I loved and resented how intensely certain live music made me feel, and how that intensity of feeling wasn’t translatable in the boy-rock world, where factual knowledge and expertise were the currency. These passionate contradictions combined with my sexual shame—for my hunger, for my clumsiness, for my secrets—and with the salt of the disregard and violations I perceived as having been inflicted upon me due to my gender. All this I was pouring into a new pot, splattering as I did so, where it stewed in the context of histories I was learning about, of cosmologies and systems. I was trying desperately to sort out the feelings and the theories, to read enough and think enough and write enough to name them, but that’s hard to do at a full boil. My sophomore year in college was wonderful and important for me, but I was pretty much the opposite of chill.
Yet there in the neighborhood strip club, I found some relief. My efforts to suppress the nervous mix of arousal and misgiving I felt when pushing open the heavy black door were so easily successful as to be eager. The permission I gave myself to be there (and received from the indifferent establishment and the West Philly milieu), along with the beers I drank and the chain of Camel Lights I smoked and the aftershock endorphins from the prior night’s long fucking, sedated me into a narcotic repose after my couple years of tension. In the presence of so many available women, the occasional man who sidled up to me never pressed the issue when I demurred attention. Hey, I was just there to see my friends. I was just another lazy afternoon patron, if with a funny little twist—escaping from my job search and internal unrest, letting myself be soothed by watching pretty, nearly-naked women dancing.
THE WOMEN ALL told me the vibe was different at night. Even in daylight, their enchanting performances on stage didn’t yield the dancers any tips, and I wasn’t so sedated that I didn’t notice how they had to labor and grind for those, hop down, work the bar, make eye contact while shimmying their tits and brazenly pressing for money. The calculated exchange, callous and begrudged on both sides, that was the part I felt embarrassed to be seeing, but I looked hard at it, even if through lizard eyes. The lizard eyes of a stoned anthropologist. I collected raw material for my sense-making project and for catching my buzz. In between their sets and tips-rounds, I’d chat with my housemates. It made me feel special, because they’d talk to me for free.
It seemed that every day another West Philly girl was taking up dancing. Many of them encouraged me to give it a shot. They were sure I’d be hired. The owner of the Bounce Babe liked skinny white girls with long dark hair, they said. They were confident in the knowledge of his preference, which he’d offered in a tutorial about how every man had them and how to divine those of clients without taking it personally. But despite fitting his bill, I didn’t jump. Why not, they wanted to know—it had become almost de rigueur among the unemployed in the house, and they all knew I was looking for a job.
“You’re there all the time anyway,” Maerene pointed out to me.
“I’m not the stripper type,” I said. I pointed at my chest. “Tiny boobs.”
“I’ve seen your nipples!” she cried. She was well into her forty-ouncer and who knows what else. “You can do it. They’re cute!”
They were probably flashing as she spoke, because another girl was behind me giving me a shoulder massage and my tank top had loose armholes and I seldom wore a bra. I was not ashamed of my small breasts. I liked them fine; I liked the freedom they gave me, and it seemed almost incidental to me to cover up. But although when my Oberlin boyfriend came to town I wouldn’t even let him climb the stairs of the porch when he walked me home, so afraid was I of being seen as a sheltered college girl, I maintained my resistance to stripping even at the risk of appearing prissy, of not fitting in. I didn’t want my breasts to be rated by the same men I peacefully sat alongside at the strip club. I knew my comfort in my body would be mitigated by the judgment, and that the defenses I’d need to build up against it, and against monetized interest and stolen gropes, would alienate me from my newfound ability to see sexual energy as a fuel for anarchic revolution rather than a ball in the Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King tennis match. Even at ten dollars an hour plus tips and street cred, it wasn’t worth it.
I take my son and daughter to my friend’s place to celebrate her forty-fifth birthday. Connie’s been separated from her husband for almost a year, and her life has settled into a new groove—new apartment, new friends, new man in her life. She’s been dating this guy for a while, but I’ve yet to meet him, I’ve only heard tell. I’m looking to collect some first-hand observations before I wholeheartedly give my approval.
He’s not there yet when we arrive, and we all settle into the living room—my daughter coloring with another little girl, my son playing video games with Connie’s son, me bantering with the grown-ups, three sharp, divorced moms, about men, and sex, and male strippers. I tell them the story of how I waitressed at a Chippendales-type show at the Italian Civic Club when I was in tenth grade. We laugh and riff off each other, mix confession with salt and humor, speak either sotto voce or in a code we believe can’t be read by the children—Chippendales, there’s no way they know what that is, even if the tone of our laughter draws an antennae away from the glow of the high definition screen. I’m conscious of how fresh the conversation seems in comparison to those I have with married women in my neighborhood and at school functions. I’m aware of how familiar and foreign it is, a diet I used to live on and seldom taste now. I want more. I don’t really want my friend’s new boyfriend to show up with his two sons and break the all-girl vibe.
But then Connie’s son starts asking her every few minutes: “Why aren’t they here? When are they coming? Shouldn’t they be here by now?” His anxiety gives voice to the rest of ours. He should be, shouldn’t he?
“Quit asking,” Connie finally snaps. “I don’t know where he is. He’s not answering his phone.” I feel the moms circling the wagons around our friend, some of us turning toward her, ready to offer any comfort, some of us facing outward, cocking our guns for an attack. Why aren’t you here, motherfucker? My desire to vet this guy goes from passive to active, the benefit of my doubt no longer assured.
But then the doorbell rings and the new gang troops in merrily, the boyfriend with his two growing sons, and he handles the situation so comfortably. Within a few sentences, I’m ready to like him. We share some room on the couch. Another of the moms and the man volley about the first date she’s going on later, what signals her clothing sends. The evening is just getting started, and I’m relieved to see it’s going to stay slightly ribald and fun.
It’s an Indian summer night, mid-October, deliciously warm. My daughter had insisted on wearing her new Halloween costume to the party, a furry bear suit, and I had said she could as long as she put on shorts underneath rather than the pants she’d been wearing, so that she wouldn’t get too hot. She gets too hot despite my forethought, and within an hour she wiggles out of the costume, the pelt of russet fluff and cheap sateen discarded on the floor. She vaults onto my lap. She’s a climby girl, squirmy, long-legged, and she twists from me to scale the back of the couch. She gets stuck for a moment with her head pointing to the ground and her little bottom lifted into the air, barely covered by the striped shorts that fit at the beginning of summer. My husband and I have oft remarked that one of the many details of parenthood that doesn’t get relayed clearly is how consistently one’s face will be put in close quarters with toddlers’ butts and genitals. Almost daily, at times both expected and not, you’ll be offered a full view of a winking asshole, a sticky scrotum, a stinky vulva. But at three and a half, in positions like the one she’s in, my daughter’s body is already becoming more like a girl’s, less like a genderless toddler’s. Next to me, the man says something like: “Whoa, I don’t want to get arrested.”
I know this can be a concern of men, a real one. My husband stayed home with the kids more than I did, and he’d mention times when he felt unwelcome on the playground because of his gender, get a dirty look from a mom if he tried to help a little one up the stairs of the slide. Another male friend talked about the awkwardness he’d felt when the little girl he’d been babysitting insisted he wipe her after she peed. Another friend had the police show up at his door because