The American women I have known who belly dance as hobbyists (and I’ve known several) have each had a quirky thing in common. At the drop of a sequin, or at the first hint of a risqué comment, or sometimes with no provocation whatsoever, any of them would deliver a stiff-necked and puritanical little speech about the venerable art of belly dance.
Belly dancing, they would proclaim, is an utterly non-sexual practice. What’s more, they would have you know, belly dance “in its proper cultural and historical context” has nothing whatsoever to do with stripping, and even less than nothing to do with any of the more intimate models of sex-work. (These were 1990s women, though, so they didn’t say “sex work.” They said “prostitution”, loading each syllable with disgust.)
Festooned with their coin belts and sequined bras and tasseled shawls and fringed wraps and at least the proverbial seven layers of veils, any of these women could almost sell you this load of sex-negative codswallop. But when they’d go back out on the dance floor and start to shimmy, the spell would break. Whatever its “proper historical and cultural context” may be, belly dance with all of its artifices and accouterments is manifestly a time-tested and well-honed technology for raising and hardening the penises of men.
If you require further evidence of this straightforward proposition, I offer you the photographs illustrating this post. Our belly dancing model goes by the unlikely name of Kissa Sins, and as her photos make clear, she definitely does not view belly dancing as an art that’s in any way distinct from its power to arouse!
Susan Shepard spent sixteen weeks (at different times over seven years) stripping in oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota. And then she wrote Wildcatting: A Stripper’s Guide To The Modern American Boomtown, which is full of utterly delightful and erudite observations about rural America, the modern economy, and the lives of itinerant laborers.
The American worker has never been so efficient in terms of output over hours worked. At the same time, real wages and benefits have plummeted. Prospects are shitty for college graduates and non-graduates alike. Layoffs and cutbacks in previously solid industries protect the profits of an ever-smaller class at the expense of those who produce value. In stripper terms, here’s what that looks like: Lap dances in many places still start at $20, the same price they were in 1990. Customers expect ever-higher levels of contact and performance skill, meaning strippers work harder to earn the $20 or the dollar stage tip that is worth a lot less than it used to be. At the same time, clubs charge dancers higher stage fees and tipouts, especially as customer counts and tabs drop and dancers become a primary source of income for the clubs. There are no layoffs when your workers pay you, so instead of cutbacks, clubs hire more and more dancers, resulting in more competition for a smaller customer pool. Do more with less!
The one big advantage you have if you’re a stripper, though, is the ability to travel to greener pastures. If you would like to have a job in another town, as long as you look good enough for the club’s standards, you’re hired. So those who can, move. When the level of bullshit is too high or the earnings too low, they the hit the road. Same as the men who wind up traveling to work in the oil fields. If you can make $30,000 more a year driving heavy equipment in North Dakota instead of in Louisiana, and you need that money, you go. Is this the logical progression of a service economy? It looks like migrant labor.
What Shepard does not tell us (although you know it already if you know anybody employed at hard physical labor) is that the modern American laborer making any kind of decent wage wears Carhartts, a brand of tough work clothing. Whatever the merits of Carhartts as work attire, apparently they are not kind to the tender ass-skin of your local lapdance professional:
Bozeman, Montana, roughly marks where the plains turn into the mountains. It precisely marks the geographic spot where I return to myself on drives back from North Dakota. It’s seven hours from Williston, and that’s as much driving as I want to do in a day after a week of nine-hour shifts. So I would stop there and go through this routine after every trip to North Dakota: Check into a hotel or a sweet little vacation rental. Take two hours to put a mud mask on my face and my ass (those long hours of lap dancing on Carhartts are MURDER on it), scrub myself in a hot bath until my skin is red (Williston is the dustiest place I’ve ever been, and you feel like the dirt will be with you forever), wash my hair, moisturize, and go to one of the nice restaurants that live off of Big Sky vacationers and seasonal residents. They’ll have real glassware, attractive waitstaff, and good food. It makes me feel like I’m back in civilization, and I smile all through dinner thinking about how I’m here and not in Williston.
It’s refreshing to know that dirty dancing really hasn’t changed in 3300 years. I’m pretty sure I saw this girl in a club a few months ago. Same hair, same earrings, same decorated scarf around her waist, same back bend…yup, it hadda be her:
Speaking of fetish fuel as we were, does anybody out there have “a professional homemaker” fetish? OK, maybe a “female ex-convict” fetish? You know you want her!
And now, you can have her, working a stripper pole on her TV show to help promote a stripper-moves exercise class:
Even if you don’t have a specific Martha Stewart fetish, you’ve got to approve of the idea behind the thing. By any calculation I can imagine, every additional woman in America who learns some stripper moves is a net gain for the Gross National Hedonic Product.
I have long had an item on my Internet searching to-do list, perhaps too long delayed by the fact that I’ve spent as much of my leisure hours as I have thinking about sexbots and gill men and so on. That item was to track down a famous performance by the soprano Maria Ewing done at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden sometime in the early 1990s. Oh, don’t groan. She very much deserves a place of honor here, because of her performances in Richard Strauss’sSalome.
Now, it’s well known that the burning erotic core of this overheated-to-begin-with opera (based on a play by Oscar Wilde is a performance by Salome of the famous Dance of the Seven Veils, performed for her stepfather (and great-uncle) Herodes, the Tetrach of Judea (busy man). Herodes is clearly trembling with lust for Salome, and Salome is in turn nursing a less-that-healthy obsession with the prophet Jochanaan, who is imprisoned in a pit in Herodes’s court.
Performance convention for this high-art striptease since its first performance in 1905 has been for the singer-actress depicting Salome to end in a body stocking.
Maria Ewing’s performance starts conventionally enough:
And there’s a conventional amount of taunting of Jochanaan in his pit:
But in the end Ewing, shall we say, defies the traditional performance convention:
And it is just glorious. Pictures I can present here do it little justice. You can readily find video of this on YouTube: one example is here:
In the end, Salome insists on being brought the head of Jochanaan on a silver platter. Herodes, having given his word, has no choice but to comply. Salome’s triumph was the subject of a famous illustration by Aubrey Beardsley.
Bonus! Searching for Maria Ewing turned up an arguably even steamier performance by Francesca Patanè in a Rome production of Salome.
I was pretty entertained to discover that somebody went and used Photoshop to update and modernize (whilst leaving unchanged the essence of) a hairy old folk tradition that’s long been near and dear to ErosBlog:
Notice they are stripping him. Imagine a chorus of high female voices like you’d hear in Castle Anthrax: “But Santa! But Santa! It’s so warm and sunny here! We must get you out of that horrid fur and make you more comfortable! Much more comfortable…”
