down and dirty

I observed and wrote up the following field notes after visiting a local strip club with one of my professors as part of my work toward a master's in sociology.

Arriving at the club, I was coaching myself to just relax and enjoy myself. Since I had never before been to a strip club it was quite a new experience for me. When I went in and didn’t see my supervisor immediately I took a seat at the bar to give my eyes time to adjust to the dark, since I didn’t want to traipse around the very dark corners of the club looking for her. I took a deep breath, and for the first time in my life saw a woman (to be honest, she looked like a girl) dancing for purely titillating purposes. Being a belly dancer, my preconceived notions of what "dancer" means were certainly tested by what I saw. The woman’s movements were more bump-and-grind than anything else—meant to simulate the sex act. There was a lot of writhing and leg-spreading and simulated masturbation as well. Furthermore, the term striptease really does not connote properly what the woman was doing, since she came out in a thong and bra and actually only removed her top. There was no foreplay, so to speak, no flirtation, no dance of the seven veils slowly revealing the mystery and beauty of the feminine form. I did not expect to see a purely pornographic display, and I was slightly embarrassed to watch, but didn’t know what else to do, given my circumstances. I was painfully aware of being the only woman other than the employees there, and could see the men looking at me, likely wondering about why I was there. This steeled my resolve: I was there to be a dispassionate observer and apprentice sociologist, so I determined to set aside my surprise and naive expectations and get to work.

Around this time my supervisor, M., arrived, having been stuck in traffic for a few minutes, and we took a seat. I was beginning to notice more details about the place we were in. It was much darker than most nightclubs I have been to in the past. It did not appear to be very clean, and it was quite small. I was reminded more of some of the bars I visited while in Beijing and Xian, China, than of the kind of bars and clubs in this area that don’t feature nudity. I had lots of questions and since M. had been observing, conducting interviews, and writing about the subject for years she had lots of pertinent information to share. The arrangement of the stage was such that there was a recessed level of seating around the "runway", and then other seats up a couple of steps with a few tables. More seating was at the bar; also a few steps up from the lower level nearest the stage. We were seated near the very end of the stage itself on the upper level. I noticed right away that all the patrons were sitting in seats relatively far away from the stage. I asked M. why no one was seated in the lower seating area. If they came to really see the dancers up close, after all, I would have expected them to be on what amounted to the "front row". Yet those seats stayed almost empty throughout the night. I assumed that the desire of the patrons to maintain the relative anonymity and complete observer status possible in the darker, higher-up seats was stronger than the more carnal desires that might push them closer to the action—but also into the "observed" area the rest of the club’s patrons all had their eyes on. I also wondered if research into primate hierarchy had any application here. Would there be "alpha males" or "silverbacks" willing to claim the seats closer to the stage and the women?

The dancers came out one after the other, announced by name. There were about 6 or 7 different dancers there that night. I noticed that the similarity in moves on the floor and "tricks" at the pole was striking. In belly dancing, each member of a troupe is expected to have her own style and to specialize in something—veil work, belly flutters, shimmies, etc.--while the most accomplished dancers have an entire performance (or more than one) full of mostly original takes on basic and advanced forms, choreographed into a seamless "dance". Here I was surprised at how many dancers did the exact same thing as the dancer before her. It left me feeling that what was expected here of the women, what worked best to get tips, was a cut to the chase, faceless display that was interchangeable from person to person. No one dancer left an indelible, memorable mark, due to the conformity. In belly dancing, the women make lots of eye contact with the audience—both with women and men. Here I saw some eye contact made by dancers with men who walked down to the stage to tip them, but almost none with us two women watching and talking intently. M. had said that the strippers would not know what to make of us—were we lesbians, were we somehow judging them, were we competition for the dollars and drinks men might otherwise bestow upon them? —and would therefore keep their distance from us, and she was right.

Soon a waitress who said her boss wanted to buy us drinks approached us. M. had told me to expect to be asked if we wanted jobs, so I figured this was the first step in what would become that proposition. I ordered water and she had a drink, and soon after began a conversation with the bar’s owner when he came over to chat. I liked her creed—"talk to anyone who will talk to you"—and basically sat back to watch her work. The first thing I noticed in her dialogue with him is that she took on a much more bubbly, less serious tone than I had noted in my conversations with her. Gone was the fairly serious academic woman I had met and spoken with, and in her place was an effervescent party-girl out for a good time who just loved hanging at strip clubs. I was so intrigued at this massive persona-shift that I had to ask about it after he moved away. She said she had learned early on in her research that if you go in like an academic, asking lots of questions and divulging your researcher status, people would shut down and tell you absolutely nothing. I wondered aloud after our observation how similar a process this was to what the dancers themselves do in their work. A highly empowered dancer who verbalized any genuine, negative feelings or thoughts about some of the things she sees, does, and has done to her, wouldn’t get tips or have a job for long, after all. Much more efficacious to play the part of a dancer who loves her work—loves to be stared out, and fantasized about. The club owner told us about one dancer onstage. He said she used to be a dancer at a big club in Houston and that she had made enough there to buy a trucking company, but that she was dancing again because "just can’t stay away from it". I asked, "Why do you think that is?" and without hesitation he shrugged and said, "She’s an exhibitionist". I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince us, or himself, or if he truly believed it, but I had a hard time believing anyone independently wealthy would choose to dance on a Thursday night in a seedy dive in northwest Arkansas. But it must make everyone feel better about being there if they believe the object of their desire is there by choice, and even more so if she actually wants to be objectified as she plays out her own sexual fantasy of exhibitionism.

I said earlier that most of the dancers used the same moves in their performances, and several of them also looked the same. Though there were some exceptions in hair color and proportions, most were blond, slender, big-breasted (several had had breast-augmentation), "Barbie"-types. There were a couple of exceptions. One girl was very, very thin with long dark hair, and another was bigger than the others, with extremely short, brunette hair. Even her name was different—Shy. I was surprised to see someone looking so different (in reality, her physique was "normal", but compared to the other dancers she looked overweight). M. said she was new and when I asked how she knew (since this was her first time to observe at this club as well) she said, "Two things. She walks a little differently in her high heels, and she is bigger. If she is still dancing a year from now she will have lost weight". I thought her dancing style was a bit more explicit even than the other dancers’, and wondered if that was a kind of compensation for not being in the preferred, "ideal" physical state.

It was when Shy was performing that I first saw two men come down to the actual stage and stay there in seats, rather than just putting money on the stage and walking back to their seats.
They were mature men, in their mid to late 30s or 40s—the "alphas" I expected to see there, if primatological behavior has any application for humans in strip clubs. She "presented" a bit more openly to them, spreading her legs practically in their faces, and stroking herself. One of the men had a dollar bill in his hand and seemed to be taunting her with it, as she was prostrate before him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but there was definitely a kind of teasing going on with the money. The dancer stayed on the ground writhing even more wildly and the second man also stood over her, as well. Their faces were hovering near her splayed crotch, and they were leering and holding onto the money instead of giving it to her, as if by doing so they could engage her longer, make her become even more revealing or somehow give them more than she already was. There was an overt dominant/ subservient aspect to the situation, and it was the only time I felt extremely uncomfortable and protective of one of the dancers. I really had to fight the urge to go down there and push them aside, which I know would have been wholly inappropriate on many levels. Had I been on the street and seen someone treating a woman in that way, no matter what her dress or behavior, I would have engaged the men angrily and put myself between them and her.

Soon after, we were propositioned by a very intoxicated man who seemed to assume he could have sex with both of us. Even after we said no thanks and let him know were married, he slurred "Me too, that’s ok". He was having trouble communicating in English. In my rudimentary Spanish, I told him no, that we were nice girls. His reply was so ironic that it really stuck with me: "That’s what I like, nice girls." We married women were being clumsily and repeatedly invited into a proposed threesome with a married man who preferred nice girls. It was surreal, and had I not been in that equally surreal space I would have responded with some choice words and possibly a physical reminder that my, and our, space was our own. Instead, we just moved to the bar. M. told me there that she was sometimes groped by such patrons, but I got the impression that she saw it to some degree as part of the job—the important thing being that she could continue to maintain her relatively undercover status and get more information for her research. Even as ostensible customers, some men seemed to think we could be treated with a standard of interaction far more cavalier than the normal rules of engagement between men and women on the street.

Here, I was confronted with the fact that all the rules were different, and no one—not the men, not the dancers, not M., and not even me--acted as they would have in real life, outside. As we stood in the parking lot talking, I felt as if I had just walked out of a small, dark factory created solely to feed some men’s desire for no questions asked, impersonal, mechanistic, assembly-line sexual titillation; a kind of holographic fantasy of someone else’s making, or a dream I had been having where I just couldn’t bring myself to act or speak. And I was just an observer. Knowing that questions of agency were important to M.’s work, I couldn’t help but wonder if there really were dancers who managed to feel otherwise.