Power (S)Trip
A Girl’s Trip to the Strip Club
When William Shakespeare wrote this as a metaphor,
‘All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts’,
I wonder if he realized that it’s one of those things that holds true for life as well as most strip clubs.
You know what I’m talking about — you’ve seen those ‘phrases that can be said during sex and a funeral’ or ‘things you can say at a wedding and a job interview’ (for instance, I’m just doing this for money). Who’s to say that Shakespeare didn’t pioneer this game? The man was wild.
And now that I have introduced my topic, oh so subtly, and have appealed to the intellectual majority with an out-of-context quote, I hope you trust me when I say that the story I’m about to tell you does not have a moral. It’s not a sermon or a life lesson. It’s just a couple of observations from a 20-year old about her first (and only) trip to a female, 100% nude strip club in Hollywood. It’s living proof that what happens in LA, does not in fact, stay in LA.
Spring Break, 2019 — freshman year of college. Everything about that time was a first in my life. I’m an international student completing an undergraduate degree in Genetics. And so far, there was not a thing about college that I didn’t absolutely love (soul crushing GPA requirements aside). And I would happily attribute that to the phenomenal friends that college gave me. We may or may not have been described as the ‘Taj Mahal of Priestley dorm’ but that’s a whole another (slightly tone-deaf) story.
For our first spring break together, we planned a chaotic all-girls trip to Los Angeles. And trust me, this trip was NOT meant to be wholesome. It was supposed to be crazy and chaotic and 100% touristy with sobriety entirely optional. So in a way it makes total sense that one night, we found ourselves decked up like wealthy patrons, standing in front of the 18+ Showgirls strip club on Hollywood Boulevard, well past our bedtimes.
To be completely honest, I didn’t think we’d actually go through with the plans, until we stood there waiting for the bouncer to let us in. It was a weekday so it was practically empty. Other than curiosity and ease of access, we really didn’t have any other reason to go to a strip club. But wasn’t spring break meant to be all about the debauchery? There was excitement, a flurry of squeaks and giggles and the promise of doing something almost forbidden in the air. As the garishly neon sign of a naked lady beckoned to us at this $$ yelp-reviewed strip club, I remember thinking that this scene had all the trappings of a bad Hollywood movie. We handed the bouncer 10$ each, clutched our pre-prepared wads of 1$s and skipped inside with enough decorum to be instantly out of place.
Red and pink lights blended into one another seductively. Metal poles, just like we imagined, stood silent and stoic on round stages erected around the room and around each stage was a smattering of chairs, couches and tables for drinks. We picked our way through the balding middle aged men, dropped our bags into seating around a stage and then headed to the bar for a drink. I was nervous, as if I was the one going to be on stage, but also incredibly excited. As Jennifer Lopez played in the background, the bartender — a beautiful girl who didn’t look much older than me — handed us our Cokes and Sprites in plastic glasses that had cartoon strippers on them. We all laughed, already knowing that these were going to be framed in our apartment back in college. Some people have art from wine & paint nights, we have soda cups from strip clubs.
When the show started, we were mesmerized. For a long time we watched in awe, and most importantly appreciation as they twirled around poles in giant heels and with unbelievable core strength. Almost in a trance, we analyzed the dance as though it was performative theatre. We applauded wildly, yelling praises and “you go girl!!” between genuine laughter, dancing and gasps of surprise as they whirled around us with stupendous clarity. We picked favorites, we knew their names, and because on that Wednesday night, we were the only group livening up the place, the girls noticed us too. They flashed us smiles and winks and egged on by our support, demonstrated some truly back-breaking moves that had us on our feet, howling for more. The nudity stunned us, but I think we got over it pretty quick. “Woah”, “she’s so good”, “I LOVE that outfit!”, “damnnnnnn” were commonly heard from our group. And after their performances they’d often talk to us when we went to get refills from the bar. One girl complimented my friend’s sweater. Another girl told me she was majoring in electric engineering and was putting herself through college. Destiny, Crystal, Cashmere, Kiara — I remember their names (and their outfits) long after we left that club because as strange as it felt to go to an all-female strip club with a group of girlfriends, it was probably stranger for them to see us there.
The night had been a sober albeit caffeinated blur and it wasn’t until we were strolling along the Walk of Fame to our parking spot, completely at ease and clutching our stripper cups, laughing at what an unbelievably fun night it had been, that I really had time to reflect. There was a particular feeling somewhere, mixed up in all those happy emotions, that I was struggling to identify.
And it was unsettling to realize that it was camaraderie.
Objectively, our lives couldn’t be more different. I was earning a degree in college, financed by my parents, and still living a relatively safe and sheltered life. I was being exposed to the world, to its crippling evils and uplifting goodness, morsel by morsel. I was going to be a scientist. There’s a culture of respect and understanding and validation. The security of an education and my next meal. And the only balding middle-aged men in my life were professors. On the other hand, the girls were either putting themselves through college or working full-time in a profession that offered little to no security, job or otherwise. While some had consciously picked this career, a lot were thrust into it by circumstance, with their dreams and aspirations on hold. They were brilliant at what they did and yet they weren’t judged for that. They were weighed and priced as a jumble of parts by the same middle-aged men who bought ‘love’ every night with their daytime job as a capitalist sell-out. And yet when we looked at them, we saw dignity and it might be laughable to say that we respected the performance they put up — but it doesn’t change the fact that we did.
There were memories of the night that we had pushed to the fringes to avoid ruining it. They came up when one of us voiced a simple question — “how was the experience?” I tried to answer but the words ‘good’ and after that ‘bad’ died on my lips because that wasn’t quite it. They were too simplistic to capture the actual complexity of that experience. I finally went with ‘interesting’ and there were a couple of minutes of introspective silence as we ruminated over how we felt and more importantly, why we felt it.
There had been a simple sign next to every stage at the strip club that read,
“No Touching”
It was an unmistakable neon monstrosity in blinding yellow, clashing violently with the red and pink decor. It was a statement and an instruction all at once. It was uncomplicated and basic. It was almost comical. And yet there was not a single patron there who didn’t flout it. The sight of the dancers’ exhilarating performances is superimposed with visuals of meaty hands grabbing at them and smacking them under the pallid glow of the preventative sign. A bouncer would then gently chide them, the dancer would ignore, and the evening would continue. And the sequence would repeat. The girls knew that if they protested, it meant less money. So really, the “No touching” just increased forbidden pleasure.
Meanwhile, our group stood apart from that tableau, shouting encouragements that weren’t even remotely sexual. It’s interesting because at the end of it all, none of us considered it a moral digression. It was just some form of an extreme cabaret or burlesque performance. And as with gleaming smiles and gleaming heads the men flung their dollar bills at the girls, I remember us almost reverently placing our ones at their feet. It was satirical because without even thinking, our first thought in a strip club was respect for the dancers.
And I keep coming back to this image of the lonely, pathetic balding middle-aged man desperate for companionship and more importantly control and power because the crowd was not a function of the place we picked. The term ‘gentleman’s club’ comes to mind which is nothing but a “strip club” where money curtains the same invasion of privacy and Armani suits hide the beer-belly.
There was something to be said about the quiet strength in the dancers, the culture of resilience and the knowledge that some of the most powerful men in the daylight are consuming the mindless illusion of power and possession that they pay the dancers to put up. The balding men (metaphorical or otherwise) may think they are superior but the girls I saw that night knew they were holding all the cards. We walked into that strip club young, wild and free but in a strange turn of events, we left wiser.
And maybe that’s why the girls loved us and we loved them. There was an invisible exchange of praise for their competencies at the job. There was no judgment on what they were doing, there was no paring them down to bits of meat. Every time rules were flouted, we screamed harder and applauded more. And in that moment it didn’t matter that we were two groups of girls so different from one another. It only mattered that it was women empowering women in the strangest manner. That they felt safe and unexploited and appreciated for the briefest of moments. That there was a possibility of conversation that extended beyond a smacked ass. And hence, that night, in what is arguably the most degenerate of joints, it was a strange few hours of innocent fun.
