Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture by Catherine M. Roach

Author:Catherine M. Roach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Published: 2007-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

Part II

Stripping and Popular Culture

5

Striptease Culture: Thongs For Everywoman

Playgroup Moms Gone Wild

A man is rubbing his naked buttocks across my chest. No, I take that back – the buttocks are not entirely naked. A black thong is nestled between them. (It turns out that there are male thongs as well – who knew?) My one coherent thought is that the friction is about to trigger a breastfeeding let-down and that milk will stain the front of my white T-shirt. It will glow neon-bright under the black lights of the club for all to see. My next thought is that he smells nice. I imagine the dancers in a back room, debating the merits of various colognes and warning new guys that you have to smell good or the women will never buy dances from you. My stripper is also wearing glasses as he performs his lap dance. It’s all somehow quite endearing.

For comparative purposes, I have decided that I need to visit a club where male exotic dancers strip for women. There are not really that many of them. In some places with male dancers, the clientele is primarily gay men, and in other clubs one night of the week or a certain section of the floor space is set aside for women customers to enjoy the gyrations of male strippers. But tonight’s club is meant just for the ladies. “Canada’s Hot Shots” is located in a nondescript commercial neighborhood of Gatineau, the French-speaking Quebec city directly across the river from Ottawa in the national capital area of Canada. (My family and I are back up North again for the summer.) The club is located in the basement of a building where upstairs, in a sister club, women disrobe for a largely male audience. The stairs down to Hot Shots and the lobby where you pay your cover charge open up into a large rectangular room, rimmed all along the ceiling with neon tube lights in fuchsia and blue. Banquette seating and tables line the walls, as well as a long bar. A large semi-circular stage, mirrored at the back and lined with seats for patrons (if not Gyno Row, then Procto Parade? The Cockpit? The Penis Gallery? The Cocktail Club?) takes up much of the space.

For tonight’s venture, my enterprising sister-in-law Danielle has rounded up a posse of women from her mommy-and-me play group and from her family. We’ve actually been here once before, about eight years ago, on the eve of Danielle’s wedding to my brother. Memories of the event are somewhat hazy, but I do remember being fascinated even then by the dynamics of the club, and I look forward now to a more focused study. Danielle is renowned within our circle as the organizer, a woman of high energy, humor, and efficiency who holds down a successful career as a social worker, folds laundry with Origami-like precision, and is raising two young children with my somewhat slower-moving brother. Both of Danielle’s older sisters are here with

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