A gay man, a straight man, and his fluid girlfriend all walk into a topless bar on a Friday night, all three of them strip club virgins. Inside, smooth-skinned women in strappy lingerie stalk about on platform heels from booth to booth and arch themselves across stages, laps, and poles. As the trio moves into the lounge area, taking seats on the red wraparound couch, three voluptuous women straddle the laps of three separate men, whose rough hands slide silently up their bodies. The girlfriend turns to the gay friend and says, “I’m going to need something alcoholic.”
Last Friday, that straight man was my boyfriend, the birthday boy; that girlfriend was me, and the strip club was my idea of a good time that was, well, mostly for his benefit. But, as we stood at the bar, and a towering mocha-skinned beauty led my man away for a lap dance, she called over her shoulder at me, “I do girls, too.” A song and a half later, she grinned enthusiastically at me as she exchanged his hand for mine and led me off to the red couch for my turn.
Logistically, I do recall, with no small measure of satisfaction, what she did in her dance, but amid the amusement stirred feelings of confusion, of conflict. So I posed my feminist questions to her, listening for an explanation for this pleasant madness. My eyes kept searching to keep contact with hers as we spoke, out of respect, woman to woman, even as she obstructed them with pieces of herself. What about her boyfriends? Did she feel comfortable doing this? Did she like her job? What were the bad days like? Did people ever abuse the power she gave their hands? I stared, incredulous, at her grin, which seemed so genuine, and wondered to myself: How do women get anywhere in this world when places like this exist?
Whitney told me she had some exes who were jealous sometimes, yet jealousy didn’t seem like a theme in her relationships. Even while she pressed on me, she explained that she actually preferred when people used their hands — it made her feel appreciated. “When they don’t touch, it makes me feel like they don’t want me on them,” she told me. She said she did enjoy her job, that it allowed her to interact with all different kinds of people nightly. She conceded that there were some rough nights sometimes, some rowdy customers. But she also explained that it was actually often the women who physically overstepped, pinching and biting and “showing off for their men,” she said, annoyed. I couldn’t believe it, that a woman would disrespect another woman’s body like that, occupational hazard or no. But more than that, I had a hard time conceptualizing a job as a stripper in the positive ways she’d described it. Perhaps predictably, I was too wrapped up in the commercial exploitation of it all to enjoy the dance very much, so when our song ended, I paid her and took her answers back to the bar where my gay friend waited to be briefed. His eyes surveyed the topless entertainers with a similar confusion. And even as we sent my man off with somebody else, the two of us, both self-professed feminists with our minds wetted by wine, put our heads together to weigh our unrest.
In the morning, as the three of us curled up around cups of tea, nursing our hangovers and our opinions, our questions about justifying such clubs, all clarified by sudden sobriety, intensified. I couldn’t stop thinking about the voluntary nature of it all. These were women who had applied for the job and kept showing up to work presumably of their own volition, willing to bare themselves and be touched by strangers merely as entertainers. My boyfriend suggested a comparison between these dancers and other service individuals and entertainers, to waitresses who performed a service in exchange for pay or to gymnasts whose physical feats were entertainment to spectators. But, I argued, there were no sexual undertones in those examples. In those situations, the produce weren’t people, women with thinking minds and talents that run deeper than flesh and figure. Those occupations do not blur the line, do not make it difficult for some patrons to distinguish between the naked woman within and the clothed, considering woman without, to think of women as pleasure objects. Voluntary or not, establishments like the strip club feed into a society that was biased against woman — and not only that, but biased against certain types of women. We all examined our memories for the types of women we’d seen on stage and found that somehow, though the spread seemed to suggest variety — “something for everyone,” as my boyfriend had said the night before — they all seemed still to represent variations on conventional standards of beauty. All of the women there somehow matched the fairly fair and fairly-hourglass or fairly-pear-shaped conventions we all know well. Whitney, with her light brown skin and short, black hair, was the darkest dancer in there. I was the only girl in the whole club that night who looked remotely like me.
That raised other questions, like do we have the right to speak for women who bare themselves voluntarily? Should we condone the existence of strip clubs if all parties are willing participants? Can we do so even when the selection is skewed? And how much responsibility do such establishments have to change the norms of perception and improving women’s overall image in our society? Whitney's answers to my questions made me think that perhaps I don't have the right to rally against these institutions, much as I wanted to. I was against them, but not all women are. For my friend and I both, our feminist flame was stumped by these women's willingness to pander to men's sexually bent interests.
Beyond her and women like her, however, I reflected that, regardless of their preferences, I still live in a sexist reality, one that is not helped by an institution that parades women around in nearly nothing for the excitation of its mostly male clientele. That doesn't mean, though, that there's much these clubs can do to change that reality. The problem is that a strip club is very much an active participation medium. Management has to pander to the clientele in order to get them in the door, and their attention to conventional forms of female beauty is just a byproduct of business — biased and a little grotesque, but fairly understandable all the same. However, the true effectors, the genesis of societal change, really need to originate in passive participation mediums — in visual media like TV shows and movies and broadcast television, on billboards and in cosmetic products and advertisements and on the runway. It needed to start in all the places we’re exposed to just by living, to start training our subconscious biases to affect change — not just for the purpose of improving our views of women, but also for improving our views on racial equality, religious equality, and the equality of the LGBT community as well.
Perhaps the strip club can't easily be an instrument for effecting change concerning the objectification of women; perhaps that's too much to ask of it, and I just have to accept that they exist, and even that they're fun places to visit. But maybe it can be an instrument for effecting a kind of change, slowly, but effectively all the same. Because, they didn't have to let women in, or, in fact, cater to them at all, in the spirit of perpetuating this practice of heteronormative sexual behavior. When preselecting a place to take my boyfriend on his birthday, I read the Yelp reviews of several such places, and many seemed ready to turn away women who were not accompanied by at least an equal number of men. Perhaps my next experiment will be to turn up at a club like that alone and ask for admittance. While they may not be able to make drastic changes in the way women are viewed physically, perhaps small improvements can be made just through recognizing the nuances of sexual preference in our society. Perhaps what we can look to our strip clubs for is the example Whitney spoke to as she glanced over her shoulder at me and said, "I do girls, too."
