5/8/00
I played my worst game of pool in
years on Saturday night. It was really stellar. Superlatively bad.
There were a group of guys playing each other and I came up and
put my quarters on the table. When my turn came, it took a little
while to get the guy to gamble with me anyway because there was
a language barrier, but after holding up ten fingers to indicate
ten dollars and doing the universal 'shimmy' motion to convey the
idea of a table dance, the bet was on. I somehow found myself in
sitcom-language-barrier land, where I, the WASP chick, somehow reached
the conclusion that if I wanted this gentleman to understand me,
I SHOULD SPEAK LOUDER. There. That'll do it. If I ever go to a foreign
country, I'll just bring a megaphone and everyone will understand
me. I don't know what I was thinking...
At any rate, if I had endeavored
to shoot badly, I would have been hard pressed to reach the pinnacle
of ineptitude to which I rose that evening. Anyone watching for
most of the game would have assumed that I was a novice. By the
end, he had left me with 4 balls on the table. He sank the 8 ball
decisively - and the cue ball dropped into the corner pocket. The
poor bastard had to pay me anyway. Life is just sick sometimes.
This was an amazingly slow weekend. I think everyone
went out on Cinco De Mayo and got drunk early in the evening, whacked
a couple of pinatas and downed tequilas and cervezas until their
breath had that liquor-puke smell that drives the ladies wild, and
then went home and passed out. I just limped around the pool table
and put ice on my knee between shots until it was over.
I blew my knee out again, hence the limping and
the ice. It's always in the same place, and I never get it looked
at, but I'm on a cane a couple of weeks every 6 months or so from
something as innocuous as squatting down to look at cereal on a
lower shelf at the supermarket. I tell everybody it's from selling
blowjobs in the Conoco bathroom because the floor is cold.
The Feminist Stripper Site was mentioned by author
Rachel Resnick during an LA Times Book Forum called "Sex in
the City," and unless something goes wrong, I'm being featured
in a Las Vegas publication called "Private Dancer Monthly."
I think I even get the cover. Very exciting. Thanks to Nica,
who writes for the magazine and has contributed to this site as
well. Now, I just have to lose ten pounds in three days...
My two favorite "Star Wars" customers
finally sat near each other on Saturday night and met for the first
time. It was interesting. It's funny to know two people for so long
from the same place and to realize that they've never met.
I've gotten a large number of letters
from teenaged girls who want to be strippers when they grow up.
I wonder what their parents would think to know that they're corresponding
with an 'exotic dancer' about future career plans. I think it may
not be the most welcome news in some households ("Kill the
fatted calf and make ready a great feast! My child wants to take
her clothes off for money!"). From my point of view, I
think of it a lot like birth control for kids that age; you may
not like the idea, but that won't matter if they really decide to
go through with it, and so you might as well make sure they're as
well-prepared as they can possibly be. We hope never to go to war
again, but we still train our soldiers and build weapons. I think
if your teenaged daughter is really considering dancing, she could
do worse than talking to me.
Still, letters from young people are a development
which I had not anticipated - and an opportunity I'm glad to have.
A friend of my aunt's gave me Gloria Steinem's "Outrageous
Acts and Everyday Rebellions" when I turned 15, and although
I disagree with her whole angle on the Playboy Club, Gloria made
me a feminist. I'm glad to have the opportunity to show young women
that women don't lose power by showing their eroticism. It's a lesson
with which some parents, I'm sure, disagree, but kids that age will
gather information and form their own opinions whether you like
it or not. This is when you rely on having raised them well - just
keep in mind that well-raised children often make choices that aren't
what their parents have in mind... and they turn out just fine.
That's an interesting question I should add to
the Questionnaire: how many strippers would want their daughters
to dance? I, of course, would be fine with the whole thing. I think
it probably has a lot to do with what kind of experience the dancer
herself has had, although we would all do well to remember that
your child may have a very different experience than you. Forty
years ago, if I had been the mother of a girl who fell in love with
a black man, I think my first instinct would be to feel dread for
the ignorance and persecution that she might face, but I would want
her to do what made her happy, and to fight the good fight. Then
and now, I would want my child to be a fighter, to have opinions
and to stand up for what she believes is right - even in the face
of opposition. I would be proud of her for that. Coal miners, I'm
sure, hope for something better for their children. So do strippers.
I hope my (hypothetical) kid makes six figures doing something she
loves. I hope she becomes President. But if she's a stripper, I'll
be happy, too - as long as she is. If I keep working at this,
perhaps by the time the little girls of today become the strippers
of tomorrow, it'll mean something entirely different - just as interracial
relationships today are entirely unremarkable and considered perfectly
normal by everyone except the truly backward.
Humans make progress in the tool-using field very
quickly... intellectually and emotionally, though, it's a much more
difficult process. We do it, though, little by little. Slaves were
freed in this country over 130 years ago, and circumstances have
changed a great deal, but there are still idiots all over who can't
quite adjust. Native Americans still live, for the most part, in
abject poverty - and still on reservations. It was just 55 years
ago that six million Jews along with countless other 'undesirables'
like homosexuals, Catholics, gypsies, and the developmentally disabled
were exterminated in full view of the whole world. It's still going
on in Croatia (although there are places all over the globe where
genocide and ethnic cleansing have been going on for years, but
since the participants are all dark-skinned, the USA has never thought
to intervene. The Croatian children had yellow hair and tennis shoes,
so we ran right over to help).
Women began the emancipation movement in earnest
just over a century ago - just a few generations, really. My grandparents
were raised by parents who had grown up in the Victorian age, when
chair legs were covered because they were too suggestive, and women
were encouraged during the necessary but distasteful task of intercourse
with their husbands to close their eyes and 'think of England.'
I suppose it's no surprise that society is still having a little
difficulty with women having complete control over their own sexuality.
We've been ashamed of sex for a very long time - adult magazines
were 'dirty,' promiscuous girls were 'bad.' As recently as 70 years
ago, girls who masturbated were often given electroshock therapy
or even lobotomized. It's going to take a little time to adjust.
We just have to keep plugging away. (And next time you masturbate,
do it for those poor girls...)
