Tits Out for the Boys P2: Stripping...for Fun?

Stripping...for Fun?

A Hootchy Kootchy Burlesque Revival

Sexual pouting lips? Check. Sequin encrusted costumes? Check? Removing these costumes? Check. No, this isn’t a stripper’s dressing room, but could be any burlesque performance around the world at this point in time. Or, as I experience, any Burlesque dance class. As costuming is such an important aspect of the art form, beginner classes spend almost as much time talking about where to buy corsets as how to step, together, step. Burlesque is credited as the mother of modern stripping, but after its many revivals, what we are seeing today is an interesting domestification of burlesque dance. What was once so shocking about burlesque has become relatively mundane (oh no, don’t remove that glove! What would your mother say?) As a do-it-yourself burlesque revival storms the western world, burlesque classes and shows are popping up everywhere. Women from all walks of life have joined classes and performed on stage in the burlesque tradition, not only volunteering their bodies for the gaze, but sacrificing time, money and energy to do it. All around the world woman have reclaimed burlesque for themselves, and Dunedin is one of the leading small cities in this trend.

But are these women simply passive dupes of a patriarchal system? Or are they the powerful, hot young things of Brown’s Cosmopolitan world? As I get to know more of the women involved in Burlesque, I realise that they are neither. Take 48 year old Debbe; I met Debbe over the scramble for sequins in a class run by nation-wide burlesque brand Hootchy Kootchy, one of the most commercially successful burlesque groups in Dunedin. Debbe has been attending burlesque classes for only six weeks at the time of my visit, but she’s been involved in feminism for a lot longer than that. Growing up, she had four sisters and a mother who was active at the height of second wave feminism; avid sing alongs to “I am Woman, Hear me Roar” were common place for Debbe growing up. The effect of this feminist upbringing remain strong: “I actively try not to limit choices for myself or bow to societal norms.  I have been referred to as a ‘boundary pusher’ which was intended as a negative trait but I have accepted it as a compliment.” She writes in an email after we meet. She confesses that she is selective about who she tells about her new found hobby, however, for fear of having to explain and justify her choices. And it is not only Burlesque dancers that fear the judgement of others because of their stripper related activities.

“It’s Just Aerial Acrobatics!” Pole dance and pole fitness.

There is an ever pervasive misconception that stripper’s poles are greasy, but ask yourself this; how could anyone hang upside down from a steel pole 6cm in diameter using only the crease of their leg if said pole was covered in grease? The reality is the exact opposite of this misconception; pole dancers’ poles are waxed. The first time I ever saw pole dance was, in fact, thanks to the very process of waxing poles, or more specifically the time that it takes to wax a pole. During pole dance shows, there is an awkward gap of three of four minutes while the poles undergo maintenance for the next set of performances, and a successful Dunedin pole dance studio recruited some circus performers and I to fill in the gaps (by night I swap my writers pen for belly dance bra and belt, in case you were wondering). I parade around the stage, always looking out my peripherals to make sure I was not  about to smack into a pole or a person, while women in black shorts and bare feet crawl up poles, fire-man style, coating them with large white candles. I shimmy and shake and spangle my little heart out, but as I look out to the audience I meet no one’s gaze. I sit back in the audience to watch the rest of the show, when one kindly audience member turns to me and says: “Don’t worry about it love; you tried your best.” Outshined by a pole monkey.

But it is no wonder that I was not impressing anyone in that particular audience. These women show strength and gravity defiance that most of us common folk could only dream of, and that’s just the pole management team. Recently I was asked to yet again distract an audience-who-needs-no-distraction as the studio puts on a huge four night production of everyone’s favourite, secretly dirty, musical Grease. I pop along to their dress rehearsal to scope out the stage and to chat with the performers.

The thing that strikes me is the sound. Across the studio screeches the sound of flesh simultaneously gripping and sliding across metal. It sounds like a pain verging on torture, but when I ask some of the dancers about it they unanimously answer that it sounds much more painful than it really is. There are plenty of other moves that do cause pain, but I am told that they are the silent ones. As Irene, a blonde with a slightly vacant look in her eyes, tells me with a laugh: “If you don’t like pain, don’t do pole dancing”. Am I in a room full of masochists, I wonder? But here pain is not so much enjoyed as it is a symbol of dedication, of working hard towards training the body and accomplishing physical goals. The dancers wear their bruises like girl-guide badges; if they could clip them to a ribbon, I’m sure they would.

Among the women at the studio, there is unquestioned respect for the physical achievements of themselves and each other; but outside the studio, it is a different story. Almost everyone I talk to has someone in their lives that disapproves, and are forced to spend a lot of time explaining and justifying their hobby to strangers. Resistant or unsupportive family and friends find it difficult to be persuaded without seeing the show for themselves, and unanimously switch camps once they do. The symbol of the pole and its associations with stripping are so strong that it takes concrete visual evidence to persuade people that a pole can be danced on without all the performer’s clothes ripping themselves from their body.

            Most of the girls I talk to at the dress rehearsal set themselves in fierce opposition to strippers; the suggestion that they may be in stripper territory visibly upsets and angers them. But Bonnie Black, the founder of this very studio, has a very different although equally fierce take on this binary. When Bonnie auditioned for “New Zealand’s Got Talent,” a derivative of the American television program which acts primarily as a glorified High School talent show, earlier this year, she was furious at presenter Dei Henwood when he announced that “the stripper” had made it into the second round. “Thanks for calling me a stripper in front of my fucking parents” she says about Henwood to me over coffee. She continues, “If you want me to strip for you, then I’ll strip. But don’t call me a stripper when I’m doing pole fitness; that’s a totally different thing.”

See you next week for more on the legendary Bonnie Black and my final thoughts in stripping for work and leisure in a post-feminist era!

Tits Out for the Boys: Stripping for Work and Leisure in a Post-Feminist Age P1

Tits Out for the Boys

Stripping for Work and Leisure in a Post-Feminist Age

Photograph by Vivian Bruce

Welcome to the 21^st Century: Where the Stripper Rules

We live in a time where, by all accounts, the stripper is winning. She is rich, she is sexy, she is fascinating and she chooses her own hours. New stripping blogs are popping up almost every day[1] and are guaranteed flocks of followers; Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Strip Tease DVD has found its way into the bedrooms of middle aged ladies all over the world; and women are frequenting the strip club as audience members in droves.[2]The stripper seems to ‘have it all’- money, beauty and men falling at her high heel clad feet. No longer does society look down upon the stripper, but reveres her as an icon of feminine success.

            This contemporary idolization of the stripper is rooted in the post-feminist age in which we live, and is indebted to the sexual revolution of the 1960's. Helen Gurley Brown[3], founder of the profoundly influential women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, argued for a sexual revolution for women in her taboo breaking book Sex and the Single Girl, a foundational text (and woman) for post-feminist thinking of the present. In her book she criticized society’s insistence on the pure, virginal woman and asserts a new, sexually assertive and successful feminine lifestyle. She encourages her readers to use their bodies and good looks to get what they want from men, and from life; and if you don’t have it, fake it. The stripper embodies Brown’s manifesto for the confident, sexy single girl; her body is her success, men universally desire her and women envy her. The stripper is not a victim at all, but an idol of feminine success and confident sexuality, a figure for the common woman to look upon and emulate.

Reality Check

Back in the present, in a dim and overheated room, a young woman with long curly blonde hair and full round buttocks parades herself on a pole filled stage. Eyes follow her every movement; hungrily, they consume her image. Her movements are not subtle, there are no hints or suggestions. If her dancing were a poem, it would be a very bad one; no metaphors in sight, only one dimensional facts. It would be written in bullet points. What normally remains behind closed doors is imitated, re-presented in the most public and flashy way possible. Except, it’s not a whole representation. There is something missing; an invisible other, an intended recipient for all her grinding and shaking. I realise, not wholly comfortably, that this intended other is me.

            Well, not actually me, not exactly. I’m not going to give anyone tips, and considering that we have just spent the last half hour talking about her children backstage she probably knows this. All that work, energy and effort has been for the three lone men who occupy Dunedin strip club "Stilletos" at the considerably early hour of 10:30pm on a Thursday night. I hope for the girls’ sake that the club fills up later; the lack of audience makes the whole thing feel that much more sleazy. I've been sitting in the audience for about 20 minutes when I realise that I have adopted the same position the entire time; stiff, perched on the very edge of my seat, hands folded over my notebook like a primary school student in their class photo. Casually, I try to re-position myself into a more natural pose. How do I normally sit? I try leaning back into the chair, with arms at my sides; I look like a body stoned jellyfish. What about crossed legs? It feels much too prudish for the situation. I slink back into the changing rooms where the dancers fluff about with shoes and lacy panties; it feels much more comfortable back there.

            The dancer remains on the stage. When I met Lexie (her stage name) a few minutes earlier, I was struck by her quiet and reserved demeanor  During the tom foolery and back stage antics, she sits in the corner clutching her black jacket closed and quietly smiling to herself. With two young children (both girls), horse riding and working late into the night, she manages to catch her sleep in fleeting afternoon naps. When I ask to hear more about her children I brace myself for the bombardment of excited information that most breeders respond with when given permission to discuss their kids. She tells me she prefers not to think about them when she is here. Once she takes to the stage, it is not difficult to understand why; when Lexie dances, it is not her depth that the men want to see. No children. No horse riding. No life or personality. Just a body, an object, a thing to fantasize over. Possess. How, in any way, can stripping be positive? How can being reduced to a husk of a human in the eyes of three grubby old men be in any way enjoyable or empowering?

Sexual Liberation vs Second Wave Feminism

            Second wave feminism, as you may imagine, had a slightly different take on the stripper than Brown and post-feminism of the present. Important feminist figures such as Laura Mulvey argued that women were the bearers rather than the makers of meaning; their bodies represented the desire of men, not the sexual agency of themselves. [4]. The theory of the male gaze, that is a powerful and dominating gaze that fashions women in accordance with male sexual fantasy and seeks to abolish their agency by turning them into a fetishised object, saw the construction of women as a sexual object as the underpinnings of sexual imbalance in society. The stripper in second wave feminist thought was not a feminine idol but a symbol of female oppression. The stripper fulfilled the role that patriarchy desired of all women; silent, sexual and subservient to their demands. So while Brown and sexual revolutionists (the other most notable figure for the sexual revolution in the 1960’s being Hugh Heffner) saw women’s embracing of sexiness as the key to female empowerment, second wave feminists saw traditionally sexy appearance, behaviour and practices as the key to female oppression. And so the stripper becomes a dichotomised and fractured symbol; she is either the ultimate good or the ultimate evil. As the stripper gets tossed around from theorist to theorist, sexual revolution to second wave feminism, where does the humanity of the stripper register? A symbol has no voice of her own, no way to communicate her own feelings and opinions of the complicated position that she occupies. It’s time to move away from the stripper as symbol and approach this topic with a clear and distinct knowledge that a stripper is a complex human, occupying a complex role for complex reasons. So, too ,are the women who emulate her.

Hope you enjoyed the first section of "Tits Out for the Boys". Catch up next week for a look at Burlesque and Pole Fitness!

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[1] Notable stripping blogs include diaryofanangrystripper.com, astripper.wordpress.com, graceundressed@blogspot.com and countless others.

[2] Ariel Levy, 2003.

[3] Brown, 2003 (originally published 1962).

[4] Mulvey, 1992.