check, and thus the logic of sadism and masochism, it is argued, is a key to the ... between power and powerlessness, misogyny and feminism, and sadism and.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 14 NUMBER 1 (APRIL 2004)
Striptopia? Michael Uebel
Considering the possibility that there might be something utopic about strip clubs, this paper traces the relays between power and powerlessness, feminism and antifeminism, utopia and dystopia within a broad psychoanalytic framework. It is interested in analyzing the social and psychological stakes for the male heterosexual consumer of strip culture. Strip clubs, this paper argues, are the special site of a masculine debasement amounting to a kind of moral masochism, to use the Freudian typology. The male masochism here is an index of contemporary power and how it is expressed, where what is important is not how much power one can demonstrate, but rather how much one can hold in check, and thus the logic of sadism and masochism, it is argued, is a key to the dynamic relations that inhere in the strip scene. An attempt is made to bring radical feminism in alignment with this analysis of sexualized power and pleasure. Keywords
masculinity; masochism; psychoanalysis; feminism; strip club
“All your mental armor drags me down.” (Bush 1996) “The male glance,” notes Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, has often been described. It is commonly said to rest coldly on a woman, measuring, weighing, evaluating, selecting her—in other words, turning her into an object. What is less commonly known is that a woman is not completely defenseless against that glance. If it turns her into an object, then she looks back at the man with the eyes of an object. It is as though a hammer had suddenly grown eyes and stared up at the worker pounding a nail with it. When the worker sees the evil eye of the hammer, he loses his self-assurance and slams it on his thumb. (1999, 209)
Perhaps what I wish to say here about the male consumption of strip culture amounts to an extensive footnote to this incredibly provocative quotation. In my view, Kundera’s hammer analogy captures the essence of the incredible lure and power of erotic dancing. It suggests precisely the danger that arises ISSN 1035-0330 print; 1470-1219 online/04/010003-17 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1035033042000202898
4
UEBEL
when certain fantasies regarding the dancer are given up or denied. The dancer calls the customer’s erotic bluff, forcing him to exchange his fantasies of mastery for those of submission. Yet the loss of the objectifying fantasy gives rise to another masculinist fantasy of mastery, this time a largely defensive, as opposed to aggressive, one: I sacrifice my well-being in a moment of self-questioning and self-hammering because that is the only way I can be sure that I am alive, desirable, and, at the end of the day, benevolent. My concern in this essay, then, will be to trace the relays between power and powerlessness, misogyny and feminism, and sadism and masochism, that make up the masculine fantasies activated within this special cultural space. Strip clubs are indeed special spaces. Descending the stairs or walking down the corridor and through the inner doors into a dim, bass-thumping, perfume and cigarette-laced room, one becomes conscious of entering an almost magical domain, where a temporary reprieve from the protocols of everyday life can be expected. Suddenly one’s erotic relation to the world, to others, is at the same time simplified and rendered more complex. Perhaps this is because here everything is at once possible and predictable, and it is this potent combination of the unknown and the familiar that constitutes the erotic secret of the strip scene. In the club a new set of protocols reigns, amplifying and monitoring libidinal existence. To be sure, sexuality in a strip club seems less repressed. Sexual banter, unabashed naked and cosmetically enhanced bodies (that bear remarkable resemblances to one another), the free flow of money and compliments, and open seductions all seem to work at lifting prohibitions on erotic behavior. But, as Michel Foucault’s history of sexuality reminds us, signs of eros’s liberation point directly, if not tragically, to the reaffirmation of the very structures that liberation and transgression would undo. If strip clubs are spaces for the possibility of a libidinal existence unencumbered by erotic repression, they appear to be so only to the extent that such an existence has been orchestrated by an oppressive and often self-serving psychic and social order.1 Indeed, the stability of strip culture itself depends upon the not always willing submission of its participants—male and female, patron and dancer— taking, in the case of the male patron, the form of a social (or what some psychoanalysts designate psychic, as opposed to sexual) masochism curiously produced by the seeming liberation of sex rather than its repression. Seeking erotic freedom in the strip club always to some degree ends up calling into being the very protocols and limits of desire that we wish to transgress. But these are laws to which we imagine we can at least provisionally submit. Their self-enforcement within strip gives rise to a masochism more powerful than the voyeurism or fetishism also in play. The 1. See Kay’s (1999) stirring account of the exploitative working conditions in San Francisco strip clubs where prostitution, tolerated by club management and sought by many customers, takes a heavy toll on dancers. The conditions described by Kay, it should be noted, are the exception rather than the rule in American strip clubs, especially in the “gentlemen’s clubs” that I am analyzing here.
STRIPTOPIA?
5
masochist reins in his own desires, while always fantasizing that the other person admires his self-control. No small pleasure is taken in one’s own instrumentalization, in the masochistic “labor” performed for the dancer’s enjoyment. An analogy suggested here (and by a perverse reading of Kundera) is that of an alienated worker finding some pleasure in his errant thumb-smashing if only because it impedes the production goals of a capitalist boss who demands ever more precise hammering. Sacrificial performance for the other’s enjoyment is made absolutely explicit in strip culture. To take one salient moment in the club: toward the end of another interminable “dollar dance” (a nightly ritual where dancers circulate among customers offering them about 10 seconds of table-side attention for a dollar while, typically, a long medley plays), the DJ will stop the action and have the patron stand and dance for the stripper. This carnivalesque reversal provides a homely spectacle of masculine abasement in which its participants, however, seem to revel. Having so grandly humiliated himself, the customer all but ensures that the dancer remains an impossible object of desire. But this seems to be the point: a masochistic display like this diverts attention away from the real abjection that inheres in masculinity. In this way, it defends against the rejection that always follows groveling at the dancer’s feet, but it also—and this seems to be the real point—defends against the possibility that the dancer might actually go for the patron.2 For the most part, you do not go to a strip club to pick up women or, in most clubs, even to touch them. The desires a stripper sets in motion are never meant to be fully satisfied. The dancer’s power resides in her function as the cause of desire rather than as the object of desire. Jacques Lacan tells us that the sex act must fail, that “there is no sexual relationship,” and nowhere is this more true than in a strip club. The dancer on the stage fantasmatically sustains my desire, while at the same time she conceals the fact that genuine pleasure is available only for her. Enjoyment will always first be the dancer’s enjoyment of herself; which is to say, the enjoyment of her mastery. You will not have her because she will always possess herself first. To indulge your fantasies in a strip club is to attempt a solution to the unbearable enigma of the dancer’s desire, to find an answer to the ceaselessly interrogating voice that is as much cultural as it is psychic: What are we wanted for (anyway)? By provoking such self-questioning, the stripper’s desire—or, that fantasy of her obscure desire—is always to some degree anxiety producing. Is there, I cannot help but wonder, any element of her 2. My argument here about the masochistic dynamic inhering in the stripper–patron relationship is corroborated by strippers themselves: “Susan,” a former dancer and contributor to Screw magazine, observes that men “may think that they want the girl to come home with them but they really don’t want the fantasy of this teasing to go any further, they may want to touch or feel but they’re almost submissive, almost as if they were just there for the tease” (Ben-Shitta 1992, 36). My own interviews with dancers suggests that Susan’s use of the adverbial “almost” chastens the real compliancy of the male customer. See also Liepe-Levinson (1998), who does a nice job describing other ways in which club patrons place themselves in “jeopardy” in order to defeat the possibility of satisfaction, while keeping alive the pleasures of self-control and of yearning itself.
6
UEBEL
seduction that is real, an element addressed to me? Is there something more (or less) here than the play of appearances; if so, then what? The solution to my anxious questions, to my doubts, perhaps the only one, is to attempt some kind of interpretation or fantasy of her desire, and then masochistically offer up myself as one interchangeable object of desire. This is one, perhaps the main, reason why strip clubs have never seemed to me purely places of masculinist sadism, for customers seem acutely, if unconsciously, sensitive to their passive position vis-a`-vis the dancer’s desires, whether authentic or imputed to her. If masochism is the process of becoming the object through self-denial, that self-negation takes place in the strip club before the dancer’s “evil eye” (to return to Kundera’s image). It is around the pleasure of the dancer—the jouissance of a God, of “a supreme Being in maliciousness,” declares Lacan (1966, 773)—that we become instruments, at the point where pleasure and its prohibition fade into one another. Jouissance here becomes precisely that which serves no purpose (Lacan 1998, 3). Thus, we resign ourselves to getting off on, having a relationship with, the fantasy, never the woman herself. Jean Clavreul, writing about “the interests of the pervert,” claims that they “must above all be rigorously of no use, to lead nowhere. Anything validated by the pervert is marked with the seal of uselessness” (1980, 226; original italics). The strip scene, from the customer’s point of view, is sealed with uselessness, to the extent that his submission serves only to indelibly mark him as the dancer’s plaything. Sartre’s brilliant exposition of the condition of masochism in his book on Charles Baudelaire emphasizes precisely this same point: the erotics of subservience, a function of the distance and “frigidity” (a term, for Sartre, including conditions of whiteness, coldness, polished metalicism, and sterility) of the beloved, amounts to no more than an “empty game” producing nothing (Sartre 1950, 78, 117ff).3 Clavreul’s theory of the perverse masochist and Sartre’s reading of the characterological masochist intersect in a way that helps us understand the necessity of renunciation and failure, of the nothing that lies at the core of masochistic submission. Always “on the side of the eye,” as Clavreul puts it, a patron in this instance calls on the dancer as the perfect merchant of illusions with whom to enter into a kind of contract, so that his investments in the merely illusory can be proven and renewed. Dance for me, and I submit … I submit to your fantasy. Sylvia, a former dancer at the glorious Chez Paree in San Francisco, describes the “essence of the tease” in terms that illustrate just how powerful “nothing” really is within the simultaneously intimate and alienating strip scene: For a girl who likes to tease, this is the ultimate, to have the guy beneath while you do everything to turn him on until he asks, and sometimes, deliciously, literally begs for sex, a hand job, a kiss, none of which he is ever going to get, 3. Deleuze is quite obviously indebted to Sartre in his important essay on masochism, “Coldness and Cruelty” (Deleuze 1989).
STRIPTOPIA?
7
of course, because a true tease is at heart a sadist. She most enjoys the moment when the customer has opened himself to her and made himself vulnerable, the moment when she can break his heart and scar his ego with one little word: no. I suppose that means that those who like to be teased have a bit of the masochist in them, that the thrill they really seek is the moment of desire’s culmination being slapped down, the anticipation of sexual desire being dashed against the rocks of a dancer’s indifference. (Sylvia 2002)
The art of the strip-tease, its tricky sadism, what Sylvia calls “the dynamic of ‘I could, but I’m not going to’,” meets its match in the thrilling masochistic surrender of the patron. The dancer’s sublime power depends as much upon fantasy as the customer’s submission: each imagines he/she is arousing the other through a form of withholding. This provisional, or contractual, couple participates in an erotic game where libidinal energy is sublimated on each side—the teaser’s cruelty is filtered out through the calculated movements of seduction and the aggressive desires of the teased are sacrificed to the intoxicating pleasures of abjection.4 The question who is seducing whom here is remarkably complex, but in every good strip it seems that each pushes the other to the brink, with the reassurance that the relationship will never really begin, or, better, that the relationship is condemned to begin over and over again. Even looking to, or staring at, the dancer’s body, all we discover are more obstacles to the love relation. Strip clubs are scenes of the impossibility of certain kinds of jouissance, not because dancers are rarely more than remote fantasy objects, but because they are in fact subjects whose bodies are accessible insofar as they can be symbolized (with singles, tens, and twenties in their garter), and inaccessible in so far as they are intractably real. The paradoxical dancer’s body is thus a “zoned” body, organized and marked with paternal signifiers (“dead presidents”), a body whose realness cannot be encountered independent of the symbolics in which it is immersed. The dancer’s body is a place of inscription, and yet, paradoxically, it is beyond or “outside language”; thus suspended, it complicates any encounter with it.5 I wonder always whether it is possible to uncover, or recover, the woman herself, to hold her somehow to her promises made beyond the flesh. Hers is a tight body. Strikingly tanned, the naked body appears costumed, sealed, armored. The whiteness and coldness that Sartre, and Gilles Deleuze after him, have attributed to the severe woman, the despotic mistress, are the inverted equivalents of the tanning-salon glow. Likewise, the pasties, garters, stockings, satin thongs, shiny shiny boots of leather, heels, gloves, jewelry, piercings, tattoos, lipstick, makeup, hair weaves, wigs, breast implants, neatly trimmed (if not cleanly shaved) pubis, whatever, all serve to turn the body’s erogenous zones into eroticized zones, tightly covered with 4. The S/M game, insists psychoanalysis, squelches genuine destructive impulses; it wards off a potentially aggressive encounter between self and other (Coen 1988, 51–56). 5. For an account of losing a direct sense of the body, to which I am indebted here, see Andre´ (1999).
8
UEBEL
a “second skin” of mass cultural signifiers. Thus, a vitrifying of the body beautiful: The vitrification of nudity is related to the obsessional function of the protective wax or plastic coating of objects and the labor of scrubbing and cleaning intended to keep them in a constant state of propriety, of flawless abstraction. In both cases, vitrification and protection, it is a matter of blocking secretions … preventing them from collapsing and maintaining them in a sort of abstract immortality. (Baudrillard 1993, 105)
A dancer’s body is never really in front of you at all—sealed in signs, it appears as abstract, gravity-defiant youth. Such a hermetic body has peculiar effects upon the strip club habitue´, who is not necessarily, indeed rarely, an admirer or addict of beauty. Rather, his gaze is pure envy (in Latin: invidia, from the verb videre, to see) in the Lacanian sense, “envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself” (Loran 1978, 116). In her distance and enviable narcissistic unity, the dancer enthralls, but if ever she were reduced to a pure fetish object (just a mobile nude body on stage), the gap, which keeps desire active by holding it open, would collapse.6 Therefore, while at the same time a stripper encourages fetishization, she works to inhibit it, her seductive power, her lure, becoming tied now to her ability to self-enclose, to erotically “recreate her body as an object for herself” (Baudrillard 1993, 108). The erotic dancer, with gaze directed at herself (in the ubiquitous mirror or with eyes closed), constructs around herself a protective envelope, wherein all her jouissance is reflected back and concentrated. Her narcissistic body conserves its pleasure, expending it only when necessary. In this flesh-for-fantasy world, perhaps the most satisfaction that one can hope for at the level of identification with the elusive dancer is to gaze at her in the same way that she gazes at herself. This is, in my experience, a rare ability on the part of the dancer, the power to use the patron as a perfect mirror for precise, (auto)erotic poses. This is also, I suspect, a rather unusual ability on the part of the patron, to see what the dancer herself sees, to look at the stripper with a feminine connoisseurship. The narcissism here is overwhelming: the other is no longer an object, for now, in Rimbaud’s famous ungrammatical expression, “I is an other.” The idea of your self as subject and the other as object is undone by a projective desire to be desired by women for whom you yourself are attractive enough. This identificatory 6. Defenses of stripping as a historical art form appear oblivious to this dimension of the dance. Judith Lynne Hanna, a cultural anthropologist who has served as expert court witness in exotic dance cases, unreflectively views the stripper as aesthetic object: “Circular theater stages in erotic dance clubs allow patrons to move around and marvel at living sculpture, much as museumgoers observe a statue and just as countless faces look up at the promenading new Miss America” (Hanna 2001). It is unclear whether Hanna sees these ideal bodies as frozen (statues) or moving (promenading beauty queens), but it is clear that her description reduces dancers to fetishes that close off real desire—what would it mean to desire a statute, or, for that matter, Miss America?
STRIPTOPIA?
9
tie with the dancer places you on an insecure border between eros and suffering, at the line where pleasure, found in self-reflection, in the delicious awareness that one is not the passive and dismal creature upon which one reflects, spills over into the anguish of becoming an object, of being looked at fetishistically, the victim of what Paul Virilio aptly labels “objective tragedy” (1989, 22). Conversely alienating and enticing, strip culture fascinates the eye, parading before the patron sacred bodies, fit for worship and sending mixed signals of seduction and excommunication. Her self-absorption, her autoerotic coolness, is finally what makes us genuflect, with the divine thought that if we could just constitute ourselves once and for all as the stripper’s ultimate desire … Lamentably, the club itself is set up to disappoint the devout sacrificial lover. There are limits as to how far this erotic space can be further eroticized, and it is never only a matter of burly bouncers and pony-tailed managers policing patron and dancer behavior. Recently, a club DJ offered me some insight into the stakes of oversexualizing the dancer–patron relation. In response to the question why I never hear slower, sensual music like, say, Enigma or Love Spirals Downward, he replied, “We’ve got to keep the beats up, to 100 bpm plus, otherwise guys start thinking about their wives, their current girlfriends, their ex’s. My job is to keep the guys feeling happy.” While it sounds remarkably misogynist at first blush, the idea that thinking about one’s past or present significant other somehow obviates happiness seems to be more about the club’s enforcement of the fantasy of a new temporal order whereby a future “significant other” (i.e. a dancer as object of the customer’s desire) also obstructs happiness. To put it simply, from the club’s point of view, a dancer’s job is to frustrate. What better way to confine dancers to the role of tantalizing fantasy objects than to play songs that militate against any sensual affectivity? High-tempo music fosters the illusion that everyone is having a great time (it’s a non-stop party!), while attention is diverted away from the burdens of personal relationship. This illusion turns masochistic, which is not to say unhappy, when we, consciously or not, sense the impossibility of having a relationship with the dancers themselves. It is difficult to deny that there is relief, even traces of real satisfaction, here in the metronomically regular strip club, but pulsing through it are unexpectedly strong currents of anxiety. Infusing every moment of bliss are fantasies conspiring to bring down limits on happiness. In short, the pleasures of the strip club are ultimately bound up with the unpleasures they inevitably become. A note after visiting my favorite club where I spent an otherwise unremarkable evening with my then favorite dancer India: The double pleasure of the erotic dancer: control and the illusion of control at once, a brilliant, if monotonous, dialectic of power and powerlessness. The best dancers make you feel that you’re in control (you call her over, she’s dancing, smiling for you, mildly flirting with you) while all the time she’s in complete
10
UEBEL control, tempting you, knowing you can’t touch her where you want, that you desire her, and the extent of your ability to act on that desire is purely a function of money and not of any social or amatory graces. The best dancer makes you feel as though she only enjoys dancing for you. The song ends, however, and you are reminded that her enjoyment is a curious thing: the idea is that somehow her enjoyment is contagious—I can only enjoy if she does, and the more she does, the more I do.
“Nothing hurts like your mouth.” (Bush 1996) Strip culture presents us with a distinctive cultural theater in which masochism reveals itself to be as much a psychic strategy as a social one. To describe the masochistic logic of strip culture, however, is not to celebrate male masochism. It is simply untenable, given the social and political inequalities of the present social order, to exonerate the special disavowal of power always available to, and chiefly exercised by, those who have power in the first place.7 When the possession of power starts to give way to its continual disavowal, the immiseration of the powerless is increasingly derealized. The reasons why the explosion of “gentlemen’s clubs” in this country took place in the yuppified, and Rambo-movie-saturated, 1980s are not mysterious. The white manhood acquired under Reagan and Bush was, quoting Michael Kimmel: the compulsive masculinity of the schoolyard bully, defeating weaker foes such as Grenada and Panama, a defensive and restive manhood, of men who needed to demonstrate their masculinity at every opportunity. Men who feel powerful in their lives do not need to wear “power ties” or eat “power breakfasts” or “power lunches.” (1996, 292)
It is my contention that men rather quickly came to realize that power ties and power lunches do not enhance manliness. Masculinity predicated upon the constant demonstration of power is doomed to go limp, if only because it requires the constant stimulation of a world of subordinates and enemies who cannot be counted on to remain fixed in their places. A new strategy is required, where the giving up of the masculine position is made easier by identifying with, rather than trying to compete with or rule, the dominant woman. In this new erotic union, men, no longer required to act like men, recognize that “manhood can be a let-down, and male masochism [is a] paradoxical attempt to infuse more pleasure into it” (Phillips 1998, 104). As I have argued elsewhere, contemporary male masochism is a largely compensatory affair (Uebel 2002). Men who have internalized, however imperfectly, 30 plus years of the discourse and political effects of feminism, know it is now unacceptable to evince outright patriarchalism. So, the liberal 7. Recent feminist and queer theories of masochism, although not always compatible, are rightly critical of the failure on the part of some current theorists to acknowledge that masochism is an essentially male—gay and straight—prerogative (Modleski 1991, 135–163; Hart 1998, 86–123).
STRIPTOPIA?
11
male in particular finds himself in a difficult relation to culturally embedded patriarchy, a relation that would seem, quite simply, to call for an end to dominance, but in fact is politically viable only as a form of compensatory masochism, which, mainly at the level of fantasy, works continuously to reclaim and consolidate masculine hegemony. There is a strong sense in which the contemporary male is either unwilling or unable to assume the sadistic role Catharine MacKinnon and others have assigned to the masculine subject generally in a patriarchal society. This, however, is only to affirm that this same male can, through masochism, achieve the affectivity of dominance without having it linked to violence. The demonstration of masculine power is now twisted according to a masochistic logic: how much power you have is strictly a function of how much you can give up. Thus the lure of strip culture may be that it allows one to enter a fantasy world wherein differences between power and powerlessness crumble as submission and jouissance collapse into one another. Yet, it seems to me, any signs of utopia found in such a scenario are destined to fade quickly, and this form of masochistic practice becomes still another neon sign of crisis in contemporary masculine subjectivity.8 As I have proposed, to understand why men go to strip clubs one must consider their masochistic identifications with the erotic dancer and all that she offers for a moment that seems at once far too fleeting and far too exciting. My contention that masochism explains why men visit, and revisit, the strip scene is predicated upon a post-Freudian insight often ignored or forgotten: namely, that we describe a situation as masochistic not because it is painful and thus exciting, but because it is thrilling—too thrilling—and hence painful. Masochists of all stripes do not seek pain or suffering for its own sake; for them, unpleasure does not become pleasure—rather, they are defending against the possibility of pleasure becoming unpleasure. Masochists carefully manage pleasure so that it does not spill over into unpleasure. The fear of intensified pleasure, the fear of a world of boundless stimulation or, especially, as is so often noted in psychoanalytic case studies, of abrupt shock, drives the masochist to seek refuge in a world whose existential rhythms and repetitions excite, but only along what Wilhelm Reich describes (1949, 263) as a low, “non-climactic,” anal curve. With the proviso that they do not overstimulate, the masochist can safely play his erotic games. When excitement appears straightforward, as in the apparently uncomplex voyeuristic pleasures of strip clubs and mainstream pornography, there is little if any temptation to link such spectatorial thrill-seeking with the production of unpleasure or anxiety. We know, or think we know, what excites men in these scenes—naked women—but to link this sublime object of masculine desire with real anxiety, and hence with masochistic rather than sadistic pleasures, is not simply counterintuitive but in a certain sense politically risky, if not retrograde. 8. On masochism as symptom of masculine crisis in postwar American culture, see Savran (1998).
12
UEBEL
There are, of course, compelling psychological and phenomenological theories to account for why men might be made anxious by nakedness (and I will rehearse one or two later), but the main reason for shying away from such theories seems to be political: to understand the fantasies and pleasures of the dominant class (white men) is socially irrelevant when, systematically, women are being oppressed under the daily regimes of patriarchy. From the point of view of the subjugated woman, it simply does not matter whether the primary fantasy at work in the mind of the dominant male is fundamentally sadistic, masochistic, or a twisted combination of the two. Feminism—and here its radical forms have been the most insightful—reveals the extent to which sexual inequality and violence are perpetuated by systems of masculinist enjoyment, to the point where inequality becomes synonymous with the very enjoyment of sexuality. It furthermore seems an eminent condition of modernity that power tends to express itself sexually and to consolidate itself through jouissance. In the revolutionary writing of Dworkin and MacKinnon, pleasure and passion are never in themselves pathological, but are said to become so when distorted by sexual injustice and social alienation. There can be no pleasure, in their view, when it is contaminated by masculinist fantasies of domination. The existence of sexual inequity guarantees the degradation of the desire for pleasure and the pleasures of desire, and hence the ruin of the psychic and social well-being of both women and men. Without a revolution in intercourse, sexual justice will continue to be foiled by the elements of human fantasy tied to domination, submission, abstraction, objectification, and so on. Much of the so-called sex-positive critique of radical feminism, preoccupied with debating pornography’s significance, its social impact and sexual codes, misses the utopian drive of a revolutionary writer like Dworkin, who imagines a highly sexualized universe free from abstraction, cynicism, perversion. Such a utopic realm is, for Dworkin, based upon forms of “sexual passion outside identity … passion outside the control of the ego, which is the servant of routinized civilization” (1997, 26). “Skinless” sex, her term for this kind of self-less passion, constitutes a return to the “irreducibly human” (Dworkin 1997, 29), to what is beyond or prior to the culturally constituted self. “Society,” Dworkin writes, “interposes itself—by creating the necessity for identity, by making rules—between two humans, keeping them separate, even during intercourse” (1997, 23). The masochistic dimension to skinless sexuality can be overwhelming, for it involves a radical opening up of the self to the other, to the world, in such way that everything outside the self has a “merciless” contiguity (Dworkin 1997, 27). Touch, which for Dworkin is the essence of what it means to be human, to have knowledge, and to be part of a community, is precisely that which is usually denied in a strip club. In place of the self-negating eros of undefended contact another kind of eros, according to Dworkin, flourishes, one depending on the distance necessary for the violence of abstraction. Whereas Dworkin would not hesitate to
STRIPTOPIA?
13
equate this new kind of sadistic eros with strip culture, I would suggest that it is wrapped up in, and even partially softened by, its masochistic performance. The utopian strain of Dworkin’s argument—the idea that masochistic surrender of the armor of identity opens the way to knowledge and humanity—I find compelling, and although Dworkin herself would resist linking masochism to skinlessness, precisely because of masochism’s association with femininity under patriarchy,9 there does seem to me real value in analyzing just how masochism can be taken up as a strategy of power, identity, and community. Given the undeniably significant political reasons for thinking about erotic pleasure as a dimension of oppression, the masochistic strategy of empowerment through disempowerment merits special attention in order to understand the forms taken by oppression through pleasure. Strippers, in my experience, tend to have an acute understanding of sexual power and pleasure, so that for them the pairs sexual inequality/equality and sadism/masochism do not necessarily form violent hierarchies, but rather points on a reaching continuum of erotic relationality. They in fact experience power in terms of its fluctuation, its inherent reversibility, and their lives and jobs seem to dramatize this. As dancer Faith comments: In here [the club] I’m the master, the domme or mistress really, without the whip, and I dictate the mood and agenda for the customer. I preside over his pleasure, sometimes ruthlessly, but that doesn’t mean I can always control my own excitement. Outside the club, I’m not always the mistress, because there are personal and intimate situations where I don’t have all the power or I choose to give it up. (Personal interview 2003)
The strip club is a laboratory for the creation of power and for its dramatic relinquishment, a more or less sterile space in which dancers and customers can test the reality of their own social and libidinal limits along with those of the other, free from the messiness of the intimately personal. These experiments with power, performed repeatedly, convey the very essence of performativity: the interplay of teasing and submission “conjures up the contradictory nature of all performance, which strives to create the truth of illusion and unmask the illusion of truth” (Hart 1998, 68). Through the strip performance, truth and illusion vie with one another on the ambiguous field of flirtation. Flirting between dancer and customer undoes commitment to a single truth (e.g. the truth of a relationship and all the promises sustaining it); at the same time it holds out the illusions that promote the wish for more desiring. “It is inevitable,” Adam Phillips writes, 9. There is a tendency among feminist analyses of masochism to equate it with a lack of power, particularly women’s self-subordination under patriarchy. See, for example, Chancer (1998, 200–228). Given the complex psychodynamics and non-essentialist nature of masochism, this view is untenable.
14
UEBEL
that flirtation—the (consciously or unconsciously) calculated production of uncertainty—will be experienced at best as superficial and at worst as cruel. Flirtation as sadomasochism with a light touch is a modest expose´ of excitement as inextricable from tantalization; of desire as desire for a certain kind of torture, an enlivening torture, so to speak … The generosity of flirtation is in its implicit wish to sustain the life of desire; and often by blurring, or putting into question, the boundary between sex and sexualization. (1994, xvii–xviii)
Strip clubs are the spaces par excellence where the sexual and the sexualized become tantalizingly confused, and male patrons, by masochistically surrendering themselves as interchangeable objects, are attempting a solution to the inherent discomfort such confusion can generate. If seeking the reality of sex yields only an encounter with fantasies of the sexualized, just as seeking only fantasies reveals that they are indelibly marked with real sex, then one solution is to turn all desire into a kind of exquisite torture, which, while it enlivens the subject, making him keenly receptive to the world, also fixes him into the more or less enviable position of being the object of someone else’s flirtations. Flirtation suggests that sexual desire is always already in play, even while it must negate the relations that such desire might build. This is the sovereign power of the dancer as seductress, a power that, as Baudrillard argues, stems from her ability to “eclipse” any will or context. She cannot allow other relations to be established—even the most intimate, affectionate, amorous or sexual (particularly not the latter)—without breaking them … She constantly avoids all relations in which, at some given moment, the question of truth will be posed. (1990, 85)
Contrary to received opinion, dancers do not seduce with their naked bodies, not when they offer them up strictly for erotic consumption. I suggested earlier some reasons why this might be so—considering the stripping body as vitrified, admired more for its self-closure and self-pleasure, the way in which it impedes and then channels desire in new directions, than for its sheer eroticism—but there are phenomenological and psychological dimensions to the masculine response to nakedness that offer some clues as to why being in the presence of nude women is so imperative. Dworkin makes a provocative claim regarding female nakedness: it has the power to “unnerve” because it reminds men that they themselves are deeply uncomfortable with the experience of being naked as such. The fact that men do not attempt to avoid this anxiety by turning away from naked women suggests that they are coping with it in some other way. According to Dworkin, femininity can only be experienced within specific phenomenological frames: heterosexual men, although they are not alone, take a hard look at women through the protective lenses of abstraction and of fetishization. Experienced remotely, voyeuristically, the nakedness of women allows men to defend themselves against the unhappy reality of their own nakedness,
STRIPTOPIA?
15
against the loss of self-possession that nakedness signals:10 “men need women to survive their own nakedness” (Dworkin 1997, 33). Nude women thus shield against the self-absorption and loneliness into which men would fall if they did not view femininity as “the escape route … into reality,” where women themselves come to stand for “the world, connection … what is real, the physical, what is true outside [their] frenetic self-involvement” (Dworkin 1997, 33–34). Doubtless I appreciate the significance of Dworkin’s argument for reasons that she would not necessarily. Her argument about the male response to nakedness is intended to show how the sexism inherent in it leads to sadistic violence. Because men, she argues, are incapable of achieving a state of “skinless” identification without clinging to the power that comes from possessing an inviolable self or ego, they will resort to sadistic control over the other. I want to propose that, within the sexual dynamics of the strip scene, men, as Dworkin claims, do find nakedness unsettling on account of their own insecurities and insufficiencies, but these signs of masculine frailty do not herald violence. Instead, the sexism of the strip club—and there is plenty of it—resides in the masochistic appeal of feeling the violation of the sexist power defining maleness. Naked women are attractive to men because they represent a potential point of identification with subjection. The challenge of identifying with the dancer is the very secret of the male voyeur, even while, as Anita Phillips contends, men are protected against the full implications of such an identification.11 Visuality itself, she argues, protects men “with its insistence on a physical distance between the viewer and the viewed” (Phillips 1998, 98). The strip club is one space in which men can pay for that protection, enjoying the luxury to be made anxious, while masochistically surrendering in an act of identification with the naked dancer. However, what can look rather like benevolence, the generosity of masochistic submission, is almost never a political alignment with femininity. It was the arguably most brilliant theorist of masochism, Theodor Reik, who in his monumental Masochism in Modern Man laid bare the aggressive identificatory logic of masochism, a logic based on reversing the simple ethical proposition “Give what you would wish to receive.” Male identification with the feminine position, says Reik (1941, 240), signals precisely the submissive position in which the woman would like to be seen. Masochistic men, in other words, receive what they would wish to give, and in this way obviate their will to domination. 10. Bataille makes a similar point about the way “stripping naked” undoes “the possession of a recognised and stable identity” (1986, 17–18). This dispossession of the (we assume masculine) self, Bataille argues, is symbolic of sacrifice and even a simulacrum for the act of killing. 11. Phillips’s argument here is about masochistic male identifications with pornography: contra the usual reading, it is claimed that men identify with women in a position of objective powerlessness. This claim is corroborated by others (Soble 1986, Kaite 1995). Soble provocatively suggests here that all pornography can be understood in terms of “a revolt against the male sex role” (1986, 84, n. 81). Kaite suggests that the porn consumer is one who “flaunts his identification” with a female body that offers simultaneously castratedness and phallicity (1995, 59–60).
16
UEBEL
Figure 1. Strip club currency, purchased with a credit card.
Men, as a rule, do not become aggressive in the presence of nude women in a strip club, but discover the pleasure values of wrapping any pre-existing antifeminist aggression in the cloak of masochism. This is precisely what makes this cultural space remarkable: despite how firmly the club is predicated upon sexism (not to mention its contenders, racism and ageism), men are paying for, and sometimes addicted to, the opportunity to deny that sexism. Interestingly, as I have discovered in many interviews with dancers, this ruse very rarely fools them. Dancers describe a typical approach made by a patron that involves presenting himself, by way of contrast to other patrons, as a kind of “sensitive guy” who refuses to gawk and who treats the dancer with the utmost respect—right up to the point that he proposes that they get together in his hotel room after her shift.12 And while many dancers will in fact admit, if pressed, that their opinions about men and masculine sexual expression have deteriorated since they started dancing, there is also a smaller number who, in seeing their role as therapeutic, wish to support men and their impaired masculinity. These dancers try to effect a kind of talking cure that aims at healing narcissistic wounds of the kind, for example, that might have come from recent divorce or widowerhood or chronic social awkwardness. The men who pay for this rudimentary therapy (note the club scrip in Figure 1), opting for an interpersonal experience rather than a voyeuristic one, view the strip club as a safe zone where their damaged manhood is not a social liability. Such dancer–patron interaction opens up the possibility of masochistically accommodating, if not celebrating, a masculinity liberated from the conventions of machismo. 12. I would propose here the category of the “sensitive guy,” who makes up a significant subgroup of the major type of club patron, “the detached looker,” the latter comprising, according to Erickson and Tewksbury, 56% of all customers. Men in this majority group present themselves as indifferent to the nudity surrounding them. They defeat their wish to look at nudity, and thereby avoid demeaning women, while “their demeanor remains passive” (Erickson and Tewksbury 2000, 285). “Sensitive guys” draw attention to their detachment, while they focus on one dancer.
STRIPTOPIA?
17
While this brand of therapeutic masochism is not nearly as radical as the ecstatic experience of masculinity untethered from the limits of power, which for Leo Bersani derives from nothing less than “the masochistic thrill of being invaded by a world we have not yet learned to master” (1995, 100),13 it is nonetheless a genuine, if momentary, reprieve from the expectations governing masculinism. The sexual inequality of this relation, whereby dancers are cast into the traditional role of nurturing care-giver, is in part neutralized by the submissiveness of the men,14 on one hand, and the compassion of the women, on the other, a compassion, as peepshow dancer Tawnya Dudash stresses, that “form[s] the basis of our resistance to socially accepted and repressive ideologies surrounding sexuality” (1997, 115). The political charge of strip-culture intimacy, however, does not always prevent it from degenerating into what Masud Khan appositely terms “auto-erotism a` deux” (1979, 24). Whereas I suggested earlier that a dancer’s libidinal relation is always with herself first, the same would seem to hold true for the patron whose primary erotic energy is self-directed—for example, through the identificatory fantasies structuring masochism and autoerotism. Thus, Bersani is almost certainly right to identify the psychic promise of masochistic surrender with its inherent anticommunitarian impulse,15 although this theory should not militate against the ramifications of the erotic “communication” that arguably supplies the strip club’s raison d’eˆtre. It is in their brilliant reading of the erotically inviting paintings of the baroque artist Michelangelo Caravaggio that Bersani and Dutoit theorize erotic address as soliciting a kind of intimacy that has nothing to do with collapsing the distance between persons, but rather with setting itself up so that it can blocked with a secret. In this way, the erotic subject “enjoys narcissistically a secret … [she] performs” (1998, 9). This secret is the workings of power and powerlessness captured in the abbreviation S/M (a neologism, incidentally, created by Alfred Kinsey to keep his sexual investigations secretive when he and his team discussed their research in public, for example, over lunch in a diner). Admittedly, few patrons are clued in to this secret. However, my argument about the dynamics of control and submission within strip culture has been less about what men know, or think they know, than about the operations of desire and pleasure conditioning their experience. And I do think there is a utopic dimension to this experience, if precisely because what is finally so compelling about the strip club, even for the crusty veteran, are the possibilities it tantalizingly markets, the promises it ambiguously holds out. 13. Indeed, Bersani is quite clear about therapeutic masochism amounting to nothing more than a “nonhypocritical acceptance of power as it is already structured” (1995, 85, see 83–91). 14. Here, male passivity seems to manifest a wish, conscious or unconscious, to be a little boy, rather than a woman, with either wish exemplifying the Freudian notion of “feminine masochism” (Freud 1961, 161–163). 15. For Bersani, masturbation is the primal moment in which a lesson in the rhythms of power and powerlessness is instilled, in so far as masturbation is an act of control indissociable from loss of control (see 1995, 103).
18
UEBEL
If the allure of strip clubs was merely the flesh parade they so radiantly stage, then such places would have become obsolete long ago. University of Kentucky
References Andre´, S. 1999. Otherness of the body. In What does a woman want? Translated by S. Fairfield. 251–75. New York: Other Press. Bataille, G. 1986. Erotism: Death and sensuality. Translated by M. Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights. Baudrillard, J. 1990. Seduction. Translated by B. Singer. New York: St Martin’s. ———. 1993. The body, or the mass grave of signs. In Symbolic exchange and death. Translated by Iain Hamilton. 101–24. London: Sage. Ben-Shitta, S. 1992. Susan of Screw interview with Sophie of Mentertainment, part I. Mentertainment (June/July):36. Bersani, L. 1995. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bersani, L., and U. Dutoit. 1998. Caravaggio’s secrets. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 17. Bush. 1996. Mouth. Razorblade suitcase. Santa Monica, CA: Trauma/Interscope. Chancer, L. S. 1998. Reconcilable differences: Confronting beauty, pornography, and the future of feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clavreul, J. 1980. The perverse couple. In Returning to Freud: Clinical psychoanalysis in the school of Lacan, edited by S. Schneiderman. 215–33. New Haven: Yale Univesity Press. Coen, S. J. 1998. Sadomasochistic excitement: Character disorder and perversion. In Masochism: Current psychoanalytic perspectives, Edited by R. A. Glick and D. I. Meyers. 43–59. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Deleuze, G. 1989. Coldness and cruelty. In Coldness and cruelty/Venus in furs, edited by G. Deleuze and L. von Sacher-Masoch. Translated by Jean McNeil. 9–138. New York: Zone. Dudash, T. 1997. Peepshow feminism. In Whores and other feminists, edited by J. Nagle. 98–118. New York: Routledge. Dworkin, A. 1997. Intercourse. 2nd ed. New York: Free Press. Erickson, J. D., and R. Tewksbury. 2000. The ‘gentlemen’ in the club: A typology of strip club patrons. Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21:271–93. Freud, S. 1961. The economic problem of masochism (1924). Vol. 19, The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Translated and edited by J. Strachey, et al. 159–70. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis. Hanna, J. L. 2001. More than meets the eye: A cultural anthropologist responds to recent threats against nude dancing. Spectator Magazine 1191 (27 August) [retrieved 1 January 2003]. Available from http://www.spectator.net/1191/pages/1191_hanna.html; INTERNET. Hart, L. 1998. Between the body and the flesh: Performing sadomasochism. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaite, B. 1995. Pornography and difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kay, K. 1999. Naked but unseen: Sex and labor conflict in San Francisco’s adult entertainment theaters. Sexuality and Culture 3: 39–67. Khan, M. M. R. 1979. Alienation in perversions. London: Hogarth. Kimmel, M. 1996. Manhood in America: A cultural history. New York: Free Press. Kundera, M. 1999. The book of laughter and forgetting. Translated by A. Asher. New York: Harper. Lacan, J. 1966. Kant avec Sade. In Ecrits. 765–90. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
STRIPTOPIA?
19
———. 1978. Seminar XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964). Translated as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis by A. Sheridan, and edited by J-A Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, pg. 8. ———. 1998. Seminar XX: Encore (1972–73). Translated as On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge by B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton. Liepe-Levinson, K. 1998. Striptease: Desire, mimetic jeopardy, and performing spectators. The Drama Review 42:9–37. Modleski, T. 1991. Feminism without men: Culture and criticism in a “postfeminist” age. New York: Routledge. Phillips, Adam. 1994. On flirtation: Psychoanalytic essays on the uncommitted life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Philips, Anita. 1998. A defence of masochism. London: Faber & Faber. Reich, W. 1949. The masochistic character. In Character-analysis. Translated by T. P. Wolfe. 208–47. New York: Orgone Institute Press. Reik, T. 1941. Masochism in modern man. Translated by M. H. Biegel and G. M. Kurth. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Co. Sartre, J.-P. 1950. Baudelaire. Translated by M. Turnell. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions. Savran, D. 1998. Taking it like a man: White masculinity, masochism, and contemporary American culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Soble, A. 1986. Pornography: Marxism, feminism, and the future of sexuality. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sylvia. 2002. The psychology of the tease. Spectator Magazine 1216 (21 January) [retrieved 1 January 2003]. available from http://www.spectator.net/1216/pages/ 1216_sylvia.html; INTERNET. Uebel, M. 2002. Masochism in America. American Literary History 14 (2):389–411. ———. 2003. Personal interview with Faith. 21 February. Virilio, P. 1989. War and cinema: The logistics of perception. Translated by P. Camiller. New York: Verso.
