Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (22 page)

Events catering to BSSDW are even less visible—occurring weekly or monthly—and often in already marginalized areas of town (although Black Pride, which occurs each year in May, ushers in an increase in shows). Events take place nationwide, usually in urban spaces leased out for that purpose.

Despite their relatively low profile, strip events for BSSDW are important to take into account when considering both the increasing importance of stripping as a form of entertainment and the ways that stripping is intertwined with other forms of consumption and other systems of meaning and privilege.

A C O M PA R ATI V E A P P R O A C H

Each of the authors conducted ethnographic research on stripping in the United States. Frank is an anthropologist and former exotic dancer who researched the motivations and experiences of male customers in five strip clubs in a southern city she calls Laurelton; in addition to her labor as a dancer and her analysis of her everyday interactions, she conducted multiple, in-depth interviews with 30 regular customers of those clubs.13 Over the year and a half she spent in the field, she also interviewed other dancers, managers, DJs, and men who preferred other kinds of adult entertainment. Carnes worked as an exotic dancer in traditional strip clubs as well, but then pursued fieldwork at strip events catering to black female customers. She conducted interviews with 20 customers, dancers, and promoters and observed numerous strip events for BSSDW in the Washington, DC, area.14

Frank’s research was conducted in five traditional clubs chosen to represent different positions on a hierarchy of “classiness” (ranging from the most prestigious clubs in the city to the lower tier “dive” bars) as well as on
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the types of service available within. Clubs were evaluated in terms of their reputations, dress codes, cover charges, food and liquor choices, club size and atmosphere, location, and predominant clientele. Each selected venue offered stage performances by the dancers, along with the opportunity for customers to purchase “private” table dances at their seats, on a raised platform or table, or while standing on the ground between the man’s knees. Although a dancer could disrobe completely and place her hands on the customers’ shoulders, other forms of bodily contact were prohibited (which distinguishes these clubs from others that allow more contact, such as lap dances). Dancers were also required to keep at least one foot of space between themselves and the customers during dances. Customers were not allowed to touch the dancers, or to touch or expose their own genitals. These rules were rarely openly transgressed, and when they were, the customer was usually asked to leave the clubs.15 The erotic appeal of the men’s visits, then, was not dependent on sexual release or physical contact.

The male interviewees ranged in age from 28 to 57. All identified as heterosexual and had at least some college education. Despite sometimes significant differences in income and occupation, all identified as somewhere in the middle class. Twenty-seven were white Americans, two were African-Americans, and one was a British citizen who frequently traveled to the United States on business.

Carnes’ observations were drawn from three primary sites where BSSDW erotic events were held in Washington, DC—Cada Vez (a nightclub/

restaurant), Wet (a gay nightclub that was used to host Soft ‘N’ Wet Afternoons), and Club Levels (a nightclub catering to black men and women).

Both Cada Vez and Wet hosted black women’s events during off hours (or days) when the club was not in use by more dominant groups. Events offered the opportunity to watch dancers on the stages as well as to interact more privately through personalized dances. Some events attracted a younger crowd, ranging from 21 to the early 40s, while others drew the over-40 crowd. The black female interviewees ranged in age from 22 to 81 and claimed a variety of sexual identities (dom, femme, boi, etc.). Customers ranged in professions from working class to pink collar, and came from Washington, DC, southern Maryland, or Northern Virginia.

These projects are detailed explorations of specific entertainment sites, the complexities of which cannot be replicated in a chapter of this length.

Our analysis here, then, is necessarily limited in its aim and scope. What this chapter does illustrate, however, is that while the act of commercial stripping—removing one’s clothes before an audience of paying customers—

may have some similarities across demographic and context, there are also
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important particularities in practices and meanings that must be considered when drawing conclusions about stripping, and these variations challenge generalizations about such practices as intrinsically “harmful” or as signifying inequality, liberation, or anything else in a coherent, universal manner.

Most research on strip clubs focuses on a particular type of club—with female or male dancers—but rarely have scholars compared these different types of venue. The differences between male and female customers have been analyzed in a handful of studies.16 One intriguing question is whether shows featuring male strippers for female audiences reinforce or invert gender stereotypes and power differentials. As Montemurro, Bloom, and Madell have noted, because “norms for sexual expression vary, the comparison of men and women in hyper-sexualized environments, like strip clubs, is telling with respect to the power and enactment of these norms in everyday life.”17 Their research, like similar research on male customers by other scholars, offers a typology of customers. They argue that men and women visit strip clubs for different reasons and that women use strip clubs “as an opportunity for social interaction and bonding with friends” more frequently than men did, although women were still interested in the voyeuristic elements of the show.18 In this chapter, we move beyond the static typologies and explore in more depth how the creation of strip space and interactions reflects the unique cultural and historical positions of the customers, as well as how the specific needs of those customers shape the use and interpretation of strip events and clubs.

A Space of One’s Own

We found that the motivations, experiences, and interpretations of their interactions in strip clubs of the primarily white, middle-aged, and middle-class men and the black, same-sex desiring women were strikingly similar in some respects, especially with regard to understandings of entertainment and leisure. Among the men, the most prevalent (and usually the first given)
spoken
motivation for visiting strip clubs was a desire to “relax.” Strip clubs were perceived as relaxing, in part, because they provided an atmosphere different from both work and home and an opportunity for both personal and sexual acceptance from women. BSSDW also repeatedly described the events as creating a space to relax, interact with friends, escape from daily pressures, and gain personal and sexual acceptance. All the women interviewed expressed comfort in being able to unwind and get their minds off of their jobs, bills, or other stressors while viewing the performances.

In the sex industry—of which strip clubs are a significant segment—

gendered sexual identities and desires, as well as privileges and experiences of
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race and class, explicitly intersect with consumer culture. Strip club visits are thus related to other aspects of everyday life—work, home, relationships, identities, and aspirations. Strip spaces designed for heterosexual men and for BSSDW fulfill different needs for the customers as well—needs that arise out of unique social and historical positionings— although both sets of customers also discussed some similar motivations and experiences. For the male regulars, the clubs provided a relative degree of “safety” as well as

“excitement”—both as entertainment venues and in relation to their outside relationships with women—as well as the pleasure of a sexualized encounter without the pressure of physical performance. Discourses of class, race, and gender that underlie men’s interpretations of their visits to strip clubs also informed the BSSDW experiences, although in different ways. Commercial stripping involves public erotic performances with personal and cultural meanings. For the BSSDW, strip events provide a sense of community—

political and erotic—that helps them transcend everyday experiences of racism, sexism, and homophobia. In the next sections, these needs are discussed in more depth.

The Importance of Masculine Space

Strip clubs for men provide an atmosphere where men can engage in traditionally masculine activities and forms of consumption often frowned on in these other spheres—cigar smoking, drinking, and even being “rowdy,”

vulgar, or aggressive. Despite the fact that nudity eventually becomes commonplace to regulars, the clubs are still a place where many conventions are inverted; for example, women are undressed in a public space and tend to initiate sexualized interactions rather than the men, sometimes quite aggressively, and sexualized relationships are
openly
facilitated through economic exchange (rather than, as the customers pointed out, the many covert ways that this happens in everyday life).

For the male customers, for whom everyday relationships with women were often seen as a source of pressure and expectations, such inversions were experienced as relaxing. Many men described relations between the sexes in the U.S. as being “strained,” “confused,” or “tense.” Over half the interviewees specifically appreciated having an escape from the rules of conduct and the social games involved when interacting with other women in other settings.

Interactions with women in the workplace were also often felt to be constraining. One man pointed out that in the workplace he felt nervous about giving compliments to women for fear that they would accuse him of sexual harassment. Another said that club visits “let frustration out:” “With all of
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this sexual harassment stuff going around these days, men need somewhere to go where they can act like they want.” In the clubs, another interviewee claimed, “everybody knows what the rules are.” There are other spaces, then, where the men do not understand exactly what is going to “get them into trouble.” Some men explicitly stated a desire to interact with women who were not “feminist,” and who still wanted to relate to men in more “traditional”

ways. Others said that men had to continually “be on guard” against offending women, experiencing and justifying their visits within a framework of confusion and frustration rather than simply one of privilege or domination.

The rapid increase in the number of strip clubs across the U.S. in the mid-1980s, after all, coincided with an increase of women into the workforce and more attention paid to issues of sexual harassment, date rape, and criticism of the sex industry. While this is not a case of simple cause and effect, such developments certainly affect the ways that the men’s visits to the clubs are spoken about and understood.

Men also sought personal and sexual acceptance through their interactions in the clubs. Dancers offered an opportunity to talk to women with whom they were not generally able to interact, for a number of reasons—a lack of attractiveness, age differences, class differences (in either direction), availability, and the women’s willingness to interact outside of the clubs. Some men were also searching for acceptance of their sexual desires, telling dancers things they claimed they had never told their wives or lovers—usually specific fantasies or experiences they thought the other women in their lives would not understand or that had caused extreme negative reactions in the past, such as a desire to give or receive anal sex. Interactions purchased in strip clubs were also often felt to be “an ego boost” because they provided safe opportunities for interactions with women without the risk of rejection. Sexuality and sexual conquest, after all, can be experienced as humiliating and stressful for men as well as thrilling. Many sex workers joke about really being “therapists” and explicitly understand their jobs to be about boosting a man’s ego by convincing him that he is desirable, masculine, and successful. One interviewee described his visits to a strip club during a failing marriage as “good for my ego to build me up, to make me feel like I was a man again.” Thus customers were at times seeking a sense of escape from those aspects of the self that felt oppressive in other spheres—old age, ugliness or insecurity, a lack of social skills, or intimate failures. Men may seek to “maintain grandiose self-images” as part of their gender identity, images that gain a heightened importance in middle age.19 Some men may not have experienced a sense of strength and influence in their everyday lives even during their younger years, yet think that they
should have
. For men who are willing and able to pay for it,
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the type of female attention available in a contemporary strip club can be notable.

Susan Bordo discusses male anxiety about female attractiveness and argues that “just as the beautiful bodies [in cultural representations] subject us women to (generally) unrealizable models of the kind of female we must
become
in order to be worthy of attention and love, they also subject men and boys to (generally) unrealizable models of the kind of female they must
win
—with equally destructive consequences.”20 Although most heterosexual boys settle for “inferior fixes,” women who may be attractive but do not quite succeed in approximating the ideal, many men still “remain haunted by the beauties.”

Images of female perfection thus “not only shape perception, they also shape sexual desire,” she argued, and “straight male sexuality is honed on the images, even fixated on them.”21 That some men perceive female beauty as being powerful, able to “invade male consciousness and arouse desire and then to reject that desire, leaving the man humiliated, shamed, frustrated,” may lead some men to seek both solace and excitement in pornography or strip clubs.22