G-strings and Ph.D.s

Katherine Frank stripped, interviewed her customers and then wrote a thesis about male desire.

By Virginia Vitzthum

Jun 11, 2003 | Anthropologist Katherine Frank spent six years stripping and interviewing 30 of her regular customers to research her book "G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire." Adapted from her Ph.D. dissertation, it's an academic yet accessible exploration of the exchange between the naked lady on the platform and the man who keeps returning to tuck money in her garter.

Frank discusses with equal ease the bounce/rump-shaker move and the self-reflexive nature of the post-tourist, and her experience reflects less mind-body dissociation than one might expect. She created a set she calls her Ode to Baudrillard at one of the clubs, stripping off layers to songs (one from "The Matrix" and one by White Zombie) that reference the philosopher who argues that reality -- sorry, "reality" -- has become indistinguishable from its representations, or simulacra. (Had she not retired to academia, I would suggest that Frank add Hole's "Doll Parts" with its Baudrillardian refrain, "I fake it so real I am beyond fake.")

Frank worked in several clubs in a Southeastern city she calls Laurelton, a mecca for strip club enthusiasts. In the huge, upscale, mostly white Diamond Dolls, 200 to 300 "girls" danced on stages and moved through the crowd selling $10 table dances to individual customers. Upstairs were private rooms that cost between $100 and $500 an hour and $200 an hour for dancers. Celebrities would often go straight upstairs, and rumors flew about orgies in there -- rumors, Frank points out, that were neither true nor squelched. She also worked at Tina's Revue, a smaller, cheaper, mixed-race club where the fantasized activities were drug dealing and prostitution. In both places, men could and often did pay dancers to sit and talk with them.

Among Frank's well-argued conclusions are that the "touristic gaze" is more relevant to the strip club experience than the "male gaze." The strip bar isn't home or work; it's a place where men can vacation either as high rollers or bold explorers of a seedy underclass -- without any risk. She also found that men were obsessed with the authenticity of their interactions with the dancers ("that guy over there is deluded, but she really does like me"). The dancers exploited their customers' longing for "realness" by giving fake real names and fake home phones (cellphones devoted to regulars who considered themselves friends). And in a fascinating chapter called "The Crowded Bedroom: Marriage, Monogamy, and Fantasy," Frank counters the charge that strip bars erode men's abilities to achieve intimacy with a girlfriend or wife and argues that the strip club forays actually held together the marriages of many of her interview subjects. Frank spoke to Salon from her home in Virginia.

Your book is incredibly sympathetic, in contrast to things I've heard about strippers hating men. How did your feelings about men change during the six years you worked in the clubs?

I think I became much more sympathetic. When I was an undergraduate I was an anti-pornography feminist. I read Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon and thought they had some good points. But talking to the guys in the strip clubs, I realized that they were damaged by the sexist culture, too. They felt repellent, that their wives and girlfriends could never accept their desires and that they could never ask advice about sex because they were supposed to somehow know everything. These guys were struggling with how to deal with what they saw as women's conflicting demands for both traditional masculine traits and more emotional presence. They were also confused by women's desire to be called beautiful but not be objectified.

That said, I also came to appreciate that men still have so much privilege and they should realize it. Their stigma for going to the club is nothing like the stripper who's trying to get her next job and can't say what she's been doing for the past four years. Dancers make a lot of money compared to women working in some other low-skilled occupations, but they are downwardly mobile: Women can't do this much past their mid-30s.

The man may think he's giving money to this woman who's "captured his heart" so she's got the power, but it's entertainment money to him. Sometimes a guy will spend $500 on a dancer: I can't imagine having that kind of money to spend on top of rent, groceries and bills.

How did you become a stripper?

I started working for liquor promoters when I was 24 to pay for grad school. Have you ever seen the Bud Girls? We were like that: We wore skimpy outfits and we'd go out in teams to different bars and sell shots. We did some promotions in stripper bars and I started talking to strippers and liquor models about body image and identification and decided to study that in school. As an anthropologist, I was interested in doing ethnography -- not writing about people from a detached stance but actually becoming a part of what I wanted to study -- so I started working as a dancer in an upscale club. I realized quickly that the women were doing it for the money, so I turned my questions to the customers.

Did you worry about the stigma?

It was a risky project. Other academics were saying things like, "Are you ever going to get a job if you take a job as a dancer?" But I think the timing was right; a few people had come out but nothing like it is now.

The ivory tower has been stormed by sex workers since then?

It's certainly more accepted now. A book came out while I was in grad school called "Whores and Other Feminists"; a lot of the writers were grad students and other public intellectuals and they'd worked in the sex industry. During the late '90s, it still felt like doing this project was going to expose me to some judgment and stigma. [Frank is now a Social Science Research Council sexuality research fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in the department of sociology and has taught at several other colleges.]

How did stripping affect your body image?

I had really positive experiences dancing. I learned that men have a much more varied perception of what sort of bodies are beautiful or sexy than a lot of women think they do. The upper-tier clubs had less variety than the lower-tier clubs. But even in the upscale clubs, you'll see more variety of shapes and sizes than you'd see in a Cosmo or a Maxim. I had stereotyped men as wanting something narrow, when in fact they have a wide variety of tastes.

Really? When I went to a strip club, the dancers all looked generically flawless.

If only a black light could follow me around everywhere! Those lights make you look tan, they make your skin look perfect, hide your cellulite and the red bumps from shaving your pubic hair.

In the dressing room you'd see what people really looked like. But yeah, there are some parameters: Youth is a big thing, and the short-haired girls quickly realized they had to wear long wigs to get any tips.

What kind of money did you make?

I've made over $1,000 in a night, and I know dancers who made over $3,000, but both of those figures are way above average. The busier clubs you work in, the more expensive dances are, the more you're going to make. But I could never work more than four nights a week because it's physically really hard. You're in high heels, it's late, it's smoky. It's a working-class job, hard labor. You're wearing a nice dress instead of coming home covered in ketchup, but you're still using your body in a difficult job.

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