The Naked Truth About Stripping: Reality and Fantasy Are Poles Apart

By Bernadette Barton, On The Issues Magazine. Posted August 20, 2008.

Every semester I assign my undergraduate students in my gender and sexuality courses a class project on the media. They bring examples of music videos, television shows, commercials and MySpace pages to class and analyze the content for what it tells us about inequality in our society.

If you've been watching any media images of young bodies, you know that lean, taut, sculpted female bodies are more "hot" than ever. It was this past Spring (2008) in my Sex Industry class, when I was watching perhaps the tenth video representation of anonymous female bodies writhing on stripper poles that it forcefully occurred to me that my book should be selling better. One of a handful of academic studies of exotic dancers, published with a reputable press, written (I think modestly) in an accessible voice, Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers (New York University Press, 2006) ought to be a best seller.

Exploring the Erotic

My book explores the exciting aspects of exotic dancing and the toll it takes over time. Frankly, I found my topic inherently interesting and, unlike many researchers, never got sick or bored of it.

Researching and writing Stripped, I examined the mundane parts of working as an exotic dancer: How do they eat a meal if they aren't supposed to leave the club? How do they get up and down the stage if they are intoxicated and the floor is wet? What do they do with tampon strings? I heard the thrilling and unexpected: What is it like to make $500 for five minutes of work? How is it that several women felt spiritual when they dance? I listened to the abusive -- what happens when a customer calls her a "dirty whore" -- and the ways dancing compromises family relationships by making partners jealous, the costs of hiding the work from Mom and worrying about the kids.

But, it was watching how Stripped was publicly received that taught me something new about our culture: it is way more sexist than I realized, and I had had a pretty bleak attitude starting out.

The Culture of Female Sexuality

Probably like most authors, I had inflated expectations when my book first emerged. I had hoped for reviews in Publisher's Weekly and the New York Times Book Review. I anticipated talk shows, radio programs and book tours.

But my book, like most academic work, did not make a huge splash, and I resigned myself to the relative obscurity most writers experience. However, while placing myself in the company of other well-received scholars whose work travels in small circles is comforting to my ego, such analysis does not do justice to the bigger picture of how our culture constructs female sexuality.

Watching all those images of strippers that the students were dutifully bringing in class after class for our cultural analysis presentations made me wonder if my book's low sales might have to do with more than the usual yawn in reception that most sociological studies receive.

Researching exotic dancers, I learned much about the funny, intelligent, risk-taking capacities of women who step outside the narrowly constructed bounds of respectable femininity in U.S. culture. I poked my head inside the strip bar to understand what it's like to be an exotic dancer in a society that both reviles and fetishizes the perfectly toned body and naked breasts on a pole.

But, after my local newspaper did a story on my upcoming book, I learned that the curiosity, empathy and respect I felt for dancers, and what their lives tell us about the rotten economic deals women face in a sexist society, was a minority perspective.

The local piece was posted to Fark.com (for its "freak" value I suppose) and received more than 54,000 hits. Unfortunately this was almost a full year before Stripped's publication date and did little for sales. There were 414 comments on the article with many saying something like the following: "The truth about strippers is that they are naked. Talk to a stripper for 3 minutes and you'll be just as much of as expert as this woman. I can't believe people get crap like this funded."

See more stories tagged with: gender, media, sexism, sexuality, stripping, sex work

Bernadette Barton (Ph.D. University of Kentucky 2000) is a member of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminology at Morehead State University. Her research and teaching interests include sexuality, gender, popular culture, qualitative methods and the sex industry.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Reproductive Justice and Gender! Sign up now »