G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire (review)

There's a recent cartoon in a certain "men's magazine" in which an elegant "escort" is pictured saying good night to one of her customers. "I'll be sure to mention you in my doctoral thesis," she says. It's lucky for us that Katherine Frank was taking such good notes as she worked as an exotic dancer (stripper, lap dancer, private dancer, nude table dancer) for six years sporadically and for over a year as an active ethnographer while completing her dissertation in anthropology at Duke, luckier still that she was so astute a listener and so agile a writer. She has written one of the best books about the world of commercial sex work, neither titillating "inside scoop" by a practitioner nor moralizing tract by a preachy politico.

Frank worked in a succession of six strip clubs in one large southeastern city that she calls "Laurelton," from the swanky and upscale Diamond Dolls and Panther Club (stand-alone clubs with VIP rooms and seating hierarchies) to the seedier Pony Lounge, located in the heart of the red-light district. While all prohibited actual physical contact and sexual release by patrons, the range of clubs also enables Frank to explore the way class intersects with sexuality and gender, especially as the regulars vie with one another on a hierarchy of emotional intimacy with the strippers. "Do you order a Budweiser?" asks one her interviewees. "Or do you order Dom Perignon? If you're really gonna show off for the guys you buy that bottle of Dom" (64-65).

From the moment she sets foot inside the first club, Frank exposes the ways the clubs construct gender and sexuality. "We sell the idea of sex," the manager explains to her. "We do not sell the act of sex. We sell a sexual fantasy without actually copulating" (xix). She maps them both geographically (within the city) and topographically as she surveys the physical layout of the club itself. She describes the structures of her interactions and conducts in-depth interviews (in which she reveals she is a graduate student) with about thirty of the regular customers.

Frank shares her own routines of self-objectification: we see how she shows up at work tired, bitchy, and unenthusiastic and how she slowly transforms herself into an object of men's desires and plays her part well enough to get the men to part with their money. She explains carefully her own strategies that enable her to retain her subjectivity despite this self-objectification, layering false identities on top of other false identities to create the illusion that as she strips one illusion away she reveals who she "really" is, giving a second, false name and life history to these utterly gullible men. Or are they? Perhaps the most interesting finding is that many of the "regulars" are fully aware of the charade and play along willingly, eagerly. Stripper and customer, it seems, wordlessly collude in an artifice, the illusion of authenticity.

There is far less about sex than about gender; these men know they are not going to have sex. "I don't go to a strip club to pick up a woman," explains Matthew. "This is a way to go be with women, talk to women, even see them naked and not have to worry about playing the social game that is involved if you are trying to pick somebody up" (94). In other words, this is a time-out from the pressure of social interaction with indeterminate results. It is the opposite of prostitution, in which the outcome is also certain and one needn't engage in all the social niceties.

Some felt that the explicit commodification actually made the experience more authentic, since no one had to pretend that money wasn't...