still, shit!
I was in a bad mood after that. There's this weird guy who came in and rapidly earned a reputation for being really cheap. I saw him in the corner and all the girls were steering clear like he had swine flu or something, so I did the same. Then, at one point, there were no customers at all so I was like, what the hell. So I sat next to him and started chatting and had some sort of flashback to him giving me lots of money! I never forget a face...unless it's in the distance under a blacklight. Up close, I totally remembered him having cash. And he totally remembered me, and told me all these facts about myself I'd told him last time (including my fake real name) and then he proceeded to get like 17 lapdances from me. Awesome. He was drunk enough that I didn't have to do anything, really, but sit on his lap. He speaks with an Indian accent, and looks South Asian, but he swears he's from Cairo. He can't speak a lick of Arabic, nor can he answer any basic questions about his supposed hometown, so I get the sense he's totally lying about himself. He also claims to be a resident of Los Angeles, where he pumps gas at a gas station, and is visiting NYC for business...yet he didn't know there was an earthquake there last week. He has a thick Indian accent yet swears up and down that he was born and raised in LA. Okay, so he's totally lying about himself, and he's really socially weird. He looks like an unattractive version of this hot guy I went to high school with. So during a dance, he grabs my ass and my thigh and squeezes/scratches really hard, enough to draw blood. (Cut to image of Egypt Boy at a Pictionary party attempting to sketch "blood" on an easel...) No, okay, he didn't draw blood, but it hurt! That, plus my bad mood, and I totally smacked him, open palm, across the face and shoved his chest, and then made him give me $40 for "being an asshole." He did.
Other than that, a good day. I'm having trouble adjusting to this new house rule... Wait for it: Any DJ who plays "R&B or Hip Hop will be fired ON THE SPOT". Yes, that sign hangs right under the invisible sign that says "No dogs or black folks." For real, the owner of the club threatened the DJ's who were playing "hip hop and R&B." It's totally fucked, especially since I always used to request the Roots and Outkast to make my day go by a little faster. Not only have I lost that, we have no more Kanye West or R. Kelly jams, AKA Strip club anthems! For real? This is New York City! So now, I spend stage sets entertaining myself with the aforementioned "Third Eye Blind," along with "I touch myself," "Friday I'm in Love," and of course, I also go dancing with... Mr. Brownstone!
-I really only just come to this place for a beer and to look at some pretty girls, but I can't believe my luck finding you.
-You don't belong here. You're way too smart and beautiful. (or any variation on the "you're not like the other girls here/you shouldn't be here" theme)
-I'd rather just give the champagne room money directly to you, so you don't have to give the house a cut. Shall we meet somewhere outside the club?
-There's a connection here, and I know you feel it too.
-With you, it isn't just about sex.
-If you don't have any customers, come sit with me.
-Nothing is sexier than brains and beauty.
-I'm actually not really a strip club guy.
----
Solid Gold Irishman got a little wacky on me today for a minute. Maybe I jinxed it. So I had spent something like 2 hours just chatting with him and giving him some lapdances during the slow hours. Any time we've hung out before he is always really self-conscious & polite about not wanting to monopolize my time, and being completely cool about my talking to other customers.
So today, I was kicking it with him and I saw this customer of mine come in. He's a really cool guy, and has a reputation as Mr. "Never says no to a lapdance", so girls were all over him. I didn't want him to deplete his whole cash stash on everyone but me, so after my stage set, instead of going back to Irish Gold, I went straight to him, chatted, and did about 5 dances for him. As soon as that was done, I got called back on stage again for another set (which included the Third Eye Blind Song "Semi Charmed Life"), and "never says no" guy left. Irish Gold came to tip me on stage and says "What happened to you?" And I said, "I was taking care of another customer." And he was like "Well I was waiting for you, sittin' over there like an idiot." I was stunned, because it's the first time he's been possessive, and his rude tone totally caught me off guard.
When I went back to sit with him he apologized and said he had no right to say that, sorry sorry. And I was nice, and forgiving. But still, shit!
I was in a bad mood after that. There's this weird guy who came in and rapidly earned a reputation for being really cheap. I saw him in the corner and all the girls were steering clear like he had swine flu or something, so I did the same. Then, at one point, there were no customers at all so I was like, what the hell. So I sat next to him and started chatting and had some sort of flashback to him giving me lots of money! I never forget a face...unless it's in the distance under a blacklight. Up close, I totally remembered him having cash. And he totally remembered me, and told me all these facts about myself I'd told him last time (including my fake real name) and then he proceeded to get like 17 lapdances from me. Awesome. He was drunk enough that I didn't have to do anything, really, but sit on his lap. He speaks with an Indian accent, and looks South Asian, but he swears he's from Cairo. He can't speak a lick of Arabic, nor can he answer any basic questions about his supposed hometown, so I get the sense he's totally lying about himself. He also claims to be a resident of Los Angeles, where he pumps gas at a gas station, and is visiting NYC for business...yet he didn't know there was an earthquake there last week. He has a thick Indian accent yet swears up and down that he was born and raised in LA. Okay, so he's totally lying about himself, and he's really socially weird. He looks like an unattractive version of this hot guy I went to high school with. So during a dance, he grabs my ass and my thigh and squeezes/scratches really hard, enough to draw blood. (Cut to image of Egypt Boy at a Pictionary party attempting to sketch "blood" on an easel...) No, okay, he didn't draw blood, but it hurt! That, plus my bad mood, and I totally smacked him, open palm, across the face and shoved his chest, and then made him give me $40 for "being an asshole." He did.
Other than that, a good day. I'm having trouble adjusting to this new house rule... Wait for it: Any DJ who plays "R&B or Hip Hop will be fired ON THE SPOT". Yes, that sign hangs right under the invisible sign that says "No dogs or black folks." For real, the owner of the club threatened the DJ's who were playing "hip hop and R&B." It's totally fucked, especially since I always used to request the Roots and Outkast to make my day go by a little faster. Not only have I lost that, we have no more Kanye West or R. Kelly jams, AKA Strip club anthems! For real? This is New York City! So now, I spend stage sets entertaining myself with the aforementioned "Third Eye Blind," along with "I touch myself," "Friday I'm in Love," and of course, I also go dancing with... Mr. Brownstone!
Monday, April 5, 2010
Bollywood Beats
So there's this girl who dances at the club. She's from Tibet, but lies and tells everyone (except me) that she's either Chinese or Hawaiian. It's a confidentiality thing for her. But she does speak Hindi and knows her Bollywood tunes, and once she even played me this song in my honor.
Anyway, the other day we were getting dressed and I started whistling Aap Jaisa Koi. She chimed in, of course, and by the time we got to "baat bun jaaye" I realized that two of the Russian bartenders were singing along! I was like "Damn, girls, you know Bollywood songs?" And they were like "Yeah, we love Bollywood in Russia!" And then the slew of Brazilian girls to my left were like "Bollywood EVERYWHERE!" And they started singing "Pehal Nasha." This Boricuan girl nodded in agreement and said "Acha, acha."
Lesson learned! Bollywood rules the fucking world. Though I suppose the alternate theory is that watching Bollywood turns you into a stripper. Wouldn't that be funny? Instead of pole dancing, it'd be garba-raas on stage. And rather than lotion on the legs and baby oil on the arms, the girls would use henna on their hands and coconut oil in their hair. I already have the perfect stripper name for Madhuri Dixit...(too obvious.) Ahh, imagine a world with more desi strippers. We could take the "poor" out of Kapoor, and all the Singhs could dance.
Aaja nachle, indeed!
Anyway, the other day we were getting dressed and I started whistling Aap Jaisa Koi. She chimed in, of course, and by the time we got to "baat bun jaaye" I realized that two of the Russian bartenders were singing along! I was like "Damn, girls, you know Bollywood songs?" And they were like "Yeah, we love Bollywood in Russia!" And then the slew of Brazilian girls to my left were like "Bollywood EVERYWHERE!" And they started singing "Pehal Nasha." This Boricuan girl nodded in agreement and said "Acha, acha."
Lesson learned! Bollywood rules the fucking world. Though I suppose the alternate theory is that watching Bollywood turns you into a stripper. Wouldn't that be funny? Instead of pole dancing, it'd be garba-raas on stage. And rather than lotion on the legs and baby oil on the arms, the girls would use henna on their hands and coconut oil in their hair. I already have the perfect stripper name for Madhuri Dixit...(too obvious.) Ahh, imagine a world with more desi strippers. We could take the "poor" out of Kapoor, and all the Singhs could dance.
Aaja nachle, indeed!
Thursday, February 18, 2010
A Few Good Men
The Good Customer. Elusive, rare, often just an illusion. But I have to say, there are some guys who are just solid, solid gold.
My new Irishman regular has reminded me that I need to stop stigmatizing/ridiculing "strip club customers" as some sort of homogenous group. Yes, perhaps many of them are grabby, or stingy, or sexist, or stalkery, or highly self-absorbed. Yes, maybe some of them have questionable STI's. (Who can forget this guy?)
And even with the GOOD customers, there's usually a catch.
For instance, take my aformentioned architect friend (blueprint blueballs guy). He's really nice, and very sweet and kind and respectful of my time as an employee of the club. But it only took him two visits before he started pressing me to meet him outside. As of this week, now that he knows I am not likely to go out with him, he's told me he probably won't be visiting me at the club anymore.
Then there was DVD/girlfriend guy who was hot and interesting. But then he went and split up with his girlfriend because of hopes of being with me and started showing up at the club all the time and got massively annoying.
Generally, "good customer"ness is a short-lived trait. It's a matter of time before you get tired of me, start doubting my motives for being nice to you, start spending less money, or press me to meet you outside.
Mr. Ireland has reminded me that the good customer doesn't always need a fatal flaw. Like I said in my last post, this guy is super politicized, really intelligent, humble, and generous. He never talks down about strippers, never makes excuses or feels the need to justify why he's in the place to begin with, and has no delusions about the commercial nature of our relationship. In other words, he's perfectly happy to fork over money for a good (bounded-authentic) afternoon with me, without trying to turn it into a date, sex, or therapy. (I seriously need to knock on wood... Quick! Get me a customer's crotch!)
Mr. Ireland goes on the list with this guy, and my favorite flamingly gay customer who takes me to the champagne room to chat and get drunk on mimosas.
Then again, this isn't a tough list to top...
My new Irishman regular has reminded me that I need to stop stigmatizing/ridiculing "strip club customers" as some sort of homogenous group. Yes, perhaps many of them are grabby, or stingy, or sexist, or stalkery, or highly self-absorbed. Yes, maybe some of them have questionable STI's. (Who can forget this guy?)
And even with the GOOD customers, there's usually a catch.
For instance, take my aformentioned architect friend (blueprint blueballs guy). He's really nice, and very sweet and kind and respectful of my time as an employee of the club. But it only took him two visits before he started pressing me to meet him outside. As of this week, now that he knows I am not likely to go out with him, he's told me he probably won't be visiting me at the club anymore.
Then there was DVD/girlfriend guy who was hot and interesting. But then he went and split up with his girlfriend because of hopes of being with me and started showing up at the club all the time and got massively annoying.
Generally, "good customer"ness is a short-lived trait. It's a matter of time before you get tired of me, start doubting my motives for being nice to you, start spending less money, or press me to meet you outside.
Mr. Ireland has reminded me that the good customer doesn't always need a fatal flaw. Like I said in my last post, this guy is super politicized, really intelligent, humble, and generous. He never talks down about strippers, never makes excuses or feels the need to justify why he's in the place to begin with, and has no delusions about the commercial nature of our relationship. In other words, he's perfectly happy to fork over money for a good (bounded-authentic) afternoon with me, without trying to turn it into a date, sex, or therapy. (I seriously need to knock on wood... Quick! Get me a customer's crotch!)
Mr. Ireland goes on the list with this guy, and my favorite flamingly gay customer who takes me to the champagne room to chat and get drunk on mimosas.
Then again, this isn't a tough list to top...
Friday, February 12, 2010
Valentine's Pay
Holy crap! Today was our work Valentine's Day party. All the girls had to wear lingerie, which was awesome because it beats the synthetic glittery stretch material we wear normally. It could have been topped only by a "pajamas + slippers" theme. But, wow! The boys were out today, and a-spendin'!
The day started with this customer, a new guy, taking a liking to me and grabbing me for a couple of dances. A Japanese American architect, I had him at some pun about blueprints and blueballs. Generous tipper, nice guy, and definitely in the mood for love. So he's been married for 10 years, and hasn't had sex in 5. I, apparently, am the first person he's told this to.
Then came Mr. Ireland. This guy is a total sweetheart! He's deeply political and loves to talk about the similarities between the Irish and Palestinian people's history. He's also awesomely generous, very much into me, and a complete gentleman.
By the end of the day, the list of "nice, generous, and sweet" customers was a lengthy one! There was only ONE asshole today, and he's sort of a regular customer of mine who got completely hammered. Yes, he was an asshole. He told the bartender "I'm a dentist, and I know bad breath when I smell it, and you have bad breath." He told me, "You have small breasts. You should get a boob job." It was annoying, but he followed up most of his insults with a FIFTY DOLLAR tip. No joke. Every time he pissed me off, he'd drunkenly fumble through his pockets and pull out a crumpled wad of $50s and hand me one. (He'd also mumble "Now don't look at all my money!") He did the same thing with the other girls he'd offended. Then he told me, "I came here just to see you today. Wouldn't it piss you off if I took another girl to the champagne room?" And he actually did it. It would have been annoying except that he'd already given me a lot of cash.
Randomly, Thomson Thomson showed up!!!! I haven't seen the guy since before the raid, months and months ago. I thought I'd never see him again, especially since the time he tried to "shush" me when I told him not to finger-fuck me and he complained to another girl that I "lack dedication." But apparently, he's been hanging out at the strip club across the street from my previous club, and a girl who works there told him where to find me. He came by, gave me a nice tip, and said "I can't buy dances from you here because it's all out in the open, and you know how much I like intimacy." Gawd, whadda loser.
But seriously, we milked Valentine's Day for all it was worth. The Brazilian non-English speaking girls brought notebooks with them that had English messages written in them, and when a customer showed up, they'd reach into a Duane Reade bag and pull out a blank Hallmark card and copy a message from their notebook into the card. I wonder if these guys keep their stripper gifts in a secret drawer at their desk at work so their poor wives don't find them.
These boys have been struck by Stupid's Arrow! And I ain't complainin'...
The day started with this customer, a new guy, taking a liking to me and grabbing me for a couple of dances. A Japanese American architect, I had him at some pun about blueprints and blueballs. Generous tipper, nice guy, and definitely in the mood for love. So he's been married for 10 years, and hasn't had sex in 5. I, apparently, am the first person he's told this to.
Then came Mr. Ireland. This guy is a total sweetheart! He's deeply political and loves to talk about the similarities between the Irish and Palestinian people's history. He's also awesomely generous, very much into me, and a complete gentleman.
By the end of the day, the list of "nice, generous, and sweet" customers was a lengthy one! There was only ONE asshole today, and he's sort of a regular customer of mine who got completely hammered. Yes, he was an asshole. He told the bartender "I'm a dentist, and I know bad breath when I smell it, and you have bad breath." He told me, "You have small breasts. You should get a boob job." It was annoying, but he followed up most of his insults with a FIFTY DOLLAR tip. No joke. Every time he pissed me off, he'd drunkenly fumble through his pockets and pull out a crumpled wad of $50s and hand me one. (He'd also mumble "Now don't look at all my money!") He did the same thing with the other girls he'd offended. Then he told me, "I came here just to see you today. Wouldn't it piss you off if I took another girl to the champagne room?" And he actually did it. It would have been annoying except that he'd already given me a lot of cash.
Randomly, Thomson Thomson showed up!!!! I haven't seen the guy since before the raid, months and months ago. I thought I'd never see him again, especially since the time he tried to "shush" me when I told him not to finger-fuck me and he complained to another girl that I "lack dedication." But apparently, he's been hanging out at the strip club across the street from my previous club, and a girl who works there told him where to find me. He came by, gave me a nice tip, and said "I can't buy dances from you here because it's all out in the open, and you know how much I like intimacy." Gawd, whadda loser.
But seriously, we milked Valentine's Day for all it was worth. The Brazilian non-English speaking girls brought notebooks with them that had English messages written in them, and when a customer showed up, they'd reach into a Duane Reade bag and pull out a blank Hallmark card and copy a message from their notebook into the card. I wonder if these guys keep their stripper gifts in a secret drawer at their desk at work so their poor wives don't find them.
These boys have been struck by Stupid's Arrow! And I ain't complainin'...
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Not sequitur
The following songs will always remind me of work:
I really miss my stripper buddy Sheila I used to talk about from my old club. In the raid, we all scattered, and I think she left the country for school, and I genuinely miss having a buddy at work. And I also just missing having her around as an unlikely friend.
My prof gave me an A on the paper I posted (segments of) below... She also gave me a hug when I saw her the other day, and told me I lead "such an interesting life." Ego massage, a guilt free party!
Never drink 3 glasses of Metamucil for the first time on the day before a shi(f)t at work.
Does anyone else find the "Call me Mr. Flintstone, I can make your bed rock" song at once an insult to the world of music and utterly catchy?
I really miss my stripper buddy Sheila I used to talk about from my old club. In the raid, we all scattered, and I think she left the country for school, and I genuinely miss having a buddy at work. And I also just missing having her around as an unlikely friend.
My prof gave me an A on the paper I posted (segments of) below... She also gave me a hug when I saw her the other day, and told me I lead "such an interesting life." Ego massage, a guilt free party!
Never drink 3 glasses of Metamucil for the first time on the day before a shi(f)t at work.
Does anyone else find the "Call me Mr. Flintstone, I can make your bed rock" song at once an insult to the world of music and utterly catchy?
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Stripping as sex work, stripping as "race-work"
So, here are some excerpts from a paper I wrote for school about stripping. It's not as finessed or put-together as I'd hoped it would be, but it's sort of my first theoretical engagement with the topic - be gentle!
*
It was mid-June, and my first day of work as a stripper. I had just finished my audition and was told I could start work that very day. After the DJ explained to me the rules of dancing at the club, he asked me where I was from. “India,” I told him. He told me that he would have “either guessed South American or Middle Eastern” for me, and that the club had never had an Indian girl before. “You’re going to do well. You’re exotic, and that’s going to be an asset for the club.”
This was perhaps my first racialized experience as a stripper, and that it happened within minutes of being hired is no accident. Almost two years later, I am keenly aware that working in strip clubs is not simply a form of sex work; it is a form of race work. Indeed, race figures prominently in my daily experiences in the club. In fact, the space of the gentlemen’s club is not only gendered, it is deeply racialized and classed. Frank argues that “part of the way race becomes real is through the organization and meaning given to particular spaces, through the ways those spaces are experienced, perceived, and imagined” (2002; 58).
In this paper, I explore the racial organization and meaning of the space of the strip club based upon my experiences in two New York City strip clubs over two years. It is my contention that race is a critical dimension of how the strip club is experienced by dancers and customers; much of the literature on gentlemen’s clubs examines the racialized terrain of the strip club as auxiliary, secondary to its gendered and classed dimensions, doing injustice to theories of intersectionality. By bringing race to the center of my analysis, I hope to demonstrate the ways it is impossible to isolate any of the intersectional variables in a spatial analysis of power.
The strip club is a place where both strippers and customers display and assess symbolic and social capital (Wood, 2000). In my experience, much of this capital has rested visibly along race lines, with race fetishization, exoticism, racism, and a concern with racial authenticity being among the critical components of how this capital is appraised. A stripper who presents herself as the girl-next-door, for instance, is constructing a normative identity that not only summons up notions of “Americanness,” innocence, approachability, and middle-class identity, but also whiteness.
Anthropology of the body and embodiment are theoretically important foundations for this paper. Complicating the Cartesian mind-body duality is essential for understanding the work that strippers do, no less so when interrogating the role of race in this work. It is only through the fallacy of disembedding the body from its sociopolitical realities that the simplistic statement of strippers “selling their body” can be made. The body is always already discursive, politicized, and social. There is, Csordas says, a distinction between the body as an object to be studied and the body as a subject of culture (Csordas, 1990). In this paper, embodiment takes a central role as I ask about the racial subjectivities of dancers and customers, and the ensuing perceptions and performances that take place.
Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu are two important thinkers for understanding embodiment (Csordas, 1990). Merleau-Ponty’s concern is with the domain of perception, the complicated duality of body-as-subject and body-as-object. He emphasizes the need to understand the experience of perception, as perception is a critical starting point in how we understand objects. He says that it is “as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Thus, Merleau-Ponty suggests that what he calls the “preobjective” is deeply concerned with the ways humans take up and inhabit the sociocultural world. For Bourdieu, it is habitus – a set of dispositions which both collectively and unconsciously structure both practice and representation – that is critical to understanding embodiment. Bourdieu’s discussion of aesthetics, for instance, is an example of this (Bourdieu, 1984). While we may think of taste as bodily, it is certainly social, cultural, and political.
For Appadurai, objects that enter exchange relations have social lives (Appadurai, 1988); this may seem like a foregone conclusion when the exchanged ‘objects’ are social beings. Yet, if we understand the social life of things being exchanged, what does it mean to buy and sell deeply social experiences and services? What sort of commodity is a stripper selling? In a commercial setting like the strip club, it seems that the body, the social self and personhood are imbricated in particular ways.
To look at the body as an object, as objectified, and the mind as the locus of subjectivity overlooks the myriad ways strippers explicitly use their physical bodies to portray subjectivities around age, race, class, and other crucial dimensions. The commodified setting of the strip club often leads people to (inaccurately) assume that strippers are (simply) commodifying their bodies. This overlooks the ways the body itself carries racial, political, social, and gendered identities; this assumption ignores the ways the body is discursive and politicized. What, then, does it mean to present one’s body as a commodity? What does the body signify? How do strippers present their bodies in ways that are both objective and subjective? How is the so-called objectification of one’s own body rooted in sociopolitical realities? Ethnographically, how do dancers bring to life or make explicit the social and political dimensions of their bodies in their everyday practices? How are body and mind imbricated in the presentation of the (racialized) body as commodity?
My interest in the strip club as a particular site for this investigation (after all, our daily experiences everywhere are racialized) stems from the fact that the strip clubs specifically – as are several types of sex work in general – are at once intimate and fantastic settings. Racialized performance, perception, and embodiment in strip clubs rest in a terrain that is explicitly commodified, sexualized, and exotic. Frank’s trope of “touristic practices,” for instance, suggests that the strip club is a peculiar site in the way it is perceived by patrons (and, I would add employees) who “desire to have a particular kind of experience rooted in the complex network of relations between home, work, and away” (2002; 90).
In the pages that follow, I will use autoethnographic analysis of my experiences as a stripper to address the following concerns. I examine my experiences to understand the role that race plays in the strip club in shaping the perceptions of dancers and customers. I also explore the way racial performativity is an everyday practice in my work at the clubs. I examine my experiences at the club that suggest certain assumptions about racial categories and authenticity. I end with a discussion about why theoretical and ethnographic analysis of race in strip clubs is worthy of analysis.
......
Each of these stories, in different ways, speaks to the way racial perceptions operate in a strip club. The club itself is an important site for understanding how these perceptions work. First, those inside the club seem to have some sense of communitas; in the case of the strippers commenting on my body shape, my very presence in the club separates me from those “skinny” Indian girls in their imaginary and brings me into a dialogue with them. For Ricardo, my nudity separates me from the “covered up” Indian women he sees on the city streets. Being a stripper, then, brings me into an intimate social environment in which people can see and comment on my body and racial identity in ways that might not be possible outside such a space.
The anecdotes provided here are but a short sampling of instances in which I was perceived in accordance with, or in exception to, some preconceived notions of what an Indian/Muslim/South Asian woman is expected to be. Very rarely does a day go by at work where I am not drawn closer to a customer because of a perceived racial alliance (i.e. with a Muslim man, a South Asian, an Arabic speaker, or even a white man who backpacked across India in college). Often, these encounters bring with them explicitly racialized statements about what other strippers are like and how I am different from them. The site of the strip club is significant, for it is only in a place like the strip club that an independently wealthy man can spend an afternoon dancing with naked women from Brazil or the Bronx; the emotional, mental, and physical intimacy of the space is intertwined with the racial contours of the club.
In other words, the racial discourse within the strip club reveals unique nuances that general conversations about race (in other settings) do not. In the club, these conversations rest explicitly along sexualized and classed lines. In few other instances would an older Turkish man have the opportunity to express to a young, South Asian woman his ideas about promiscuity, Islam, and marriage. Outside of the club, I do not sit patiently and sip champagne while talking to a married conservative man about how the Republican party can revitalize itself.
The body itself is brought into discourse as the foundation for these racial perceptions. The construction of race as a biological fact is perpetuated by this discourse. For several of my customers, my race indicates that I am free of HIV or any other STI. I have been assumed to be a virgin by several customers. Dancers have asked me if I had “butt implants” because my body did not seem to them to be truly Indian. Wall Street hedge fund workers have praised me for educational capacity rare among other dancers, and credited my Indian background for it.
In this way, my investigation is a deeply spatial one; the spatial confines of the strip club may actually reveal and conceal in particular, telling ways. “The clubs,” says Frank, “offer a fantasy space where the demands and limitations of the everyday could be escaped or transformed” (2002; 33). Understanding the club as a fantasy space, and yet an intimate one, allows us to understand the peculiar racial discourse that is expressed inside its walls. Communitas forms between separate people; connections that are otherwise not possible become commonplace; intimacies form that are fleeting yet telling.
......
With these cases, we see race being performed by dancers, management and customers. We see the strip club as a place where racial pretenses are presented, where race itself is constructed. Playing reggaeton and rap might pigeonhole the club as a “black” club, or a less classy establishment, as might a girl “booty-dancing” on stage. Requesting music that constructs my own ethnic identity as authentically Indian or Asian has been financially lucrative for me, as illustrated by the Bengali economist anecdote. In other words, symbolic capital is critical for the way the club itself, as well as individual dancers at the club, are perceived. Egan explores the use of music as a type of resistance, a way to build intimacy and romance, and a way to exercise creative license in the strip club (Egan, 2006). For myself and other women I have worked with, music selections and dancing styles are a clear way to indicate a race and class identity.
The deliberate presentation of this capital has, for me, been conflicted terrain. While strippers find themselves on what Barton (2006) calls a “Mobius strip” in terms of gender power (at once contesting and perpetuating heteronormative, patriarchal regimes) , the conflicting relationship to power and subordination has been explicit along racial lines, too. When customers praise me in comparison to “ghetto” girls who work at the club, or make offensive statements about other dancers’ English competency, it becomes financially lucrative for me to use my cultural capital in the club along those very racialized and classed dimensions. By fulfilling a customer’s fantasy by playing the part of a virginal Indian girl, a Muslim woman rebelling against the repressed sexuality of her childhood, or the “intellectual” with an exhibitionist streak, I at once reinforce stereotypes about myself and the other strippers from whom I am differentiated by accepting and performing these roles. At the same time, however, by playing these parts, I am able to make sums of money unimaginable in any other part-time job. It is at once a disturbing and rewarding performance.
The daily scene in the dressing room is explicitly racialized, as well, as girls flatiron their curls, put on wigs, use body makeup to cover “ghetto” tattoos and stretchmarks. Conversations about “nappy” and “good” hair abound. Management enforces these internalized desires, as certain women are encouraged to wear wigs and body makeup. A sign in my club’s dressing room reads: “TASTEFUL JEWELRY ONLY. NO ‘BLING.’ NO GHETTO GOLD. NO BAMBOO-STYLE EARRINGS.”
The bodies we commodify are not simply bodies; they are embedded in material realities and salient social constructs. The dancers, management, and customers work to perpetuate these constructs in everyday decisions. The music, dancing styles, attire, and accessories are all deliberately chosen to create an image of a particular type of club, a specific sort of femininity, ethnicity, or class.
......
While popular understandings of strip club culture often suggest a vulgar, visual objectification of women by male customers, the literature suggests that customers are often in search of something radically different from a place where women’s bodies are ogled (Frank, 2002; Wood, 2000). Strip club customers are usually not just in search of a sexual experience or even visual stimulation from the presentation of women’s bodies. In Frank’s work, the strip clubs she studied contained a “social geography, a landscape that was raced, classed, and gendered, populated with a variety of Others who lent an air of excitement or danger to the men’s experiences” (74). Strippers, then, become black, Latina, white, gothic, innocent, or vampy to produce this social geography.
The examples above suggest that the dynamics in the strip club anticipate a particular type of essentialized racial purity, conformity, and authenticity based on these perceived categories. In our interactions at the club, we “allow the customer to imagine the personality and history of the dancer who is attending to him” (Wood, 10). While Wood’s major assertion is that these imagined personas that are created by dancers and customers alike often “affirm cultural notions of masculinity” and gender (18), my observations suggest that they often affirm essentialized notions of race, culture, and ethnicity.
In my experience, assumptions of racial essence and purity are explicit and abundant at strip clubs. On numerous occasions, being able to speak Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, or “standard” English has been instrumental in establishing a long-term, lucrative connection with a regular customer. Linguistic skills were proof that I was a particular type of immigrant woman, separate from the many Brazilian and Russian women who often lacked legal documentation for work in the U.S. or had limited English proficiency. Several times, customers have told me that even the way I introduced myself “gave away” my race and class identity within seconds. Linguistics is not the only way I am perceived and perform a racialized identity. My status as a graduate student often came into question by customers. One man, himself a university professor, said that several girls lied and pretended to be graduate students, but “it’s clear that they’re not actually in school, and it’s clear that you’re some sort of graduate student.” In fact, the “Indian emphasis” on higher learning has come up several times by customers with whom I discuss my career and schooling.
On numerous occasions, customers have asked me for information about my family life. Do my parents try to arrange my marriage? Aren’t they really strict? Are they accepting of my choice to be in graduate school? Several of these questions reflect assumptions about what my people are expected to be like; my responses to these questions are part of the racial performance that I argue is a critical component of the social geography of the strip club.
......
The autoethnographic examples above are part of my attempt to begin to understand the myriad ways race impacts the social geography of the strip club. By looking at racial performance, perceptions, and assumptions, I hope to draw attention to the ways strippers (particularly those who are women of color ) navigate an overtly racialized terrain. The hiring process, the daily act of getting dressed, and the ways we choose to introduce ourselves to customers all suggest careful calculations about race and ethnicity.
The strip club as a site for investigations about race seems to be a compelling one. In very few sites do racial and gendered performances work so closely together for the purpose of commodification. It is also a site in which extremely disparate people (in terms of race, age, class, and national origin) are put together in extremely close, even intimate, settings. Crack dealers and graduate students get dressed in cramped spaces and help each other with make-up; investment bankers get drunk while talking to Brazilian immigrants about their marriage; married men with children talk to me in a single conversation about their sexual fetishes and their experience of immigration. These unusual scenes suggest that the social intimacies in the strip club allow atypical scenarios to emerge, enable unexpected contacts and social scripts.
In Barton’s work, she finds that strippers view race as “less a site of stigma than just another distinguishing characteristic that enabled her to make either more or less money on a given night” (2006; 13). Several dancers Barton interviews find race inconsequential or secondary to their ability to negotiate with customers, their physical features, or their level of education. Barton, however, contextualizes these views with the views of other dancers, for whom race is not thought of as irrelevant. “Racial images permeate our culture. Representations of the “Asian Flower,” “Hoochie Mama,” and “Blonde Playmate” color the expectations of customers. Dancers understand this. In the strip club, in which every interaction is a market transaction, dancers may deliberately perform customers’ fantasies to extract more money from them. These fantasies include other racialized fantasies, such as the subservient lotus blossom, and fantasies that have nothing to do with race, for example, the dominatrix or schoolgirl” (14). Barton approximates my experience best when she says that the successful dancer “swiftly learns to read customer desires and perform his gendered and racial fantasies” (15). Reading the customer’s socioeconomic and racial preferences has been as critical in my work as a stripper, if not more, than understanding the customer’s sexual preferences.
Understanding stripping as exposing one’s body and using nudity for commercial purposes does an injustice to the politics of embodiment. After all, a body is never simply a physical entity to be used, bought, or sold; it exists in a complex constellation of social realities, power dynamics, and material bases that construct it as a commodity. My discussion of race above suggests that not only is stripping about gendered practices, it is fundamentally a racial practice as well. As strippers, we not only present our feminine bodies to (mostly) male customers in a commodified setting, we present our whiteness, brownness, blackness, Americanness, and foreignness.
I find it empowering to use a framework of embodiment to understand the work I do. The separation of mind and body, and the consequent association of mind with sociality/politics and the body with biology/nature does a great injustice to the social subjectivities of sex workers. As Csordas says, “that the body might be understood as a seat of subjectivity is one source of challenge to theories of culture in which mind/subject/culture are deployed in parallel with and in contrast to body/object/biology” (1995; 9).
To understand our very bodies as discursive and political allows us to look at the ways we inhabit our bodies and use them in the work we do. Our bodies are powerful symbols, instruments of daily experience shaped by our very understanding of these symbols. Our bodies are not separate from our minds, from politics, from our social subjectivities. In spaces of commercial intimacy, it is never just a body that is bought or sold.
*
It was mid-June, and my first day of work as a stripper. I had just finished my audition and was told I could start work that very day. After the DJ explained to me the rules of dancing at the club, he asked me where I was from. “India,” I told him. He told me that he would have “either guessed South American or Middle Eastern” for me, and that the club had never had an Indian girl before. “You’re going to do well. You’re exotic, and that’s going to be an asset for the club.”
This was perhaps my first racialized experience as a stripper, and that it happened within minutes of being hired is no accident. Almost two years later, I am keenly aware that working in strip clubs is not simply a form of sex work; it is a form of race work. Indeed, race figures prominently in my daily experiences in the club. In fact, the space of the gentlemen’s club is not only gendered, it is deeply racialized and classed. Frank argues that “part of the way race becomes real is through the organization and meaning given to particular spaces, through the ways those spaces are experienced, perceived, and imagined” (2002; 58).
In this paper, I explore the racial organization and meaning of the space of the strip club based upon my experiences in two New York City strip clubs over two years. It is my contention that race is a critical dimension of how the strip club is experienced by dancers and customers; much of the literature on gentlemen’s clubs examines the racialized terrain of the strip club as auxiliary, secondary to its gendered and classed dimensions, doing injustice to theories of intersectionality. By bringing race to the center of my analysis, I hope to demonstrate the ways it is impossible to isolate any of the intersectional variables in a spatial analysis of power.
The strip club is a place where both strippers and customers display and assess symbolic and social capital (Wood, 2000). In my experience, much of this capital has rested visibly along race lines, with race fetishization, exoticism, racism, and a concern with racial authenticity being among the critical components of how this capital is appraised. A stripper who presents herself as the girl-next-door, for instance, is constructing a normative identity that not only summons up notions of “Americanness,” innocence, approachability, and middle-class identity, but also whiteness.
Anthropology of the body and embodiment are theoretically important foundations for this paper. Complicating the Cartesian mind-body duality is essential for understanding the work that strippers do, no less so when interrogating the role of race in this work. It is only through the fallacy of disembedding the body from its sociopolitical realities that the simplistic statement of strippers “selling their body” can be made. The body is always already discursive, politicized, and social. There is, Csordas says, a distinction between the body as an object to be studied and the body as a subject of culture (Csordas, 1990). In this paper, embodiment takes a central role as I ask about the racial subjectivities of dancers and customers, and the ensuing perceptions and performances that take place.
Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu are two important thinkers for understanding embodiment (Csordas, 1990). Merleau-Ponty’s concern is with the domain of perception, the complicated duality of body-as-subject and body-as-object. He emphasizes the need to understand the experience of perception, as perception is a critical starting point in how we understand objects. He says that it is “as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Thus, Merleau-Ponty suggests that what he calls the “preobjective” is deeply concerned with the ways humans take up and inhabit the sociocultural world. For Bourdieu, it is habitus – a set of dispositions which both collectively and unconsciously structure both practice and representation – that is critical to understanding embodiment. Bourdieu’s discussion of aesthetics, for instance, is an example of this (Bourdieu, 1984). While we may think of taste as bodily, it is certainly social, cultural, and political.
For Appadurai, objects that enter exchange relations have social lives (Appadurai, 1988); this may seem like a foregone conclusion when the exchanged ‘objects’ are social beings. Yet, if we understand the social life of things being exchanged, what does it mean to buy and sell deeply social experiences and services? What sort of commodity is a stripper selling? In a commercial setting like the strip club, it seems that the body, the social self and personhood are imbricated in particular ways.
To look at the body as an object, as objectified, and the mind as the locus of subjectivity overlooks the myriad ways strippers explicitly use their physical bodies to portray subjectivities around age, race, class, and other crucial dimensions. The commodified setting of the strip club often leads people to (inaccurately) assume that strippers are (simply) commodifying their bodies. This overlooks the ways the body itself carries racial, political, social, and gendered identities; this assumption ignores the ways the body is discursive and politicized. What, then, does it mean to present one’s body as a commodity? What does the body signify? How do strippers present their bodies in ways that are both objective and subjective? How is the so-called objectification of one’s own body rooted in sociopolitical realities? Ethnographically, how do dancers bring to life or make explicit the social and political dimensions of their bodies in their everyday practices? How are body and mind imbricated in the presentation of the (racialized) body as commodity?
My interest in the strip club as a particular site for this investigation (after all, our daily experiences everywhere are racialized) stems from the fact that the strip clubs specifically – as are several types of sex work in general – are at once intimate and fantastic settings. Racialized performance, perception, and embodiment in strip clubs rest in a terrain that is explicitly commodified, sexualized, and exotic. Frank’s trope of “touristic practices,” for instance, suggests that the strip club is a peculiar site in the way it is perceived by patrons (and, I would add employees) who “desire to have a particular kind of experience rooted in the complex network of relations between home, work, and away” (2002; 90).
In the pages that follow, I will use autoethnographic analysis of my experiences as a stripper to address the following concerns. I examine my experiences to understand the role that race plays in the strip club in shaping the perceptions of dancers and customers. I also explore the way racial performativity is an everyday practice in my work at the clubs. I examine my experiences at the club that suggest certain assumptions about racial categories and authenticity. I end with a discussion about why theoretical and ethnographic analysis of race in strip clubs is worthy of analysis.
......
Each of these stories, in different ways, speaks to the way racial perceptions operate in a strip club. The club itself is an important site for understanding how these perceptions work. First, those inside the club seem to have some sense of communitas; in the case of the strippers commenting on my body shape, my very presence in the club separates me from those “skinny” Indian girls in their imaginary and brings me into a dialogue with them. For Ricardo, my nudity separates me from the “covered up” Indian women he sees on the city streets. Being a stripper, then, brings me into an intimate social environment in which people can see and comment on my body and racial identity in ways that might not be possible outside such a space.
The anecdotes provided here are but a short sampling of instances in which I was perceived in accordance with, or in exception to, some preconceived notions of what an Indian/Muslim/South Asian woman is expected to be. Very rarely does a day go by at work where I am not drawn closer to a customer because of a perceived racial alliance (i.e. with a Muslim man, a South Asian, an Arabic speaker, or even a white man who backpacked across India in college). Often, these encounters bring with them explicitly racialized statements about what other strippers are like and how I am different from them. The site of the strip club is significant, for it is only in a place like the strip club that an independently wealthy man can spend an afternoon dancing with naked women from Brazil or the Bronx; the emotional, mental, and physical intimacy of the space is intertwined with the racial contours of the club.
In other words, the racial discourse within the strip club reveals unique nuances that general conversations about race (in other settings) do not. In the club, these conversations rest explicitly along sexualized and classed lines. In few other instances would an older Turkish man have the opportunity to express to a young, South Asian woman his ideas about promiscuity, Islam, and marriage. Outside of the club, I do not sit patiently and sip champagne while talking to a married conservative man about how the Republican party can revitalize itself.
The body itself is brought into discourse as the foundation for these racial perceptions. The construction of race as a biological fact is perpetuated by this discourse. For several of my customers, my race indicates that I am free of HIV or any other STI. I have been assumed to be a virgin by several customers. Dancers have asked me if I had “butt implants” because my body did not seem to them to be truly Indian. Wall Street hedge fund workers have praised me for educational capacity rare among other dancers, and credited my Indian background for it.
In this way, my investigation is a deeply spatial one; the spatial confines of the strip club may actually reveal and conceal in particular, telling ways. “The clubs,” says Frank, “offer a fantasy space where the demands and limitations of the everyday could be escaped or transformed” (2002; 33). Understanding the club as a fantasy space, and yet an intimate one, allows us to understand the peculiar racial discourse that is expressed inside its walls. Communitas forms between separate people; connections that are otherwise not possible become commonplace; intimacies form that are fleeting yet telling.
......
With these cases, we see race being performed by dancers, management and customers. We see the strip club as a place where racial pretenses are presented, where race itself is constructed. Playing reggaeton and rap might pigeonhole the club as a “black” club, or a less classy establishment, as might a girl “booty-dancing” on stage. Requesting music that constructs my own ethnic identity as authentically Indian or Asian has been financially lucrative for me, as illustrated by the Bengali economist anecdote. In other words, symbolic capital is critical for the way the club itself, as well as individual dancers at the club, are perceived. Egan explores the use of music as a type of resistance, a way to build intimacy and romance, and a way to exercise creative license in the strip club (Egan, 2006). For myself and other women I have worked with, music selections and dancing styles are a clear way to indicate a race and class identity.
The deliberate presentation of this capital has, for me, been conflicted terrain. While strippers find themselves on what Barton (2006) calls a “Mobius strip” in terms of gender power (at once contesting and perpetuating heteronormative, patriarchal regimes) , the conflicting relationship to power and subordination has been explicit along racial lines, too. When customers praise me in comparison to “ghetto” girls who work at the club, or make offensive statements about other dancers’ English competency, it becomes financially lucrative for me to use my cultural capital in the club along those very racialized and classed dimensions. By fulfilling a customer’s fantasy by playing the part of a virginal Indian girl, a Muslim woman rebelling against the repressed sexuality of her childhood, or the “intellectual” with an exhibitionist streak, I at once reinforce stereotypes about myself and the other strippers from whom I am differentiated by accepting and performing these roles. At the same time, however, by playing these parts, I am able to make sums of money unimaginable in any other part-time job. It is at once a disturbing and rewarding performance.
The daily scene in the dressing room is explicitly racialized, as well, as girls flatiron their curls, put on wigs, use body makeup to cover “ghetto” tattoos and stretchmarks. Conversations about “nappy” and “good” hair abound. Management enforces these internalized desires, as certain women are encouraged to wear wigs and body makeup. A sign in my club’s dressing room reads: “TASTEFUL JEWELRY ONLY. NO ‘BLING.’ NO GHETTO GOLD. NO BAMBOO-STYLE EARRINGS.”
The bodies we commodify are not simply bodies; they are embedded in material realities and salient social constructs. The dancers, management, and customers work to perpetuate these constructs in everyday decisions. The music, dancing styles, attire, and accessories are all deliberately chosen to create an image of a particular type of club, a specific sort of femininity, ethnicity, or class.
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While popular understandings of strip club culture often suggest a vulgar, visual objectification of women by male customers, the literature suggests that customers are often in search of something radically different from a place where women’s bodies are ogled (Frank, 2002; Wood, 2000). Strip club customers are usually not just in search of a sexual experience or even visual stimulation from the presentation of women’s bodies. In Frank’s work, the strip clubs she studied contained a “social geography, a landscape that was raced, classed, and gendered, populated with a variety of Others who lent an air of excitement or danger to the men’s experiences” (74). Strippers, then, become black, Latina, white, gothic, innocent, or vampy to produce this social geography.
The examples above suggest that the dynamics in the strip club anticipate a particular type of essentialized racial purity, conformity, and authenticity based on these perceived categories. In our interactions at the club, we “allow the customer to imagine the personality and history of the dancer who is attending to him” (Wood, 10). While Wood’s major assertion is that these imagined personas that are created by dancers and customers alike often “affirm cultural notions of masculinity” and gender (18), my observations suggest that they often affirm essentialized notions of race, culture, and ethnicity.
In my experience, assumptions of racial essence and purity are explicit and abundant at strip clubs. On numerous occasions, being able to speak Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, or “standard” English has been instrumental in establishing a long-term, lucrative connection with a regular customer. Linguistic skills were proof that I was a particular type of immigrant woman, separate from the many Brazilian and Russian women who often lacked legal documentation for work in the U.S. or had limited English proficiency. Several times, customers have told me that even the way I introduced myself “gave away” my race and class identity within seconds. Linguistics is not the only way I am perceived and perform a racialized identity. My status as a graduate student often came into question by customers. One man, himself a university professor, said that several girls lied and pretended to be graduate students, but “it’s clear that they’re not actually in school, and it’s clear that you’re some sort of graduate student.” In fact, the “Indian emphasis” on higher learning has come up several times by customers with whom I discuss my career and schooling.
On numerous occasions, customers have asked me for information about my family life. Do my parents try to arrange my marriage? Aren’t they really strict? Are they accepting of my choice to be in graduate school? Several of these questions reflect assumptions about what my people are expected to be like; my responses to these questions are part of the racial performance that I argue is a critical component of the social geography of the strip club.
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The autoethnographic examples above are part of my attempt to begin to understand the myriad ways race impacts the social geography of the strip club. By looking at racial performance, perceptions, and assumptions, I hope to draw attention to the ways strippers (particularly those who are women of color ) navigate an overtly racialized terrain. The hiring process, the daily act of getting dressed, and the ways we choose to introduce ourselves to customers all suggest careful calculations about race and ethnicity.
The strip club as a site for investigations about race seems to be a compelling one. In very few sites do racial and gendered performances work so closely together for the purpose of commodification. It is also a site in which extremely disparate people (in terms of race, age, class, and national origin) are put together in extremely close, even intimate, settings. Crack dealers and graduate students get dressed in cramped spaces and help each other with make-up; investment bankers get drunk while talking to Brazilian immigrants about their marriage; married men with children talk to me in a single conversation about their sexual fetishes and their experience of immigration. These unusual scenes suggest that the social intimacies in the strip club allow atypical scenarios to emerge, enable unexpected contacts and social scripts.
In Barton’s work, she finds that strippers view race as “less a site of stigma than just another distinguishing characteristic that enabled her to make either more or less money on a given night” (2006; 13). Several dancers Barton interviews find race inconsequential or secondary to their ability to negotiate with customers, their physical features, or their level of education. Barton, however, contextualizes these views with the views of other dancers, for whom race is not thought of as irrelevant. “Racial images permeate our culture. Representations of the “Asian Flower,” “Hoochie Mama,” and “Blonde Playmate” color the expectations of customers. Dancers understand this. In the strip club, in which every interaction is a market transaction, dancers may deliberately perform customers’ fantasies to extract more money from them. These fantasies include other racialized fantasies, such as the subservient lotus blossom, and fantasies that have nothing to do with race, for example, the dominatrix or schoolgirl” (14). Barton approximates my experience best when she says that the successful dancer “swiftly learns to read customer desires and perform his gendered and racial fantasies” (15). Reading the customer’s socioeconomic and racial preferences has been as critical in my work as a stripper, if not more, than understanding the customer’s sexual preferences.
Understanding stripping as exposing one’s body and using nudity for commercial purposes does an injustice to the politics of embodiment. After all, a body is never simply a physical entity to be used, bought, or sold; it exists in a complex constellation of social realities, power dynamics, and material bases that construct it as a commodity. My discussion of race above suggests that not only is stripping about gendered practices, it is fundamentally a racial practice as well. As strippers, we not only present our feminine bodies to (mostly) male customers in a commodified setting, we present our whiteness, brownness, blackness, Americanness, and foreignness.
I find it empowering to use a framework of embodiment to understand the work I do. The separation of mind and body, and the consequent association of mind with sociality/politics and the body with biology/nature does a great injustice to the social subjectivities of sex workers. As Csordas says, “that the body might be understood as a seat of subjectivity is one source of challenge to theories of culture in which mind/subject/culture are deployed in parallel with and in contrast to body/object/biology” (1995; 9).
To understand our very bodies as discursive and political allows us to look at the ways we inhabit our bodies and use them in the work we do. Our bodies are powerful symbols, instruments of daily experience shaped by our very understanding of these symbols. Our bodies are not separate from our minds, from politics, from our social subjectivities. In spaces of commercial intimacy, it is never just a body that is bought or sold.
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