Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture (Dress, Body, Culture)
Catherine M. Roach
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1845201299
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
At the heart of Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture lies a very personal story, of author Catherine Roach's response to the decision of her life-long best friend to become an exotic dancer. Catherine and Marie grew up together in Canada and moved to the Usa to enroll in PhD programs at prestigious universities. For various reasons, Marie left her program and instead chose to work as a stripper. The author, at first troubled and yet fascinated by her friend's decision, follows Marie's journey into the world of stripping as an observer and analyst. She finds that this world raises complex questions about gender, sexuality, fantasy, feminism, and even spirituality. Moving from first hand interviews with dancers and others, the book broadens into a provocative and accessible examination of the current popularity of "striptease culture," with sex-saturated media imagery, thongs gone mainstream, and stripper aerobics at your local gym. Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture scrutinizes the naked truth of a lucrative industry whose norms are increasingly at the center of contemporary society.
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V.I.P. rooms, either with established customers or in an attempt to develop such regular contacts. The goal of every dancer is to have a stable of well-known patrons who come in at scheduled times and who can be relied upon to spend one or two hundred dollars or more per visit. Ideally, she would have such patrons scheduled every night of the week that she works – the retiree as her earlybird special on Tuesdays, the downtown lawyer on Wednesdays, the out-of-town businessman every other Friday –
smart and comical, with a sassy sense of humor and a genuine warmth for people. She and Marie become good friends the summer they work together at Barbarella’s Diamonds in Ottawa and I’m charmed by her myself in our interviews. Mia is a party girl who believes that in stripping, she’s finally found her calling. “Before, I used to always get in trouble at work for being sarcastic. Now? It entertains people. YES! Finally, people appreciate me.” Dancers like Mia excel at this talk-work of
“bad,” traditional gender norms for how “good girls” should behave remain intact. Stripping only becomes really subversive in terms of these messages when it goes mainstream. Then the question becomes whether it is changing these standards and rules that govern laywomen’s sexuality. If the stripper’s performance of gender and sexuality as uninhibited, flaunt-it, hypersex glamour-puss becomes a more or less respectable option for everyday gals, one that they can pull off without suffering undue
experimentation of life. Leading sex-positive author Carol Queen says that she and others like her are trying to “transform the culture one step, one fuck, at a time.”8 The logic behind this provocative mission begins to make sense to me. Strippers, Whores, and Sluts • 127 The political edge, the social-justice critique, that I found missing in sex-positive capitalism is present in this “one fuck at a time” strategy of sex-positive feminism. For dancers such as Jeanette, Darcy, Andrea, and Mia,
through school” or “until I pay off some debts.” But the exotic dancer can also transform the Eve script, or enact another version of it, one in which she feels no shame and in fact claims pleasure and power in her performance. What she then intentionally performs is a very calculated, defiant, shameless, and brazen reversal of the goodgirl script. She becomes the mythic figure of a woman who deliberately uses her sexuality against men to beguile and trick them, in order to get what she wants.