Peel and tell in Lotus Land

Vancouver stripper turned New York writer Elisabeth Eaves: ‘I still have a lot of desire, but I think I have a healthier distance from seeing myself as a sex object.’

Just why is Vancouver home to so many sex workers with a literary bent, ALEXANDRA GILL asks

VANCOUVER

The Vancouver landscape boasts many alluring peaks and curves, but sexy is not the first word that springs to mind when describing the city's splendours. Why then do so many literary sex-trade workers hail from these fair shores?

The most successful fleshpot writer from the Canadian West Coast would be Evelyn Lau, the best-selling author and poet who first rose to fame with Runaway Diary of a Street Kid, a harrowing tale about her life as a drugged-out teenage prostitute.

But there is also Diana Atkinson, who earned a Governor-General's Award nomination in 1995 for her semi-autobiographical novel Highways and Dancehalls, about the rough life of a stripper on the logging-town circuit.

Becki Ross, a womens' studies and sociology professor at the University of British Columbia, has never worked as a sex-trade worker. Yet the feminist academic certainly created a flap when she received a $50,000 federal grant for a book she is currently writing on the history of erotic entertainment in Vancouver.

And now we have Elisabeth Eaves. In her recently released memoir, Bare.- On Women, Dancing, Sex and Power, this former Reuters reporter - who was raised in Vancouver and currently lives in New York - makes her literary debut by flashing the most intimate details of her psyche, personal life and career as a peepshow dancer at Seattle's infamous Lusty Lady.

Unlike Atkinson's - and most stories in this genre - Bare is not a sordid tale about high-school dropouts and failed waitresses who suffer from drug addictions, abusive childhoods and ill-fitting breast implants.

Eaves, the daughter of a retired math professor and a psychologist, grew up in a preppy middle-class Vancouver suburb where she learned the pleasure of streaking as a young child and kept herself amused during high school with calculating sexual conquests.

After graduating with a BA in international studies from the University of Washington, she worked at the Global Affairs Council by day and stripped by night, to help finance her graduate-studies at Columbia.

Even though Bare reports more than it philosophizes, Eaves, like Ross, applies a feminist analysis to her subject. She elevates the peeler trade to a perfectly respectable career choice for nubile hipsters and lesbians looking for an alternative way to finance their world travels and home renovations.

Until the final few chapters, that is, when Eaves returns to Seattle after a two-year stint as an overseas journalist in London and Jerusalem - to write this book and resume her former striptease career. By the end of her sojourn in sleazy nightclubs - after she has experienced the degradation of lap dancing and watched her friend Zoe, a nice Jewish girl who began stripping as a college freshman, slide into prostitution - Eaves concludes that "all sexuality for profit was insidious."

"Zoe probably affected me the most because when I met her I felt we had a lot in common," says Eaves on the phone from New York, where she is now working on a novel.

"I'm still totally sympathetic to women who want to bust loose and take their clothes off. And I do think there are some amazingly talented dancers who treat pole dancing as an art. But when I went back, I saw all these women who got trapped."

Her dramatic change of heart has failed to convince some early reviewers. "Maybe Ms. Eaves tried to write too soon," Nina Burleigh suggests in The New York Observer. "It takes a while for any young woman to recover from being a sex object and clear away the brain fog that goes with that role. It would be interesting to know how Elisabeth Eaves - who, heedless and headlong, became the ultimate sex object - explains herself to herself as she moves further away from being caught in a sticky web of gazes, and into a time of life when she can think objectively about herself."

[[ Back page header: Taking it off, on the stage and on the page ]]

Eaves says the criticism is "interesting. It's perfectly reasonable to expect that I might think differently in 10 years. But that doesn't make my opinion now any less valid."

Haunted by her past, Eaves said she had no choice but to write this book - partly because, as Evelyn Lau has often explained, the experience fuelled her creativity.

"This is the only subject that obsessed me enough to go and write a book about," says Eaves.

But unlike Lau, who continues to dwell on her various obsessions without any apparent signs of recovery, Eaves says the book was a therapeutic experience that allowed her to understand her motives, get it off her chest and be done with the subject.

"I'm working on a novel now and it has nothing to do with sex workers. Well, it will probably have some sex in it. I'm really happy that I've said the things I've wanted to say and figured things out.

In one of her most interesting points, Eaves makes a connection between eroticism and self-esteem. Sure, the money she earned was attractive. But for Eaves, the real motive for spreading her legs in front of strange men had more to do with sexual neediness than economics.

"There had been no place else to put the volatile mix I had inside: desire and vanity, seductiveness and anger, exhibitionism and selfconsciousness," the long-legged, busty, blond ballet dancer writes.
As Eaves discovered, the sexual affirmation she received from her customers allowed her to distance herself emotionally from an unfulfilling relationship and finally make the break. We'll leave it to the women's-studies majors to debate whether an affair would have been more liberating.
Eaves says she is now a well-adjusted 31-year-old. She's in a stable, steady relationship and her sex life hasn't suffered any from the experience.

"I still have a lot of desire, but I think I have a healthier distance from seeing myself as a sex object. "

She says her parents are a bit apprehensive about the book's publication, but they've come a long way in accepting her occupational choices. Her mom even chipped in with the research, mailing Eaves every clipping she read about strippers. Eaves doesn't have any conclusive theories about the connection between Vancouver and sex-trade writing.

"I guess we're known for having better strip clubs than American cities of the saxne size. We're a big port city. And Canada is more socially liberal - to make a sweeping generalization. We're a bit more laid-back about sex."

Ross would tell you that Vancouver's reputation for sexy showmanship can be traced back to the West Coast dance-club circuit. In the sixties, the showgirls from Las Vegas came to Vancouver to hone their routines before launching them in Sin City.

It appears that Vancouver's interest in the sex-trade genre is now spilling over into film. Lynn Booth, the director of The Bump and the Grind, a documentary about Vancouver strippers now in production, says the subject's appeal is similar to her last project, Pretty Boys, a documentary she produced about male models.

"Strippers are young risk-takers on the edge," says Booth. "Like male models, they're taking a path less walked."

According to urban legend, Vancouver is one of the largest centres for pornographic film production outside of California. But Sean Lang, the Vancouver director of The Money Shot, another documentary in development about "entrepren-whores," says the idea that the local industry is very profitable is "a huge fallacy.

"Yes, there are many people making porn in Vancouver, but very few are making money at it."

Lang suggests the artistic obsession with sex-trade workers in Vancouver has more to do with sexual frustration.

"I don't think anyone in Vancouver is getting laid. When I came here from Toronto seven years ago, it took me forever to get lucky. It's backwards here."

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