Male Strippers and the Toll of Exotic Dance

While researchers have looked at the impact stripping has for female exotic dancers, very little attention has been given to the consequences the profession has for male strippers. In this research, I draw from 22 in-depth interviews with male exotic dancers and 18 months of fieldwork at a strip club to examine the extent to which male strippers experience “the toll” of exotic dance. Specifically, I focus on dancers’ interactions with customers, their experiences with stigmas, the impact stripping has on their romantic relationships, how they negotiate boundaries with patrons, and the consequences stripping has for their self-esteem. Overall, I found that patriarchal privilege and the sexual double standard significantly mitigated the toll of the profession.

“I Don’t Know What to Do With my Hands”

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is not a gangster film, writer-director John Cassavetes insists, but the precise rendition of a world—both everyday and larger than life. This chapter will consider what The Killing of a Chinese Bookie reveals about Cassavetes’ place in the New Hollywood. If one of the distinguishing features of this period is its filmmakers’ willingness to question motivations and suspend narrative causality, then how does Cassavetes’ rendition of the entanglements of a small-time strip club owner complicate or confirm this interpretation? In pursuing this and other questions, this chapter will consider the connections between The Killing of Chinese Bookie and other films in the director’s oeuvre as well as its affiliation to one of the era’s most important re-workings of the gangster film: Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976).

Andro-privilege, raunch culture, and stripping

This study notes a rising number of female customers at heterosexual strip bars and explores the reasons for this change. Drawing methodologically on audio-taped interviews with strip club employees and 150 hours of observation in strip bars, we explore the dynamics of raunch culture—a hypersexualized climate—and andro-privilege, a new concept in feminist theory that we originate here. Patriarchal cultures condition members to preference practices associated with hegemonic masculinity, and uphold masculinism, the ideology that justifies male domination. Andro-privilege is a new Western cultural practice that cloaks masculinism in a discursive mantle of gender progress. That andro-privilege exists at all is a sign of growth. It demonstrates that progressive ideas about gender equality have affected people, and created, at least among some, a misalignment with unfairness. Andro-privilege resolves this discomfort by temporarily allowing some girls and women to be “one of the guys” while allowing no parallel for boys and men to benefit from being “one of the girls.” We argue that andro-privilege thrives in raunch culture because it permits a woman or girl to resist objectification and position herself as a subject—a lad or bro—rather than a sex doll.

Escaping Death

Gita, a bi-racial girl struggling to find herself after a rape and descent into strip club life; and like other teens Gita who complain of feeling worthless and alone began drinking and using drugs heavily and make the risk of suicide more likely. Girls are more likely than boys to have suicidal thought, create a suicide plan, and attempt suicide, while boys more often succeed at committing the act.