Strip Club

Gender, Power, and Sex Work

Kim Price-Glynn

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780814767610
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814767818
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Strip Club, Kim Price‒Glynn takes us behind the scenes at a rundown club where women strip out of economic need, a place where strippers’ stories are not glamorous or liberating, but emotionally demanding and physically exhausting. Strip Club reveals the intimate working lives of not just the women up on stage, but also the patrons and other workers who make the place run: the owner‒manager, bartenders, dejays, doormen, bouncers, housemoms, and cocktail waitresses.

Price‒Glynn spent fourteen months at The Lion’s Den working as a cocktail waitress, and her uncommonly deep access reveals a conflict‒ridden workplace, similar to any other workplace, one where gender inequalities are reproduced through the everyday interactions of customers and workers. Taking a novel approach to this controversial and often misunderstood industry, Price‒Glynn draws a fascinating portrait of life and work inside the strip club.

1
Studying Strip Club Work

Context and Perspective

Working as a cocktail waitress, I felt like Gloria Steinem going undercover as a Playboy bunny—I was playing hostess in the ultimate male playground.¹ I understood the drudgery and physical labor associated with waitressing, even before reading Steinem’s famous firsthand account. Less than two months on the job, I wrote in my field notes that I left work “pickled with cigarette smoke, sticky from alcohol and Windex, and physically and mentally exhausted.” Remembering drink orders and patrons’ names alongside research questions and observations fully consumed my mind. My body ached from walking, lifting, bending, and carrying. Beyond the physical and mental work of waitressing, I knew strip clubs accentuated the burdens all waitresses may face, as Steinem’s bunny shift description details: “Somehow the usual tail pullings and propositions and pinching and oogling seemed all the more depressing when, outside this windowless room of perpetual night, the sun was shining.”² The Lion’s Den was also always shrouded in darkness and hazy smoke. Another cocktail waitress described the club as a “cave” due to the absence of natural light and fresh air.

As in Steinem’s experience, my interactions with men were rife with come-ons and sexual overtones. Comments about my body and my looks, as well as requests for clothing removal, were standard fare. Men would invite me home or out on dates. By far the most common remark was, “You should be onstage!” The repetition normalized these exchanges for me and other female workers. This was, after all, a strip club. Instead of understanding these statements as distinct from men’s verbal and physical aggression, however, we should consider more fully the particular setting where they occurred. By doing so we can locate these come-ons in relationship to men’s and women’s practices in clubs, as well as the broader character of strip club work. Behind patrons’ comments loomed the assumption that women working in strip clubs were ready to comply, were resisting the urge to comply, or could be pressured to comply. As explored in later chapters, seemingly innocuous and expected comments like those described here are part of a larger set of club rules and practices that systematically objectify and marginalize women.

Before working in the club, I was keenly aware of the abuses men brought on female workers, particularly in the sex work industry. I read about them in Steinem’s and others’ firsthand accounts of sex work research. For example, sociologist Eleanor Miller, in her book Street Women, recounted intimidation and fear, particularly when confronted with male prisoners and pimps.³ At one point during Miller’s research on female hustlers, she had her car’s tires slashed. Miller’s and others’ sense of danger stuck with me throughout my research. Fortunately, my concerns over my personal safety were not realized, though I did have my car scratched by someone’s keys while I was working. Many of the women I worked with were not as lucky, as their stories will describe.

Given these considerations, I faced many questions about how to study a strip club. Should I observe? conduct interviews? participate? Each method entailed certain risks for my physical and emotional safety. If I chose to participate, I would embody the research, rather than relying on secondhand accounts. In the end, the need to acquire information through a variety of means proved compelling. Methodologically speaking, observations, interviews, and participation each provided a way of seeing and not seeing. For example, I wanted information not easily observed, like patrons’ self-concepts, strippers’ identity management, and coworkers’ attitudes toward strippers, so observations alone would not suffice. Similarly, interviews provided detailed individual information, but only when they were combined with observations and participation could I corroborate and contextualize people’s stories. Like lots of ethnographers, researchers who study groups of people and places from the inside out, I knew that firsthand experience with strip club work combined with observations and in-depth interviews would provide a treasure trove of information. Given my deliberations, it should come as no surprise that a variety of different approaches have emerged for investigating places like The Lion’s Den. Several authors, in particular, have shaped recent methods of inquiry.

Researching Sexual Subcultures

Sexual subcultures have long fascinated sociologists. Over the past several decades, sex researchers have reasoned different ways for studying groups that may be secretive, dangerous, and uncooperative to outsiders. Access has been a key concern for them. While there have been many engaged projects since the 1970s, here I focus on three sociologists’ work to highlight their particular standpoints and strategies.⁴ The examination of these authors and their books contextualizes this and other research on places where “sex” in its many different forms is offered and exchanged. Their research creates a framework for examining other entries into the field, modes of connection, and the relationship between fieldwork, access, and findings.

In 1970, Laud Humphreys published Tearoom Trade, his now infamous study of men’s impersonal sex with other men in public parks. Humphreys wanted the world to better understand closeted homosexuality and reduce the stigma associated with same-sex sexual practices. Widely criticized for his unwitting participants’ lack of informed consent, Humphreys brought us into a previously hidden world through observations and surveys. In effect, he became an insider serving as a watch queen, or lookout, for tearoom participants. His emphasis was on the men who made use of the “tearooms” rather than those we might consider sex workers. As a participant observer, Humphreys was able to study tearoom practices in detail, but how could he find out more about the men outside of the tearoom? As a watch queen, he was able to record participants’ license plate numbers. With the help of a local motor vehicles department, he got access to tearoom participants’ addresses. After changing his appearance, he approached these men at home with a health-related study. As a result of these covert actions, Humphreys suggested that he was able to uncover otherwise unavailable information about the more than fifty largely middle-class Catholic married men purchasing anonymous sex from other men. However, the deception of his participants makes his study a ubiquitous lesson in research ethics.

In 1986, Eleanor Miller produced the before-mentioned Street Women, a study of prostitution and other forms of street hustling. An outsider, Miller gained access to Chicago street women through a bar job, courthouse visits, and interviews with halfway house residents and prison inmates. She explains that her initial fascination with street women came while she was working in a local Chicago bar. After seeing some female street hustlers, she began to question then-current notions about women and crime. One argument posed that the Women’s Movement and women’s liberation had opened up space for women to participate more fully in not just formal but informal economies as well. However, the women Miller met hardly seemed liberated; rather, they seemed to be making ends meet under duress. These initial experiences paved the way for her fieldwork in homes and area businesses. Early contacts familiarized her with the language and practices of street women and enabled her to snowball sample and recruit over sixty participants. Miller describes being an accepted outsider who did not share the same background, race, or dialect of those she studied. She connected with her participants through demonstrated interest and professionalism over shared food and conversation. Participants even occasionally made her the butt of their jokes. These relationships were nevertheless fragile because of the difficult circumstances under which these women lived. Despite these differences, Miller’s access to information, especially regarding illegal work, makes her ethnography compelling. Drawing on both feminist and crime and deviance perspectives, Miller was able to consider the entirety of street hustlers’ lives rather than reducing them to their illegal activities.

In 1997, Wendy Chapkis’s Live Sex Acts ushered in a new approach to sex worker research by situating the author as both an outsider and an insider. As a feminist researcher, Chapkis was familiar with the “sex wars” debates over whether strippers, prostitutes, and pornography actresses are empowered or oppressed through their work. She sought to address this polarizing debate through the voices of nearly two-dozen sex workers from the United States and abroad. Based on their reports of difficult working conditions, she argued for decriminalization and greater attention to context. To understand sex work as a consumer, she later decided to couple this study with participation. Embodying her research, she paid for and participated in Annie Sprinkle’s co-taught sexual massage class. The class instructed participants in various sensuous massage techniques they would later perform on other women. Placing herself on the purchasing end, Chapkis concluded, “I strongly suspected I would have liked the whole experience more if I had been paid for it.”⁵ With this ending, Chapkis foreshadowed recent books by stripping veterans who have examined various facets of the industry from the inside.⁶

Authors like Humphreys, Miller, and Chapkis all situate themselves differently with regard to their “insiderness” and “outsiderness.”⁷ For ethnographic research, it is common to elaborate on one’s biography so readers can understand the researcher’s relationship with her or his subject. While this is a staple of ethnography, it is also paramount to sex work research. The study of sex frequently prompts intimate questions regarding a researcher’s identity and involvement. On the one hand, these questions reflect frequent connections between biography and research. Researchers often study facets of society to which they have an intimate connection. On the other hand, however, they reflect titillation that is peculiar to sex work research and indicate both our fascination and discomfort with the study of sex and sexuality. Humphreys, Miller, and Chapkis each provide the reader with a different perspective in terms of their identity, connection, and involvement. Though Humphreys strongly defended his work, his approach has not been looked on favorably over time. The approaches of Miller and Chapkis, however, are emblematic of current research strategies. Most research on stripping adopts some combination of observation, participant observation, and interviews.

The strategy I adopted borrows from both Miller and Chapkis. I was, in part, an outsider with a professional relationship to those I met and interviewed, much like Miller. However, as a cocktail waitress, I became a colleague and comrade through my participation, much like Chapkis. This combination of participation, observation, and in-depth interviewing provides three central components of this research. My access would have been greatly limited had I not worked within the club I studied, since strangers to The Lion’s Den were not trusted. I add to these methods a fourth component, an examination of associated texts, in particular, the club’s Employee/Entertainer Handbook and online posts to a discussion board associated with The Lion’s Den, Strip Club List.⁸ Bringing together these four resources produces what I hope is a nuanced organizational analysis of The Lion’s Den.

Stripping in Popular Representations

Stripping over Time

Stripping, with its simultaneous cultural attraction and repulsion, has its ancestry in burlesque, a popular form of entertainment that had its U.S. heyday in the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Today, burlesque is commonly associated with twentieth-century striptease, or the seductive removal of clothing. However, the content of striptease performances and the amount of nudity has varied over the years. Historian Mark Caldwell explains that nudity may have largely been in the eye of the beholder: “Systematic stripping down to bare flesh didn’t become an inevitable burlesque feature until the 1920s,” and even then performers often flashed body parts covered with pasties, g-strings disguised as pubic hair, or bodies caked with heavy white stage makeup.⁹

During the early to mid-nineteenth century, burlesque consisted of comedy, political satire, and striptease dancing that drew primarily middle-class and working-class audiences.¹⁰ Notable acts included Lydia Thompson and her troupe, the Beautiful Blondes, who performed comedic operas and played dominant roles clad in costumes that revealed flesh-colored tights, a spectacle for the times. Women adopted men’s and women’s roles with strong sexual overtones, even performing as sexual aggressors in parodies of well-known and lesser-known plays and musicals, like Ixion and the adaptation of Ben Hur into Bend Her.¹¹ This combination of women’s roles and dress was radical relative to mainstream conceptions of femininity. This more permissive cultural climate changed in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, and burlesque performance lost favor with the middle class, a transformation that took place as women became regular audience members. The simultaneous onstage presence of bawdy performers like Lydia Thompson clashed with the offstage presence of “respectable” middle-class women. Both government and church officials led the rallying cry against burlesque.¹² Cultural historian Robert C. Allen argues that along with this change of audience came a change in performance.¹³ Burlesque morphed into something akin to the stripping of today, with more emphasis on women’s bodies and less on speaking or theatrical skill. This change meant women were seen but not heard.¹⁴

The most familiar aspect of burlesque—the cooch, hootchy-kootchy, or belly dance—debuted in the United States during the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.¹⁵ The Columbian Exposition was a world’s fair featuring a number of different venues. Along what was called the Midway Plaisance, there were concessions and sideshows organized thematically and geographically as world venues. The Egyptian and Algerian exhibits featured women in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Typical Shift
• 1 Studying Strip Club Work: Context and Perspective
• 2 “Keeping the Dancers in Check”: The Gendered Organization of Stripping in The Lion’s Den
• 3 “It’s a Nice Place to Hide, and It’s Safe”: The Making of Masculinities in The Lion’s Den
• 4 Tradeoffs and Troubles: Managing Stripping Labor
• 5 Dollar Dances and Stage Dances: Strippers and Economic Exploitation
• Postscript: The Lion’s Den, 2005–2006
• Appendix 1: Researching The Lion’s Den
• Appendix 2: Participant Descriptions of Life and Work
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author