Step One
Live (Nearly) Nude Girls
Most people think that strippers are hot because they have perfect, surgically created cookie-cutter bodies. The fact is that dancers, like "real" women, come in all shapes and sizes: top-heavy, bottom-heavy, top- and bottom-heavy, muscular, toned, and even doughy. Some strippers' faces are beautiful, some cute, and some have the same random noses or recessive chins that other women have. Most are tan, some are pale. Some have long hair, some short. All but the smallest minority have cellulite and stretch marks somewhere on their bodies. If strippers are so much like ordinary women, then, why does everyone think they're so hot?
The truth is, what really makes a stripper hot is simply her willingness to get naked for you. It's that spark, that moment of utter abandon when a stripper begins her dance, that makes her absolutely, smoking hot. Contained within that spark, that instant, is a sense of complete self-confidence and self-possession. A total owning of her sexuality and power that says, Sit back, Sparky, Mama's taking you for a ride.
So why is it that some women, like strippers, are totally okay letting complete strangers see them nearly naked, while the rest of us cringe at the thought? Where does a stripper's self-confidence come from?
This one's easy: A dancer's self-confidence comes from having a deep level of comfort with her body that ordinary women don't have. The real question is, why don't ordinary women have the same deep level of comfort with their bodies that dancers do?
To really understand how some stripping experience boosts your self-confidence, you really have to understand that strippers are strictly a product of their environment. Dancers are made, not born. No woman has ever decided to dance because she was so painfully hot that she felt duty-bound to show it to any man willing to pay a small fee. No woman has ever become a dancer because she was just too sexy or smokin' to do anything else. Dancers are comfortable being seen naked because for us it's the norm. We're a product of our culture, just like you.
Culture Club
In a way it's a good thing that most of us don't like to be seen naked, because in the United States, public nudity is not only frowned upon, it's (usually) downright illegal. You can get fined or even arrested for nude sunbathing in your own backyard. If the law is this hard on your behavior on your own private property, you can well imagine how much more strict it is if you attempt to get naked anywhere else--the sidewalk or the grocery store, for instance. Actually, a few years ago a group of women sued New York State after being arrested for walking around topless at a festival in Rochester. The women, who called themselves the Topfree Seven, argued that men walk around topless all the time without getting thrown in jail, and that women ought to be given the same rights. The court agreed, and now, just so you know, in case you want to, it is perfectly legal for a woman to sunbathe in Central Park, eat at an outdoor cafe, and stroll the city streets wearing nothing on top but a whole lot of sunscreen. As of this writing, no one has taken New York City up on its timely recognition of gender equality by actually doing any of this. Why? Well, it's just weird. Can you imagine being the only woman in a city of eight million people walking around with your boobs just out there for anyone to see? You window-shopping, while others politely pretend not to look at you? It's kind of horrible--a lot like those omigod-I'm-giving-a-presentation-and-I-don't-have-any-pants-on dreams that plague all of us from time to time.
Now imagine that, for some reason, walking around topless in New York City became all the rage, and that instead of spending thousands of dollars on knockoffs of what Carrie from Sex and the City wore last season, all the annoying fashionistas decided that nothing was quite as chic as nothing at all. Big boobs, little boobs, perky boobs, saggy boobs, pretty boobs, ugly boobs, all just swinging around. At first it'd be a complete shock. Then, after a while, it'd become the norm. Just like you'd expect to see topless women on the beaches of Saint-Tropez and South America, you'd come to expect to see topless women on the subway in New York City. No one would think twice about it.
As strange as it sounds, this is what a strip club is like. It's an alternate universe. Not quite Bizarro World, but something like it. And actually this bizarre parallel universe does exist. It's called . . . Europe.
Nothing drives home the acute differences between American women's and European women's attitudes toward nudity more than working at a strip club. Most clubs have women from all over the world who work as dancers--Armenian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, Georgian, Israeli, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, and Russian, to name just a few. Of course, every woman comes to dancing for her own individual reasons, but it's interesting to note that most European women have no complex nudity issues or internal debates about right/wrong, good/bad, or sinner/saint. Regardless of their religious beliefs or upbringing, European women tend to have fewer issues with public nudity or, more importantly, their own. They just come in, work hard, and go home. The point I'm making here is that our attitudes about nudity are largely influenced by our culture, and that a strip club has its own unique culture that enables even the most prudish women to open up and feel comfortable nekkid.
When you break it down, there are five important ways the strip club makes the stripper:
1. All Nude, All the Time
Okay. I need to make a clarification right here. While it's true that some strip clubs do feature all-nude dancers, the club where I work does not. I do not and have not ever danced completely nude. Oh, well, except when I've just gotton out of the shower and my husband and two-year-old aren't around. And in that case, yes, I do dance completely nude sometimes. Anyway, in this chapter and throughout this book, when I say nude or naked, I'm really talking about being nearly naked--that is, wearing a G-string, high heels, and a garter. Alrighty, then. Moving on.
The first and most important reason why dancers are comfortable with their bodies is that they spend forty hours a week naked. Whether it's onstage, dancing for a customer, getting ready in the dressing room, eating dinner, or just having a chat, we're pretty much all naked, all the time. Okay, we're not really naked, as I've just explained, but we're as close to it as you can possibly get without losing our liquor license. To find out exactly why spending so much naked time increases a stripper's sexiness, let's first take the sex out of it.
As I mentioned in the Introduction, one of the misconceptions about dancers is that we're nymphos, and that we only dance for a living because we're too horny all the time to work at oh, say . . . McDonald's. I then went on to say that dancing could actually be quite boring. Which is absolutely true. For strippers, giving a dance isn't about being sexual. It's about work. Shaking our hooters and smacking our asses is just part of the job description. Giving a dance is about as sexual as typing up a progress report, and every bit as monotonous, too. You see, each dancer has a choreographed dance she does every single song, for every single customer, every single time. If we are asked to give a second dance, we just do it all again, backward. (FYI: It's the basic striptease, the steps to which you'll learn for yourself at the end of this chapter.) The dance doesn't flow out of our irrational sexual exuberance--it's carefully calculated so that you get to see what you came in for before the dance is over. So just ignore what the look on a dancer's face is telling you, or what she's whispering in your ear. There are only three things strippers think about while we're giving a dance: 1) Can I get this guy into the VIP room? 2) How much money have I made so far? and 3) Have I shown him my butt yet? So, you see, even though dancers spend a lot of time naked, it's in the nonsexual context of being at work.
This just so happens to be the exact opposite of what civilian women do. In fact, most women only get naked for sex or, at least, sex-related activities. Think about it: If the only time you spend naked is in the shower shaving your legs and pits in case your man comes over, or getting dressed to look good for getting undressed for sex, then that means the only time you spend naked is time you are worrying about looking good for or pleasing your man. For most women, then, being naked comes unnecessarily weighted with a lot of anxiety and pressure. This influences even our forays into clothes shopping. If we're not trying to look good for our man, we're often trying to look good because of the judgments of other women. Either way, when you're worried about looking good for someone else, it's impossible to feel good about yourself. For dancers, once we're out on the floor working, we don't have time to obsess over whether we look okay. We just do the best we can, trust that it's good enough, let go, and get to work. By being naked so often, we become familiar with our bodies in a nonjudgmental way. This familiarity leads to a feeling of comfortableness. We feel confident taking our clothes off because we are comfortable with our naked bodies--we have nothing to hide. For you, then, the more you can remove the time you spend naked from a sexual context, or any context where you are worried about the judgments of others, the more you will feel comfortable with your body as it is. Ideally, seeing yourself au naturel should become second nature. You should be intimately familiar with your naked body, how it looks, and how it functions in all sorts of conditions and situations, not just sexual ones. Ask yourself: What do my naked thighs look like in the kitchen or in the basement? What does my belly do when I'm not sucking it in or covering it up? When we ...
