Customer Reviews

Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping (Live Girls)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

At first, I enjoyed the engaging conversational style of the author and could identify with many of her thoughts on the world around her. But frankly, I had to force myself to finish the last two sections of the book. Why?

Basically, because this is a book by yet another middle-class white girl from a good family who has an education and danced at a nice peep-show for a single year and decided that it just totally screwed up her life. So much so that she had to go back and try it again.

In her struggles for finding her motivation, she overlooks the main reason of why 99% of us [take our clothes off]: money, pure and simple. Trying to find the deeper meaning in using stereotyped ... roles to her advantage in her job, she twists herself into whiny knots about it all. For Pete's sake, she danced at a rather nice peep-show, not a Tijuana trick bar, and she never had to really interact with her customers if she didn't want to. Another minus is that she can't seem to get out of bad relationships, (like most women, really), or figure out what she wants in life (common to most people, I imagine). She also reports in exhaustive detail about the .../dancers she hangs out with. She managed to pick girlfriends who were screwed up as well, which is probably why they had so much free time to socialize with each other.

Overall, this book tells a lot about the Lusty Lady in Seattle, ... Other than her Lusty Lady stories, she just went into a lot of detail about her and her friends' lives (more than you'll ever wish to know) and pondered the meaning of it all.

She brought up some good points about men, women, [pysical activity] and the balance of power between the sexes, but mostly ignored money issues ...For some reason, she is continually confounded by the whole idea of stage names. She spent a lot of time focused on her own good looks, but never seemed to try and put herself in the shoes of a women who wasn't so good-looking and how her perception of the world might be changed. For a former Reuters reporter, her refusal to pull her head out ... and try to take an objective step back is quite amazing.

I give this book 3 stars because I made it ¾ of the way through before I was just sick of her. I'm still waiting for a realistic [dancer] book, preferably from a girl who looks at this as a job, not a life-altering event, and then moves on with her life. Once you hang up those platforms, babe, they should stay hung up.

This is probably one of the worst stipping books I've read simply because it doesn't include actual stripping (other than some limited and misleading chapters at the end). Peep show booths are one aspect of sex work but it is erronous to equate it with stripping (one you start naked, the other you perform a tease, the first you rarely have contact with costumers, the second you have intensive contact with customers, at the Lusty Lady you can earn an hourly wage, most strippers have to hustle and their income is always in flux, etc).

I strip in Seattle at an actual strip club. I know a few who work at the Lusty Lady and not a one refers to herself as a "stripper." Aside from that issue, the author should never have been in sex work in the first place. One of the primary rules is that you must be able to diferentiate between your work and your personal life. If you cannot, then you should not do it. The author did not follow common sense and is left confused and feels a need to justify her one year experience.

From a feminist aspect, I felt she failed to accurately represent the dynamic between a dancer and a customer (probably because her experience in that is very limited considering she sits there naked and the exchange starts for her after they have already paid). Also, I receive a fair amount of couples and female customers which are completely absent in her experiences and so in her reasoning.

Her explanations of fellow peep show workers are those that also seem to have difficulty seperating work from personal life (perhaps they attracted each other in friendship because other workers would have been negative or dismissive of such concerns).

I'm hesitant to call them dancers. Dancing is physically exausting (ever try to climb a pole of slick metal and hang upside down?). Also, dancing is meant as a tease, you push someone in an erotic manner but never permit them release. Masterbating alters the dynamic and is a clear difference between peep show booths and stripping (in this, I'm assuming US laws and "clean" dancers."

Overall, it's fine if you want to read a warning for what happens when you aren't emotionally capable of doing sex work and care to see someone trying to come to terms with it years later.

This is a good book, well worth your time and money. The author's primary motivation for writing the book (imho) is to create an educational, inside look at the strip club world, especially attempting to teach readers that the subculture of stripping/dancing is populated by many independent, intelligent, and multi-talented women. I'm not sure that this will be enough of a revelation to keep the average reader fully engrossed in the theme of the book, but if it helps to eliminate a blanket generalization of the dancer as a defective or ignoramus, the book will have succeeded in a literary, if not monetary sense. It's hard to imagine this book becoming a big seller, because the widespread preconceptions about women who dance in the sex industry for money is a immediate turn-off for many. If you take the plunge, though, you'll find a well written book that attempts to examine the motivation of women who choose this line of work, however temporarily. The author is insightful, and explores both the positive and negative aspects of dancing in a fair, objective light.

The main message as a man that I would take from this book is this: Except in the rarest of circumstances, you are being sold an illusion at a rather high price. Dabble in the world of flesh if you must, but examine your own reasons as to why you do so in an entirely non-judgmental, non-moralistic manner. At the end of the day, virtually nothing you will have seen is at all real, and the quest to find otherwise may leave you no wiser and considerably poorer. Dancers can be wonderful therapists and very special people.....but you will never be any closer to them than your wallet allows.....and that is the wistful yet disappointing truth. (And, in the end, on their side of the glass, it is generally no better for them to take your money for a variety of entrapping or mercenary reasons....and ultimately, no more fulfilling.)

Author Elisabeth Eaves in the prologue of "Bare" tells us she wants to understand her past experience as a peep-show dancer. The event haunts her for answers about her motives and also larger issues such as the status of women's sexuality within society. Eaves therefore quits her reporter position to return to the stage once again to achieve the aforementioned goal. Besides drawing from her own experiences, she also intimately chronicles the lives of four other sex workers/friends.

As a memoir it works; Eaves writes with ease as if talking to an old friend over a long phone call. However, the author comes up bare on any sociological depth. Prurient interests will be satisfied; there are plenty of detailed scenes about the daily work life of affording men a sexual release. But one is not closer to a lucid view on women's sexuality at the end of the book. "Bare" would be an ideal reading assignment for an introductory women's studies course or a 101-sociology class. Stereotypical notions about strippers-being stupid, abused or druggies-are shown to be inaccurate, the women showcased are far more complex, often having college degrees and considering themselves as "feminist strippers."

Eaves' narration effectively portrays the ladies with a bitter-truth honesty and shows how they " . . . become subservient to cash." We helplessly watch the women's lives slowly over time become increasingly used more instead of using the profession to garner large amounts of money to pay for college, start a business, enjoy free time and so on. Eaves states, "In the end I decided that all sexuality for profit was insidious. Sooner or later, the effect of money would turn sex into something dishonest, and I didn't want that to happen to me." But for the majority of these women it is too late as their life is tainted with ruined relationships, broken family ties, and psychological damage.

Bohdan Kot

I picked up this book after reading several of Eaves' travel articles. It's a breath of fresh air, written in a very deadpan style that works well for the subject. Strippers, and the sex industry in general, inspire very heated and visceral feelings, whether they be positive or negative. (When my sister worked briefly as a stripper, I had a very emotional, negative reaction.) The cool style of this book walks the fine line between cheerleading for the business and slamming it. It lets the reader explore things as though they were in a photograph.

Excellent story that reads half like a page-turning novel and half like an interesting academic investigation. Eaves is able to examine her motives impartially, which is an almost impossible task, up until right before the end. The reader feels the same mix of intrigue, temptation, and disgust that stripping and sex-for-money is all about.

Are strippers powerful because they extract money from weak men or are they contributing to societal stereotypes that have always placed women well below men? The answer, confusingly, is YES.

People unfamiliar with the world of adult entertainment may be surprised at how eloquent a writer a woman in this kind of occupation could be. Given her smarts, why didn't this "nice girl from a good family" fund her education with a scholarship??

The author leaves that, and other many questions unanswered. With her high degree of self-awareness (pretty evident in the narrative) the reader is left unfulfilled. Whatever insights we have into her life come across as "teasers", we catch a glimpse, but do not get the whole story. But that again, is the underlying mindset required of - and fostered by - her job.

Eaves' voice comes across as curiously flat and detached. It is almost as if she is watching herself physically and psychologically from an out-of-the body vantage point. This provokes my curiosity. Does one need to be detached from the sordid aspects of this job all the while faking intimacy, in order to withstand this kind of life?


The best aspect of her book is her astute take on the complex web of sexual interaction between men and women. She points out the furtiveness and the hypocrisy life as either purveyor or supplier of erotic arts entails. She ruminates on the seemingly insatiable male apetite for women's bodies and even after all the experience she has had, still cannot come to grips with this facet of the male psyche. And she lays out the complex dance of deceit both men and women carry out in the exchange of delusion for currency.

The book itself is titillating as the author describes her activities and explores the depths of her personal limitations. But I began to feel as though I were reading the journal of a completely self-absorbed narcissist. Overall, the book seems to elicit a sort of naïve amoral tolerance toward the sex industry.

The best thing about this book is that it doesn't offer any easy, pat answers about stripping or sexuality. I greatly enjoyed it because it explores sexual politics in a way you don't see done very often. It's not just about women trading money for a nude dance. It's about all the other things that they, and many women, trade on a day to day basis. It's still all too common for women out in the 'real' (ie, non-peep show) world to go around calculating what their 'worth' is. The author shows that. And refreshingly, despite being thought-provoking, Bare also manages to be a fun, breezy read.

After reading her opinion piece in the NY Times I decided to read the book (fortunately my suite-mate had a copy, thank you Clara!!) I am more than halfway through the book right now and find that it is enlightening. What I've learned is something that I think we tend to deny when we think about the stripping business-- that it is a business. It is not about sex, it is about selling sex, or selling the idea of sex and all that is wrapped up with it (power, attractiveness, etc.) I think that this might bother men who want to feel like the women in these clubs truly fawn over them (see below). I found that Eaves is not full of herself at all in the book-- she just trats it like a business-- if anything she intellectualizes it (perhaps too much at times, I wish she would talk more about her and other dancers feelings). She writes about her own experience but also follows other dancers around-- in these sections she doesn't talk about herself at all, she is more like a reporter.

Nevertheless, the book has been a fascinating read thus far.