Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (25 page)

In some ways, marginalized constituencies may fare worse than more mainstream ones when it comes to regulations. Visible red-light areas, and visible queer areas, may become easy targets for law enforcement. The shrinking of the “public world of queer sexuality,” set off in part by anti-sex health regulations designed to eradicate commercial sex spaces (and especially those catering to gays and lesbians),44 has continued into the new millennium.

However, strip events for BSSDW have not disappeared altogether, instead migrating to suburban areas of Washington, DC (such as Prince George’s County, Maryland). As they move into such areas, the invisibility factor that accompanies marginalization may offer additional protections. Because strip events for BSSDW lack an actual physical location, for example, they sometimes operated under the radar of enforcement agencies. An event for BSSDW such as Soft ‘N’ Wet may be thought of more as “a practice rather than a place,” and thus is better able to “live beyond the law” and simply change locations to avoid being the target of zoning regulations.45

This ability to remain under the radar also results in different practices and behaviors at the events than one might see in more traditional strip clubs in the same city, as interactions between dancers and customers were less scrutinized by legal enforcement and by event staff. Women were not prevented from touching the dancers at BSSDW events and recognized that they

“could do stuff that the guys would get in trouble for” not just because of how it was interpreted by the dancers but also because “no one was watching.”

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Thus, while events had a lack of visibility in and of themselves—due to taking place in spaces primarily designated for other constituencies and due to their periodic nature—participants also had a relative freedom from surveillance.

Further, while the women may have also had a lack of visibility and self-recognition as desiring agents in the everyday world, in the space created during the events, it was precisely because of this fact that they could exercise freedoms towards the dancers that could have been read as disrespectful or degrading coming from a man.

C O N C L U S I O N

Cultural expectations of gender as well as social inequalities and positionings affect people’s opportunities, choices, and resulting satisfactions as well as the meanings of their leisure practices. Customers, consciously or not, are part of the scene in strip clubs or strip events, intricately involved in performances of identity, sexuality, and desire that generated meaning and pleasure out of their interactions. Engaging in sexualized or eroticized encounters with dancers in a public place, and in the presence of a live audience, was significant to the meanings of the experiences for both the heterosexual male customers and the BSSDW. For the men, such encounters could secure heterosexuality, at least temporarily or in fantasy, through a public performance of desire for a woman.

Men could observe themselves desiring—literally, in the mirrored walls of the clubs, and figuratively, in the sense of self-reflection and fantasy. Further, the experience or performance of sexual desire could in turn serve as an affirmation of gender identity both to himself and to others (although sexual desire can feel different from or independent of gender, it can also serve to reinforce ideas of oneself as masculine or feminine). Public “consumption,” whether it be of the attention of attractive women or the other commodities offered in the clubs, could also generate pleasurable experiences of self and identity (or conflicted ones). For the BSSDW, individual performances and experiences of desire at strip events are connected to understandings and experiences of being part of a political and erotic community, and contribute to an atmosphere of acceptance, belonging, and safety as well as one of libidinal abandon.

Observing other women desiring women, and being observed oneself, is thus layered with meanings.

There are of course many aspects of strip club visits and their meanings to the participants that we have not been able to touch on in this chapter: complexities of the relational and psychological aspects; issues of authenticity and performance; the connections of stripping to the entertainment industry
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more broadly; discourses of classiness and respectability and their impact on the meaning of strip events and interactions to the customers; and more. Our aim here, however, was to begin drawing these comparisons between events for heterosexually identified men and for BSSDW to extend the analysis of stripping beyond simplistic generalizations about gendered power. We argue that while stripping—or other forms of adult entertainment—is implicated in the same structures of inequality as other forms of labor and leisure, there are also specificities in the meaning of its consumption that must be considered. Further, while a focus on gender is certainly appropriate when thinking about the organization and impact of commercial stripping, other axes of identity, experience, and inequality such as race, class, and sexuality must be taken into consideration if we are to truly understand the complex interconnections of power and pleasure that draw participants so consistently.

N OTE S

Katherine Frank’s research was supported by a fellowship from the Sexuality Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, funded by the Ford Foundation.

1. See Katherine Frank, “Thinking Critically about Strip Club Research,”

Sexualities
10 (2007): 501–517.

2. Sheila Jeffeys, “Keeping Women Down and Out: The Strip Club Boom and the Reinforcement of Male Dominance,”
Signs
34 (2008): 151–173, at p. 170.

3. Jeffreys, “Keeping Women Down,” p. 151.

4. Jeffreys, “Keeping Women Down,” p. 151.

5. Bernadette Barton,
Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers
, New York: New York University Press, 2006; Katherine Frank, “The Production of Identity and the Negotiation of Intimacy in a Gentleman’s Club,”

Sexualities
1 (1998): 175–202; Katherine Frank,
G-Strings and Sympathy:
Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002; Kari Lerum, “Twelve Step Feminism Makes Sex Workers Sick: How the State and the Recovery Movement Turn Radical Women into

‘Useless Citizens’,” in Barry Dank and Roberto Refinetti, eds.,
Sex Work
and Sex Workers
, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999; Alexandra Murphy,

“The Dialectical Gaze: Exploring the Subject–Object Tension in the Performances of Women Who Strip,”
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
32 (2003): 305–335; Jennifer Wesely, “‘Where am I Going to Stop?’:
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GENDER AND SPACE IN STRIP CLUBS

Exotic Dancing, Fluid Body Boundaries, and Effects on Identity,”
Deviant
Behavior
24 (2003): 483–503.

6. Laura Agustin, “The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex,”
Sexualites
8

(2005): 621–634; Frank,
G-Strings and Sympathy
; Katherine Frank,

“Thinking Critically about Strip Club Research,”
Sexualities
10 (2007): 501–517.

7. Agustin, “Cultural Study of Commercial Sex,” p. 681.

8. Frank, “Thinking Critically about Strip Club Research.”

9. Ronald Weitzer, “Why We Need More Research on Sex Work,” in Ronald Weitzer, ed.,
Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex
Industry
, New York: Routledge, 2000.

10. “Same-sex desiring” is used throughout the chapter to embrace a range of sexual identities, including “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “gay,” and “dyke,”

all terms used by respondents to self-identify. Because the parties focus on same-sex desire, this term serves to encompass the spirit of the parties rather than attempting to define individual identities.

11. Judith Hanna, “Exotic Dance Adult Entertainment: A Guide for Planners and Policy Makers,”
Journal of Planning Literature
20 (2005): 116–134.

12. Katherine Liepe-Levinson,
Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire
, New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 36.

13. See Frank,
G-Strings and Sympathy
.

14. See Michelle Carnes,
Do It for Your Sistas: Black Same-Sex Desiring Women’s
Erotic Performance Parties in Washington, DC
, doctoral dissertation, American University, Department of Anthropology, 2009. The names of individuals quoted in the chapter are pseudonyms. Frank uses pseudonyms for the clubs and city in which she conducted fieldwork. Carnes identifies the club names and city in which she worked, as the historical specificities of that location form an important part of her analysis and the former original host clubs in her study are no longer in operation.

15. There were some ways that dancers and customers made contact that bordered on breaking the law or the club rules but were not reprimanded if the contact was consensual and quick. A dancer might lean in towards the customer during her table dance, for example, momentarily leaving less than 12 inches between them. She might touch his legs or shoulders during a dance, or let her hair graze his lap. Customers might sometimes be given a hug while the dancers were clothed, a thank you peck on the cheek after a tip or a dance, or be allowed to lay a hand on a dancer’s leg while she sat next to him (again, clothed).

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16. Paula Dressel and David Petersen, “Gender Roles, Sexuality, and the Male Strip Show: The Structuring of Sexual Opportunity,”
Sociological
Focus
, 15 (1982): 151–162; Maxine Margolis and Marigene Arnold,

“Turning the Tables? Male Strippers and the Gender Hierarchy in America,” in Barbara Miller, ed.,
Sex and Gender Hierarchies
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Beth Montemurro, “Strippers and Screamers,”
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
30 (2001): 275–304; David Peterson and Paula Dressel, “Equal Time for Women: Notes on the Male Strip Show,”
Urban Life
11 (1982): 185–208.

17. Beth Montemurro, Colleen Bloom, and Kelly Madell, “Ladies Night Out: A Typology of Women Patrons of a Male Strip Club,”
Deviant
Behavior
24 (2003): 333–352, at p. 335.

18. Montemurro, et al., “Ladies Night Out,” p. 349.

19. Glenn Good and Nancy Sherrod, “Men’s Resolution of Nonrelational Sex Across the Lifespan,” in R. Levant and G. Brooks, eds.,
Men and Sex: New
Psychological Perspectives
, New York: John Wiley, 1997.

20. Susan Bordo,
The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
, New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1999, p. 285.

21. Bordo,
The Male Body
, p. 287.

22. Bordo,
The Male Body
, p. 290.

23. Leonore Tiefer,
Sex Is Not A Natural Act and Other Essays
, Boulder: Westview, 1995, p. 153.

24. Frank,
G-Strings and Sympathy
.

25. Katherine Frank, “Just Trying to Relax: Masculinity, Masculinizing Practices, and Strip Club Regulars,”
Journal of Sex Research
40 (2003): 61–75.

26. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,”

Signs
14 (1989): 912–920, at p. 919.

27. Angela Davis, “Black Women and the Academy,” in Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel, eds.,
The Black Studies Reader
, New York: Routledge, 2004, at p. 93.

28. Davis, “Black Women and the Academy,” p. 93.

29. Corie Hammers, “Bodies That Speak and the Promises of Queer: Looking to Two Lesbian/Queer Bathhouses for a Third Way,”
Journal of Gender
Studies
17 (2008): 147–164, at p. 153.

30. Hammers, “Bodies That Speak,” p. 157.

31. Pat Califia,
Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex
, Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1994, p. 208.

32. Petersen and Dressel, “Equal Time for Women.”

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33. Liepe-Levinson,
Strip Show
, p. 156.

34. Mignon Moore, “Lipstick or Timberlands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities,”
Signs
32 (2006): 113–139, at pp. 117–118.

35. Moore, “Lipstick or Timberlands,” pp. 124–125.

36. Moore, “Lipstick or Timberlands,” p. 124.

37. This blurring of the boundaries may also be the case in certain locales around the U.S. However, even in cities which offer full nudity and lap dancing, as in San Francisco, one can often also find profitable clubs offering table dancing or sexualized encounters without sexual contact and the possibility of release.

38. National Women’s Health Information Center, “Lesbian Health Fact Sheet,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office on Women’s Health, 2005. http://www.womenshealth.gov/faq/lesbian-health.pdf.

39. “Clubcards” are postcard sized flyers, often full color and glossy with graphics, large fonts and photos of black women (sometimes the featured dancers) in suggestive poses, often wearing thongs and placing their buttocks in full and prominent view. Rarely does the word “lesbian”

appear on clubcards; more likely are cues such as “women’s parties,”

“girls’ night out,” “for the ladies only,” “dom party,” “for the femmes,”

alongside photos of two black women embracing or gazing into the camera together. On occasion, clubcards include a rainbow design or logo (most often, the promoter’s organization).

40. Judith Hanna, “Undressing the First Amendment and Corsetting the Striptease Dancer,”
The Drama Review
42 (1998): 38–69.

41. Judith Hanna, “Toying with the Striptease Dancer and the First Amendment,” in Stuart Reifel, ed.,
Play and Culture Studies, Volume 2
, Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999, p. 7.

42. Eric Snider,
Strip Club Politics
, Weekly Planet, 2003.

43. Tresa Baldas, “Prostitution Convictions Fought, Motion Claims 1st Amendment Protects Sex Talk,”
Chicago Tribune
, July 24, 1998.