Big Ed's Place

Recently, I came across a blog written by a former strip club manager, Strip Club Hound. I’ve been enjoying it and one of his posts dovetailed neatly into last week’s post on objectification. In it, he talks about a customer who said, “what do I have to do to get one of these bitches to go out with me?”

Err, you can’t.

As Strip Club Hound discusses, even though the customer was being nice to the dancers on the outside, they could sense his attitude anyway. Strip Club Hound says

Dancers in a club are very sensitive to how men view them. They know they’re sex objects to the customers who come in. If they’re going to relate to a man in any other way than to just sell him lap dances, they want to believe he thinks of them as more than just sex objects.

Now I happen to think this applies to women in general and not just strippers. Strippers may just be more conscious that they’re being objectified and reduced to bodies on display.

The thing is, the objectification is then usually mutual. The customer who sees a dancer as just tits and ass is most likely viewed as just a wallet to the dancer. The problem comes when the customer wants to pretend he’s more than a wallet, but won’t (or doesn’t know how) to stop objectifying the dancer and see her as a human being. There’s a fundamental hypocrisy there that the customer often doesn’t see.

The thing is, it’s this hypocrisy that’s causing him the pain. Want to be someone who is seen as dateable? Desirable? More than a wallet? That’s what the customer asking the dancers out wants, right? Because if it’s just to get laid by a beautiful woman, I’m pretty confident that enough money would get him some dancer at the club. It’s not a huge enough step to go from lapdances for pay to sex for pay if the money’s right. So either the customer is being cheap or stupid.

Aside–I’m quite serious about “some dancer.” Sure, a specific dancer may say “no” no matter what the offer, but the odds of getting some stripper to agree to sex are pretty good if the money is high enough. For example, $10,000 for one night would probably get a taker. Heck, for $1 Million, most women, stripper or not, would probably stop and think about it. If a guy can be honest that all he’s interested in is sex with an objectified body, the rest is just price and shopping around.

But if a guy wants an interaction with a person instead of an object, the currency isn’t money. It’s, at a minimum, respect. Interest, appreciation, and even simply liking the other person all come into play too. It’s treating the other person like a person instead of an object. Ultimately, it’s proof that you get what you give.

It doesn’t even matter what the woman does. When I was a regular at strip clubs, I quickly figured out that if I treated the dancers as people as with respect, they returned the niceness. Sometimes that was just attitude. Sometimes it was small favors, like extending a private dance another song for free.

There’s a place for objectification, like I wrote previously. There’s not a place for hypocrisy. So part of our ‘growing up’ is learning to spot and eliminate such hypocrisy in ourselves. It’s not easy, but always worth it.

Early in life, I discovered that I was a voyeur. It may have been access to my dad’s Playboys or something more ingrained and natural. I just discovered I liked looking at naked women.

As I got older, the mere sight of bare flesh stopped being interesting to me. I started to discover that the energy conveyed by a naked woman was as or more important than the fact that her clothes were gone. Close ups of body parts became dull. Traditional nudism, which represses sexual energy, also lost most of its charge. I even remember, in my twenties, when a strip club trip felt empty for the first time. Despite being an enterprise devoted to faux sexuality and bare female skin, I was bored. The dancers were clearly just going through the motions and the motions themselves were no longer of interest to me.

Now that turned out to be somewhat ironic, because a few years earlier, I’d been a regular at a club where I’d spent more than a healthy share of dough. There, almost all of my funds went to a single dancer—a fact rather well known among the club staff. In fact, one day I walked in and before I even sat down another dancer walked over and said, “she’s not here.” I shrugged and decided to return another day.

What made that one dancer special? She took her dancing seriously. She constantly worked on developing new moves and new tricks. She often came up with new costumes. When she gave private dances (lap dances weren’t legal in that jurisdiction then), she had a whole host of moves and looks to draw my eyes exactly where she wanted them. It was a silent “look at me.” “Look at my eyes.” “Look at my hip.” “Now look at my bare breasts.”

I was entranced. I was enthralled. If they’d had an ATM in the club, I’d have been broke.

That “look at me” energy has turned out to be the charge I get from being a voyeur. Peeping Tom type voyeurism doesn’t work for me because, besides the consent issues, the energy isn’t there. The woman has to know she’s being watched. She has to want to be watched, or at least looked at for a while.

Sometimes that energy can be captured on film, but not always. There’s a coyness to it, an “aren’t you in for a treat,” that’s absent in most porn. It’s naughty, not nasty. The ‘view’ is a treat—not something that’s just a flaunt.

I think that the “look at me”/“I’m looking” energy exchange is similar to top/bottom energy in a good bdsm scene. It circulates and is reciprocal. My looking feeds her pleasure at being seen, which feeds my pleasure at looking even more. It’s sexual, but far beyond simple stimulation or the quest for an O. The thrill is both more intense and more subtle. Fine wine instead of a greasy burger.

There are of course many ways to enact this energetic exchange—lingerie, semi-public flashing, and even traditional burlesque can also pick up the same flair. It also doesn’t matter too much if the woman has model quality looks or not. I’d rather have an average looking woman who’s sending ‘look at me’ signals than a beauty who’s bored and taking my gaze for granted. There’s no magic in body language that conveys I’m just one of millions. Instead, a garter belt and a smile can overcome extra weight or physical ‘flaws’ galore.

For me, that’s the core of voyeurism, and the enchantment. She conveys “look at me”—and I comply.

(the story is here)

I took a substantial break between writing the first four Holiday Series Stories and this one. When I returned to the series (after The Ugly One), I wanted to write something light. Fortunately, the holiday that was next up–the guys’ birthdays, lent itself to something fun and sexy.

I’d placed Will’s birthdays in May/June as part of the background for the first story, because I wanted it six months away from Christmas. It wasn’t too hard to put Dave’s nearby to allow for the story. The only question left was the gifts.

For that, the obvious was a striptease. How can one have a series on exhibitionism without a striptease or two? It is, perhaps, the oldest exhibitionistic sexual act, going back to Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils that led to John the Baptist’s demise. I decided that the striptease would be the central scene of the story.

The songs used in this story are “You Can Leave Your Hat On” by Joe Cocker, “Black Velvet,” by Alannah Miles, and “I Touch Myself,” by the DiVinyls, all excerpted just a little to allow them to fall under the fair use clause of the copyright laws. I recommend listening to them all, if you can.

I chose “You Can Leave Your Hat On” because it is the archetypical striptease song. It’s also extremely easy to choreograph a striptease to for an amateur–just follow the words.

“Black Velvet” is sultry, bluesy, and definitely a song to evoke passion. I once had the pleasure of watching a group of fully clothed women sway and dance to it and it raised my pulse more than any nudity would have.

The DiVinyls song rounded out the set because I wanted something that moved from seductive to blatantly sexual. The image seemed to fit with characters who would do just a little bit more than ‘show.’