Literature Review 2
Strip joints, titty bars, and peep shows all have a negative connotation. Sleazy, uneducated women dance while half naked (or completely naked) for dirty old men. The place itself is dirty, dark, and seedy. It’s not a pleasant idea, so why do women continue to strip and why do men continue to pay to see them strip.
Enter Elisabeth Eaves. She used to be one of those nude women in Seattle, Washington. The name of her particular peep show? The Lusty Lady. And the men came…in every sense of the word. She danced as Leila, and for customers she bent over, twisted, kicked her legs, and feigned arousal from theirs.
But like many of the dancers, Eaves left the Double-L to pursue other goals. She moved to New York and went to graduate school at Columbia, to earn a masters’ in international affairs. She worked as a journalist and reported for Reuters in London and in Jerusalem. She didn’t talk much about her past to others, many of them got the wrong idea when she did. But dancing haunted her. Why had she danced naked in front of strange men? she wondered. Was it wrong? How did it affect her psyche? Her relationships with men and with society?
So she returned to Seattle in search of answers, this time stripping at other clubs with the intent to write about her experience. If she could write about it, she could understand it. Her book, “Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power”, tends to reveal only more questions and few answers. But it sheds some light on the life of a peep-show dancer.
Many times in the book, Eaves wonders what would motivate her to strip. After all, people presume that women who are sexual are uneducated, downtrodden, abused, or any combination of the three. Eaves was none of those and she found the stereotypes irritating.
Stripping also offered Eaves a flexible work schedule. It was an interesting job that paid well (the top pay at the Double-L in 2001 was $27 an hour.) But Eaves also found the work attractive for another reason. It fed her obsession with stripping.
As a child, Eaves says she had a “deep distaste for clothing.” During her teenage years, she rebelled against her parents’ ban on tight shirts and short skirts. And as a sorority member at the University of Washington, she was confused by the constant warnings to “be aware of your reputation.” Why should girls be so confined while boys were given sexual license?
Eaves noted in her book that she believed that women who strip didn’t have to follow those rules. They were free.
After graduating from college with her first degree, Eaves noticed a Lusty Lady employment ad and – wanting no regrets at age 80 – decided to check it out. So she decided to visit the peep show, stepping into one of the dark booths, dropping coins in the slot, and watching as a screen lifted to reveal a long-haired woman wearing nothing but white patent-leather boots. Eaves says she was at once “mesmerized” and filled with something akin to desire not for the other woman, but to be her. Soon after, Eaves was on the other side of the window, dancing before a wall of mirrors on a red velvet rug.
In a sense, Eaves didn’t really become a stripper, because the dancers at the peep show are always nude. That is, unless you happen to count wigs, false eyelashes, platform shoes, boas and other accents. In the book, the dancer’s nakedness adds levity, with Eaves describing how they politely laid a piece of paper towel on the dressing-room couch before sitting down. Or how they introduced themselves to each other with compliments such as, “You have beautiful breasts.”
Equally fun is Eaves’ discussion of the dancers’ stage names, which are always pseudonyms so that the customers can’t trace them. Girl-next-door names are popular: Jenny, Heather. Food and jewel names are too: Crystal, Ruby, Cherry.
By choosing Leila, Eaves joined the ranks of Lily, Lulu, Delilah. “The two l’s made the person saying the name flick the tongue up and down in a licking motion,” she writes.
But the book’s picture of peepdom is not all rosy. Once the novelty of being nude wears off, the work was repetitive. Working in the private booth where men on one side of the glass direct women’s actions on the other side through a sound system (“You are a naughty school girl, and you’re late for class!”) was also unsettling to her.
And it can be disgusting. “The architecture of the stage was such that we literally looked down on (the men) and they looked up at us,” Eaves writes. “We also held a sort of moral high ground, in the sense that we could explain our presence here, however ingeniously, in terms of earning a living. They, on the other hand, were ducking into cubicles where they paid money to watch girls fake arousal.”
The work fed Eaves’ cynicism about met in general, even harming her relationship.
After arriving back in Seattle to do more research, Eaves chose to work in other clubs, doing lap dances and working bachelor parties. But in a space of a few months, her attitude had become more negative.
But the book shows that stripping isn’t as exploitive as one would think. The women choose to take part in the profession. However, it reinforces the idea that women can be bought. Every Betty, Zoe, and Kim have their appearance, behavior, and sexuality for sale.