women's work
"And it got late and someone turned on some vintage disco, and all the people young enough never to’ve heard these songs the first time round got up and danced. Funky Town, The Freak Is Chic and Upside Down… the songs that played in topless clubs in the late 70′s while these men were getting famous. While me and my friends, the girls, were paying for our rent and shows and exploring “issues of our sexuality” by shaking to them all night long in topless bars."
This quote has been an object of meditation for me since I first read it in Chris Kraus' I Love Dick a couple of years ago. I think of it often in terms of "the first-person industrial complex," the ways that young women are encouraged to make work out of their lives and then pilloried for it; the ways that being a young woman sort of demands that you make work out of your life, or at least that you work the hell through it. To be engaged with your feminism is to be constantly in the process of interrogating your self, your sex, your relationship to your body and that body's relationship to the world, and it's good, I mean, I think it's good for us, but also it's exhausting. I wish more men were required to do it and I wish women were required to do less of it, the labor of refiguring gender relations on micro and macro scales.
Sometimes it's not that deep though. Sometimes I'm just at a an actual strip club, watching women dance.
My first, which I went to years before I'd ever even heard of I Love Dick, was near a freeway overpass somewhere in west LA, a literal low point slouched under Culver City's antiseptic high rises. I was eighteen, meeting a bunch of girlfriends; I arrived alone and the bouncers very nearly refused to let me in because I looked so young-- and so unlikely, I think now. In Los Angeles you can't serve alcohol in the same room as a naked woman; this meant that the places my friends and I could go were 18+ and dry, which, ha ha, it turns out are the really serious ones: where men do not come with even the pretense of having drink and hanging out, but instead for the sole, specific purpose of getting to see a woman take her clothes off, and pretend she's doing it for them. They must have had an actual changing room but the dancers were so used to having the run of the place that they were all touching up their makeup in the bathroom. They were very sweet to us, of course.
Now I go to Jumbo's and Cheetahs, not often but regularly enough: eastside bikini bars where no one gets fully naked and I can drink cold cheap beer and marvel at pole tricks, tip everyone, tip extra when the women dance to a song I like-- Marilyn Manson's The Dope Show, or my high school classmate Banks' track Begging for Thread. I bring male friends who identify as feminist and watch them squirm under the weight of their wokeness, act like they've never watched porn.
I like these places. I like Jumbo's minimalist seediness and Cheetahs' mirrors-and-neon 80's opulence. I like watching women seven feet tall in their heels and untouchable on the stage: the ease and elegance of their bodies in motion, swimming through air, flipping upside down to stand on the ceiling. I like the way their skin looks, tight and smooth as velvet under the lights.
And part of me likes imagining I could be one of them: that I could get a man to pay to watch me move. Is that fucked up? I don't think so, actually, or not fucked up in the ways it seems on the surface. In the first place, I like the idea that I could make money with the resources I have at hand, that all the nights I've spent sitting around in my underwear drinking beer provide the kind of sight so potentially riling that we've placed legal limits on men's access to it. (I'm aware that these women don't get paid to sit around, exactly. If I had an audience I'd probably spice it up a little bit?)
But also isn't that ultimately what femininity properly performed is supposed to bring you? Men who will pay for you-- for the privilege of your company, for your drinks and your dinners. A man who will pay for the wedding: ultimate access. Is it any wonder that I watch men throw dollar bills at women on stage and the lizard part of my brain reads it as a sign of respect and correctness, that I never understand why people denigrate strippers-- who seem, to me, to be doing exactly what a woman is supposed to do? To look beautiful, to attract attention, to make men pull out their wallets. To suggest the pleasure of touching them but never allow it. To disappear off stage when the show is over: to be public only when you are giving the sight of yourself to someone else, when you are made up, and ready to put on a smile and perform.
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I got to sit down with one of my favorite dancers recently, Cheetahs' mohawked & delightful Malice, and chat with her about her clothing line, Malicious Creatures. She showed up to a random grody Hollywood Starbucks in full makeup and a pair of studded gloves and proceeded to be as kind and lovely and generous as you can possibly imagine so now of course I love her more than ever. She wants to run a club of her own someday and I want to get rich so I can fund the fuck out of it.
This Tinyletter was supposed to go out on Friday morning, but got flagged by Tinyletter's abuse prevention because it contained "keywords," LOL, wonder what those were. If it had I would have told you to come see me read old Hanson fan fiction on-stage at Mortified Saturday night; that time has passed, obviously, but you can still read some very humiliating excerpts on Twitter here.
Last week I also wrote a follow-up to my piece about not being able to get into the Kylie Jenner Store in Los Angeles to advise you on how you can try to get into the Kylie Jenner Store in New York, and what you might want to buy while you're there. (I repeat my plea for a benefactor to hook me up with a TALENT shirt.)
Finally, Kirkus wrote a very kind review of my second book, GRACE AND THE FEVER, which is about the fun kind of conspiracy theories-- the boyband kind. You can pre-order yourself a copy! If you want!