The New York Observer
by Nina Burleigh Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex and Power, by Elisabeth Eaves.
Alfred A. Knopf, 295 pages, $24.
This book about looking at naked women begins with a lengthy section about the author and how she looks. She’s a knockout: a tall, blond and busty girl who’s been fielding lustful glances since she was 13. She’s not being narcissistic, exactly. We need to know about her look because her look and her attitude about being looked at have much to do with why she decided, in her early 20’s, to take a job in a peep-show club, stripping for men masturbating behind glass windows.
Elisabeth Eaves, the daughter of a Canadian academic and psychologist, is not your pimped, beat-me-up career stripper. Joe Eszterhas could never have dreamed her up. A former Reuters journalist, Ms. Eaves got a B.A. in international studies from the University of Washington and actually earned her first degree before she went into what she calls “the sex business” in Seattle. She worked at the Global Affairs Council in the afternoon and stripped at night. After a yearlong stint prancing naked in high heels on a pink stage with windows on the walls that unshuttered for the price of a quarter, she moved to New York and went to graduate school at Columbia, earning a second degree from the School of International and Public Affairs.
She returned to stripping-after a few years as a journalist in London and Jerusalem-because she was haunted by her past. She wanted to write about it in the same way that Simone de Beauvoir wanted to write: to understand herself.
Ms. Eaves is a good, vivid writer, and this is a brave and disturbing, if flawed, book. She takes us onstage and backstage at the Lusty Lady, a Seattle peep show with an ironic pomo edge (the marquee during the W.T.O. riots read “W T Ohhhh” and, after the 2000 election, “Electile Dysfunction?”). She introduces herself and her colleagues-all of them twentysomething, Grunge City hipsters into making easy money-by their stage names. “Zoe” is a nice Jewish girl who started stripping as a freshman in college in order to finance her international cycling tours. She has a savings account of $50,000 by the end of her 20’s. “Thanks to her notebook,” Ms. Eaves tells us, “she knew that by the time she was 19, she had watched 1,392 men unzip their pants and masturbate. She stopped keeping count.” “Kim” uses her earnings to buy and lavishly renovate a house, becoming a Home Depot fanatic who can’t quit stripping because her house is never done to perfection. “Maya” is a lesbian (lots of these in the stripper business, according to Ms. Eaves) who likes the money and hates the men. And then there are girls like “Leila”-Elisabeth Eaves herself-who have other professional interests that require clothing, who want to become photographers or businesswomen, and who do eventually follow their dreams to fruition.
Readers with no other ideas about stripper life (who, for example, don’t know what a lap dance is, or who missed the Sopranos segment where the girl gets beat to death outside the Bada Bing club) might think that all strippers have their self-respect intact and are getting college degrees and saving money to support slacker-esque bike trips across Asia and New Zealand. Almost all of Ms. Eaves’ colleagues wear Doc Martens after hours and have shaved heads or pink-dyed hair beneath their wigs.
Missing from this picture are the single mothers, the desperately poor women, the drug addicts, the hookers, the women whose sense of self and sexual life have been permanently damaged by bad childhood experiences-or simply by bad men. The closest we get to the real emotional story of professional sex objects is when we learn that the lesbians can’t do their job sober. It’s not clear whether Ms. Eaves rarely encountered seriously troubled women or whether she avoided them, or whether she’s leaving them out in order to give us a sense of the business as she understood it.
Her book does tell us, en passant, what men who pay strippers want. Anyone who’s been to a strip club has seen the weird glaze sealing every man’s eye once the naked girl starts undulating. What hypnotizes them? Ms. Eaves nails it in one paragraph: “These men wanted, simply, to see more. More body, more tongue, more tit and especially more pussy, as deeply as they could behold … You could have your labia nearly planted against the window and they still made ‘spread it’ motions with their hands, bending and peering to get a better angle. There was one regular who always brought a flashlight. What did he think he would find? … One dancer periodically intoned onstage, like a soothing subway announcer, ‘You have reached the cervix.'”
Ms. Eaves’ former peep-show clients aren’t likely to buy her book, but you never know. If they’re truly searching for whatever is at the end of that mysterious pink tunnel, they’ll get some part of the answer here. They’ll learn that girls like Elisabeth Eaves genuinely enjoy dancing around in high heels and makeup. They’ll also learn that in fact, many of these paragons of male fantasy are lesbians or have long-suffering boyfriends (no abusive boyfriends show up in these pages), that their sexy Rapunzel hairdos are really wigs and their tits are often fake.
What they won’t learn is how strippers feel about what they do. Ms. Eaves has tried to get inside herself: She shares a lot of intimate information, details about her boyfriends, her breakups, her attitudes toward sex, nakedness and her own body. She has tried to describe how being an object of desire at a young age affected the way she looked at herself. But no one reading this book will be able to say if there’s anything at all at the end of those pink tunnels.
She enjoyed her job, at least for a while. Onstage, she was all object, pure body. The experience was a narcissistic power trip-a way, she says, to provoke desire without courting danger. She had a routine: “Window opens. Start three feet away. Turn, twist, bend, high kick. Sink to floor. Approach window on knees. Stand up. Raise foot to bar, show pussy. Crouch down, show face, lips, tongue. Stand up, turn, bend over … Up, down, turn, look, wink, ass, leg, shake, repeat as necessary until subject comes … With mirrors on every surface-except floor, we were spared that-I examined my own body … like a fine wooden boat or a thoroughbred horse … I could see exactly how I looked at all times.”
Then comes a change of heart: “In the end I decided that all sexuality for profit was insidious.” She writes, “The money was corrupting … They wanted fawning, illusive female charm, and they knew that it was for sale along with everything else.” That’s surely true, but given the way she’s depicted the stripper world, we can only half-believe that it really bothers her. Her conclusion feels tacked on because she can’t explain how the experience was insidious in her own life.
This ambivalence defines her book. Maybe Ms. Eaves tried to write too soon. She’s somewhere in her early 30’s now. As she points out, stripping is for girls in their 20’s, when they’re most desirable and most vulnerable. 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.
Nina Burleigh is working on a book about James Smithson and his bequest to the nation.