The Seattle Times
By Patti Jones; Seattle Times staff reporter
Former Lusty Lady dancer turned author returns to stripping to explore its allure: Sex, money, freedom or a power over men?
At the Lusty Lady peep show on First Avenue, men duck in by the dozens at lunchtime.
They don’t dawdle in the lobby but head straight down the hall to one of the 12 doors on the right. Whoop. Bang. It sounds a little like a movie-theater ladies’ room with all the door openings and closings. But in this case the doors lead to one-person booths from which the men can for 75 cents a minute peer through glass at Trixie, Velocity and other dancers as they strut about, stark naked in 4-inch heels.
Elisabeth Eaves used to be one of these nude women, back in 1997. Tall, blond, busty, she was known to the customers as Leila. For them, she’d bend over, twist, give a revealing high kick, then sink to the floor, her lips parted.
Like so many of the dancers, however, Eaves left the Double-L after about a year for other things. She moved to New York and went to graduate school at Columbia, earning a degree in international affairs. She worked as a journalist, reporting for Reuters in London and Jerusalem. She didn’t talk much about her past to others, but it haunted her. Why had she danced naked in front of strange men? she wondered. Was it wrong? How did it affect her psyche? Her relationships with men and with society?
In search of answers, she returned to Seattle and stripping in 2000, this time at other clubs, with the aim of writing about her experience. She figured if she could write about sex work, she could understand it. The result is “Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power” (Knopf, $24), and while the book tends to raise more questions than it settles, it sheds some light on the life of a peep-show dancer.
“When I wrote the book, I hoped to answer for myself what would motivate me to strip,” says Eaves, 31, on the phone from her current home in New York City. “The presumption is that women who are sexual are uneducated or downtrodden or abused. But I’m none of those, and I find the stereotypes irritating.”
On a practical level, stripping offered Eaves a flexible work schedule. It was less boring than office temping and, after several promotions, more lucrative. The top pay at the Double-L in 2001 was $27 an hour. But Eaves also found the work attractive for another reason. “I’d always had a fascination with and curiosity about stripping,” she admits.
Distaste for rules
As a child growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, B.C., Eaves says she had a “deep distaste for clothing.” As a teen, she chafed against her parents’ ban on tight shirts and short skirts. And as a sorority member at the University of Washington, she was vexed by the constant room-mother warnings to “be aware of your reputation.” It seemed unfair that girls should be so constrained while boys were given sexual license.
“The first time I became aware of strippers, I thought, ‘Wow. These women don’t have to follow the rules,’ ” Eaves says. “I had a sense that they were free of something that I was stuck with.”
After graduating from the UW with her first degree, in international studies, Eaves noticed a Lusty Lady employment ad and wanting no regrets at age 80 decided to check it out. She paid the Double-L a visit, stepped into one of its dark booths, dropped coins in the slot, and watched as a screen lifted to reveal a long-haired woman named Korina wearing only white patent-leather boots. Eaves says she was at once “mesmerized” and filled with something akin to desire not for Korina but to be her. Soon after, Eaves was on the other side of the window, dancing before a wall of mirrors on a red velvet rug.
In a sense, Eaves didn’t really become a stripper, because the dancers at Lusty Lady are always nude unless you happen to count wigs, false eyelashes, platform shoes, boas and other accents. In the book, the dancer’s nakedness adds levity, with Eaves describing how they politely laid a piece of paper towel on the dressing-room couch before sitting down. Or how they introduced themselves to each other with compliments such as, “You have beautiful breasts.”
Equally fun is Eaves’ discussion of the dancers’ stage names, which are always pseudonyms so that the customers can’t trace them. Girl-next-door names are popular: Jenny, Heather. Food and jewel names are too: Crystal, Ruby, Cherry.
By choosing Leila, Eaves joined the ranks of Lily, Lulu, Delilah. “The two l’s made the person saying the name flick the tongue up and down in a licking motion,” she writes.
Cynicism about men
But the book’s picture of peepdom is not all rosy. Once the novelty of being nude wears off, the work can be tedious (stand up, turn, spread legs, bend over). It can also be unsettling for those working in the Lusty Lady’s Personal Pleasures room, where men on one side of the glass direct women’s actions on the other side through a sound system (“You are a naughty school girl, and you’re late for class!”).
And it can inspire disgust. “The architecture of the stage was such that we literally looked down on (the men) and they looked up at us,” Eaves writes. “We also held a sort of moral high ground, in the sense that we could explain our presence here, however ingeniously, in terms of earning a living. They, on the other hand, were ducking into cubicles where they paid money to watch girls fake arousal.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Eaves says the work fed her cynicism about men in general and harmed her relationships. “It reinforced the idea that all men are victims of their hormones,” she says.
“It took a while after I left dancing for me to grow out of seeing men in this one dimension.”
Today, Eaves says she has a better idea of what she thinks about stripping than she did when she began her book.
“My attitude has become more negative,” she says. “When I arrived back in Seattle to do more research, I thought I’d lap dance and work a bachelor party, but in a space of a few months, I started thinking, ‘Wow. I don’t like this.’
“I don’t think stripping is exploitive because, at least in this country, the women choose to do it,” she says.
“But I do think it reinforces the idea that women can be bought that their appearance, behavior and sexuality are for sale.”
‘Ten years of ballet for this?’
So what do Eaves’ parents think about her naked dancing?
When Eaves first considered stripping, she shared her thoughts with them. “You wouldn’t!” her psychologist mother responded. “Ten years of ballet for this?” her math professor dad joked.
But Eaves never actually told them about her life at the Lusty Lady until she had the contract for “Bare.”
“My father is reading the book now, but my mother is a little afraid of it,” Eaves says with a laugh. “It sits in the middle of a room like a glowing object she doesn’t want to go near.”
And Eaves? She’s ready to move on. As soon as she ends her book tour, she’ll return home to New York to complete her current project.
“It’s a novel about national identity and globalization,” she says. “It has nothing to do with stripping.”
Patti Jones: pjones@seattletimes.com.