The trouble started last fall, when my book Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show was published by Oxford University Press. It was -- what else -- gender trouble.
Oh, long before my publication date, there were hints that men’s and women’s reactions to the book might be different. But I never imagined that a book about striptease would be a Rorschach test for gender politics or that it would become a touchstone for a debate about women’s identities.
Years ago in Manhattan, when I was young, I tried out the idea of a book about striptease on a man I was dating. But he was not interested in the idea of such a book; he was interested in me, and why -- nudge nudge wink wink -- “a nice girl” like me would want to write it.
By contrast, women clutched the idea of the book a little too tightly, like a Marc Jacobs purse they imagined carrying but couldn’t afford. Women wanted to know what my argument was, by which they meant: Did I think that strippers were exploited or empowered? Essentially, they wanted the book to serve as a guide to being a woman. Which perhaps I did myself. Or else why was I writing it?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is that when I was working on the book -- doing the research and writing -- women saw it as serious, for which I was grateful. But as far as I could tell, most men saw it as a window into my life or as a picture of a woman gyrating, whether that woman was me or someone else. Men did not want to read about striptease, they wanted to watch it. (Only one man thus far has reviewed the book.)
Sometimes the idea of a book about striptease brought out a roguish Borscht Belt humor in even the most sober intelligence. My ex-husband, in all ways a paragon of support of my work, liked to repeat a joke about the origins of Strip-tease (which, yes, began life as my doctoral dissertation): “For most people, writing a dissertation is a grind. For you it was a bump and grind.”
In general, it was hard to convince men I respected that striptease was a serious subject. Even reeling off the names of literary giants and New York intellectuals who had written about striptease (such as Edmund Wilson, e.e. cummings, Roland Barthes, Leszek Kolakowski) failed to impress.
After the book came out, men dropped out of the picture. Except for one instance, women reviewed it, for the most part favorably. In the reviews, women recalled their own experiences with striptease, usually conjuring up some delicious temps perdu in their young adulthood when they visited a burlesque theater and saw some of the great striptease stars of the 1950s, like Gypsy Rose Lee or Blaze Starr. I liked reading those reviews.
On my book tour, which included visits to bookstores, libraries, college campuses, and sex-toy boutiques, I talked about old-time strippers, using slides, disabusing audience members of misconceptions they might have had about what the book is about. Audiences -- mostly women (more about this later) -- seemed to enjoy my talks.
Chief among the misconceptions -- not among just audience members but universities and bookstores as well -- has been that the book is about pornography. It is true that when I decided on the topic for my dissertation, I was influenced by the debates in the 1990s about whether pornography was feminist or not. But I was always clear that the subject of striptease differed from the subject of pornography.
Some bookstores disagreed. The bookstore at the University of California at Los Angeles, for example, “banned” me. I say “banned” because UCLA had invited me to give a talk on the LA leg of my tour and then disinvited me. From what I could surmise, an administrator had caught wind of the book’s subject and, along with some donors, deemed it if not downright pornographic at least inappropriate for a college campus. They seemed to believe that my talk would send the message that the university condoned stripping, or pornography, or something generally inappropriate for young minds. But my publicist at the time had made it clear that my talk would be about burlesque in general, not striptease in particular (striptease is to burlesque what lettuce is to salad).
The bookstore management, apparently under pressure, claimed it had misunderstood the nature of the book. Someone mentioned pictures of naked women -- my publicist had sent them a copy of the book to review -- and opined that with children walking around the UCLA campus, the event was not suitable for daytime. In fact there are pictures of scantily clad (not naked) women in the book -- after all, it’s about striptease! But there’s only one topless shot; it’s in black and white, from the 1950s.
I felt censored.
But back to the sexes. As I’ve said, most audience members during my book tour were women. That’s not unusual, since women make up the majority of readers and book buyers. But my talks seemed to draw fewer men than the talks of other writers I’ve talked to, even taking into account that I did many signings at venues where more women than men were known to hang out, such as lingerie stores.
Only twice did men outnumber women in the audience: The first time was at the Seminary Co-op, a small, wonderful, independent bookstore in Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago. The second time was at the monthly Chicago meeting of Mensa, the high-IQ society.
Arriving at the SemCo-op, I was startled to see that there were no women in the room. I was going to give a talk to a stag audience. I half expected someone to yell, “Take it off!” Fortunately, my friend Ted Fishman called his wife on his cellphone, and she joined us. At Mensa, the room was about three-quarters men and one-quarter women, but more striking than the gender imbalance was the fact that when the emcee said something that displeased the audience, people began shouting “Re-test!” and stamping their feet.
But I digress. The most intriguing impact of my book emerges during the question-and-answer portion of my talks, when the women in the audience always ask two questions. First someone asks what I think about the so-called burlesque revival, which is a national “alternative” movement committed to reviving the old-fashioned burlesque striptease I write about. The women who perform in this style are mostly Third Wave feminists; they refer to what they’re doing as “empowering” because they believe that they’re redefining gender conventions.
The second question that women always ask is that standard from many years earlier: “Are the women in your book exploited or empowered?”
Those questions always make me squirm.
It is admirable to see how tenaciously the best performers in the burlesque revival try to imitate the glamour of old-time strippers like Gypsy Rose Lee even as they send up that glamour. Many of the new performers -- with names like “Dirty Martini” and “The World Famous Bob” (a woman) and “Jo Boobs” -- use striptease as a way to recall a vanished era, but they also deliver a hip, ironic aesthetic. They try to both entertain and titillate. They wear old-fashioned strip gowns and dance to jazz standards. They aspire to a more democratic ideal of the body than the porn industry -- not all the bodies on display are slim or perfect -- which is an ideal that burlesque also celebrated. There are now a number of national festivals dedicated to this revival.
When I started writing Striptease, though, I was skeptical about the burlesque revival, its implications, and its possibilities. The whole point of my book was that striptease ended in the 1960s and that performers’ efforts to revive it were spurious. We have superseded the idea of “tease” with strip clubs and lap dancing and the co-opting of strip clubs into the pornography industry.
So to hear young women wax nostalgic about how burlesque striptease was empowering initially struck me as ridiculous. An image I thought about a lot when I began work on the book was from the movie Gilda, in the scene where Rita Hayworth takes off her glove. The way she removed that glove, with languorous allure, was to me the quintessence of striptease. The image shone in contrast to the culture that surrounded it -- the repressive culture of cold-war America. By contrast, as other writers have pointed out, much of the burlesque revival today, set against the backdrop of porn-soaked, postmodern America, is either too literal or trying too hard to strike a B-movie pose.
I had begun thinking about writing Striptease during the years, back in the mid-90s, when Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were going at it, declaiming the evils of pornography and its exploitation of women -- an era whose heat I thought had disappeared by the time my book was published. From reading the work of legal scholars and feminist academics, I concluded that there was no anti-porn position left, since the culture has become so “pornographied” that no one bothers to debate its evils anymore.
In any case, when I began writing the book, I wanted to avoid getting caught up in any debates about pornography. I didn’t want to write about striptease as either pornography or not pornography. I wanted to capture the way women lived their lives in the era before the sexual revolution. I was also interested in the psychological technique of striptease -- the con of it, if you will.
But as I got closer to finishing the book, and then began giving talks on it, I became less sure that I was right in trying to evade issues about pornography and how the burlesque revival did or did not fit into those debates. At every single talk I gave, at least one woman would come up to me afterwards and whisper something like, “I live in Bennington, Vt., and I want to start a burlesque show.”
This was almost a kind of plea. The women who approached me were always young. After that had happened three or four times, I began to wonder if the burlesque revival didn’t have some appeal that I had overlooked. And then I heard someone say it: These young women were trying to figure out a way to be sexy without getting into pornography -- watching it, reading it, participating in it. It was harder to be skeptical after that.
And then there is the other question, the one about whether striptease performers in the pre-porn era were exploited or empowered. The question also arises out of the porn-antiporn debates; that is, whether pornography exploits women or can potentially empower them. In reviews of books about pornography, there often is a puritanical suspicion of pleasure and also reflexive talk about exploitation versus women’s self-reinvention as autonomous beings taking charge of their own lives. There is simply no good way to answer the question of whether old-time strippers were empowered or exploited.
Women who ask whether strippers from the 40s and 50s -- the golden age of striptease -- were empowered want me to say that these women controlled their own destinies, that they had taken charge of reinventing themselves in their own image. That was not the case. Gypsy Rose Lee remade her look to be more like a blonde bombshell of the Jazz Age, and in the 1950s there were a lot of strippers who imitated movie stars. These women were far from free to express their own image of themselves; rather, they reinvented themselves according to popular images of the time. But Gypsy did get rich.
On the other hand, women who ask whether the Golden Age strippers were exploited want me to strike an antiporn position, to say that the women were beaten up or abused, that stripping was a dirty business then and now. (It was true that the mob was involved and that some performers turned to stripping to escape abusive families.)
I never try to sidestep those questions, but I never wanted them to be the organizing principle of the book. I describe both “empowering” and “exploitative” things in the world of striptease, but I describe more-complicated influences, events, and situations in the women’s lives as well. The truth is that I was less interested in making any claims about empowerment versus exploitation than in simply describing how the characters I wrote about were caught in the facts of their existence. But in saying so I always felt that I was disappointing the women seeking answers about their own power -- or disempowerment -- as women.
Now, I think, maybe responding to those kinds of questions just isn’t my job. And anyway, I don’t know the answers.
Rachel Shteir is an associate professor and head of dramaturgy and criticism at DePaul University’s Theatre School.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 2, Page B15