SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 14 NUMBER 1 (APRIL 2004)

Striptopia?

Michael Uebel

Considering the possibility that there might be something utopic about strip
clubs, this paper traces the relays between power and powerlessness, feminism
and antifeminism, utopia and dystopia within a broad psychoanalytic framework.
It is interested in analyzing the social and psychological stakes for the male
heterosexual consumer of strip culture. Strip clubs, this paper argues, are the
special site of a masculine debasement amounting to a kind of moral
masochism, to use the Freudian typology. The male masochism here is an index
of contemporary power and how it is expressed, where what is important is not
how much power one can demonstrate, but rather how much one can hold in
check, and thus the logic of sadism and masochism, it is argued, is a key to the
dynamic relations that inhere in the strip scene. An attempt is made to bring
radical feminism in alignment with this analysis of sexualized power and plea-
sure.

Keywords masculinity; masochism; psychoanalysis; feminism; strip club

“All your mental armor drags me down.” (Bush 1996)

“The male glance,” notes Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting,

has often been described. It is commonly said to rest coldly on a woman,

measuring, weighing, evaluating, selecting her—in other words, turning her into
an object. What is less commonly known is that a woman is not completely
defenseless against that glance. If it turns her into an object, then she looks back
at the man with the eyes of an object. It is as though a hammer had suddenly
grown eyes and stared up at the worker pounding a nail with it. When the
worker sees the evil eye of the hammer, he loses his self-assurance and slams it
on his thumb. (1999, 209)

Perhaps what I wish to say here about the male consumption of strip culture
amounts to an extensive footnote to this incredibly provocative quotation. In
my view, Kundera’s hammer analogy captures the essence of the incredible
lure and power of erotic dancing. It suggests precisely the danger that arises

ISSN 1035-0330 print; 1470-1219 online/04/010003-17

 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1035033042000202898
4 UEBEL

when certain fantasies regarding the dancer are given up or denied. The
dancer calls the customer’s erotic bluff, forcing him to exchange his fantasies
of mastery for those of submission. Yet the loss of the objectifying fantasy
gives rise to another masculinist fantasy of mastery, this time a largely
defensive, as opposed to aggressive, one: I sacrifice my well-being in a
moment of self-questioning and self-hammering because that is the only
way I can be sure that I am alive, desirable, and, at the end of the day,
benevolent. My concern in this essay, then, will be to trace the relays
between power and powerlessness, misogyny and feminism, and sadism and
masochism, that make up the masculine fantasies activated within this
special cultural space.
Strip clubs are indeed special spaces. Descending the stairs or walking
down the corridor and through the inner doors into a dim, bass-thumping,
perfume and cigarette-laced room, one becomes conscious of entering an
almost magical domain, where a temporary reprieve from the protocols of
everyday life can be expected. Suddenly one’s erotic relation to the world, to
others, is at the same time simplified and rendered more complex. Perhaps
this is because here everything is at once possible and predictable, and it is
this potent combination of the unknown and the familiar that constitutes the
erotic secret of the strip scene. In the club a new set of protocols reigns,
amplifying and monitoring libidinal existence. To be sure, sexuality in a strip
club seems less repressed. Sexual banter, unabashed naked and cosmetically
enhanced bodies (that bear remarkable resemblances to one another), the
free flow of money and compliments, and open seductions all seem to work
at lifting prohibitions on erotic behavior. But, as Michel Foucault’s history of
sexuality reminds us, signs of eros’s liberation point directly, if not tragically,
to the reaffirmation of the very structures that liberation and transgression
would undo. If strip clubs are spaces for the possibility of a libidinal existence
unencumbered by erotic repression, they appear to be so only to the extent
that such an existence has been orchestrated by an oppressive and often
self-serving psychic and social order.1
Indeed, the stability of strip culture itself depends upon the not always
willing submission of its participants—male and female, patron and dancer—
taking, in the case of the male patron, the form of a social (or what some
psychoanalysts designate psychic, as opposed to sexual) masochism curi-
ously produced by the seeming liberation of sex rather than its repression.
Seeking erotic freedom in the strip club always to some degree ends up
calling into being the very protocols and limits of desire that we wish to
transgress. But these are laws to which we imagine we can at least
provisionally submit. Their self-enforcement within strip gives rise to a
masochism more powerful than the voyeurism or fetishism also in play. The

1. See Kay’s (1999) stirring account of the exploitative working conditions in San Francisco strip
clubs where prostitution, tolerated by club management and sought by many customers, takes a
heavy toll on dancers. The conditions described by Kay, it should be noted, are the exception rather
than the rule in American strip clubs, especially in the “gentlemen’s clubs” that I am analyzing here.
 STRIPTOPIA? 5

masochist reins in his own desires, while always fantasizing that the other
person admires his self-control. No small pleasure is taken in one’s own
instrumentalization, in the masochistic “labor” performed for the dancer’s
enjoyment. An analogy suggested here (and by a perverse reading of
Kundera) is that of an alienated worker finding some pleasure in his errant
thumb-smashing if only because it impedes the production goals of a
capitalist boss who demands ever more precise hammering. Sacrificial per-
formance for the other’s enjoyment is made absolutely explicit in strip
culture. To take one salient moment in the club: toward the end of another
interminable “dollar dance” (a nightly ritual where dancers circulate among
customers offering them about 10 seconds of table-side attention for a dollar
while, typically, a long medley plays), the DJ will stop the action and have the
patron stand and dance for the stripper. This carnivalesque reversal provides
a homely spectacle of masculine abasement in which its participants, how-
ever, seem to revel. Having so grandly humiliated himself, the customer all
but ensures that the dancer remains an impossible object of desire. But this
seems to be the point: a masochistic display like this diverts attention away
from the real abjection that inheres in masculinity. In this way, it defends
against the rejection that always follows groveling at the dancer’s feet, but
it also—and this seems to be the real point—defends against the possibility
that the dancer might actually go for the patron.2
For the most part, you do not go to a strip club to pick up women or, in
most clubs, even to touch them. The desires a stripper sets in motion are
never meant to be fully satisfied. The dancer’s power resides in her function
as the cause of desire rather than as the object of desire. Jacques Lacan tells
us that the sex act must fail, that “there is no sexual relationship,” and
nowhere is this more true than in a strip club. The dancer on the stage
fantasmatically sustains my desire, while at the same time she conceals the
fact that genuine pleasure is available only for her. Enjoyment will always first
be the dancer’s enjoyment of herself; which is to say, the enjoyment of her
mastery. You will not have her because she will always possess herself first.
To indulge your fantasies in a strip club is to attempt a solution to the
unbearable enigma of the dancer’s desire, to find an answer to the cease-
lessly interrogating voice that is as much cultural as it is psychic: What are
we wanted for (anyway)? By provoking such self-questioning, the stripper’s
desire—or, that fantasy of her obscure desire—is always to some degree
anxiety producing. Is there, I cannot help but wonder, any element of her

2. My argument here about the masochistic dynamic inhering in the stripper–patron relationship is
corroborated by strippers themselves: “Susan,” a former dancer and contributor to Screw magazine,
observes that men “may think that they want the girl to come home with them but they really don’t
want the fantasy of this teasing to go any further, they may want to touch or feel but they’re almost
submissive, almost as if they were just there for the tease” (Ben-Shitta 1992, 36). My own interviews
with dancers suggests that Susan’s use of the adverbial “almost” chastens the real compliancy of the
male customer. See also Liepe-Levinson (1998), who does a nice job describing other ways in which
club patrons place themselves in “jeopardy” in order to defeat the possibility of satisfaction, while
keeping alive the pleasures of self-control and of yearning itself.
6 UEBEL

seduction that is real, an element addressed to me? Is there something more

(or less) here than the play of appearances; if so, then what? The solution to
my anxious questions, to my doubts, perhaps the only one, is to attempt
some kind of interpretation or fantasy of her desire, and then masochistically
offer up myself as one interchangeable object of desire. This is one, perhaps
the main, reason why strip clubs have never seemed to me purely places of
masculinist sadism, for customers seem acutely, if unconsciously, sensitive to
their passive position vis-à-vis the dancer’s desires, whether authentic or
imputed to her. If masochism is the process of becoming the object through
self-denial, that self-negation takes place in the strip club before the dancer’s
“evil eye” (to return to Kundera’s image). It is around the pleasure of the
dancer—the jouissance of a God, of “a supreme Being in maliciousness,”
declares Lacan (1966, 773)—that we become instruments, at the point where
pleasure and its prohibition fade into one another. Jouissance here becomes
precisely that which serves no purpose (Lacan 1998, 3).
Thus, we resign ourselves to getting off on, having a relationship with, the
fantasy, never the woman herself. Jean Clavreul, writing about “the interests
of the pervert,” claims that they “must above all be rigorously of no use, to
lead nowhere. Anything validated by the pervert is marked with the seal of
uselessness” (1980, 226; original italics). The strip scene, from the customer’s
point of view, is sealed with uselessness, to the extent that his submission
serves only to indelibly mark him as the dancer’s plaything. Sartre’s brilliant
exposition of the condition of masochism in his book on Charles Baudelaire
emphasizes precisely this same point: the erotics of subservience, a function
of the distance and “frigidity” (a term, for Sartre, including conditions of
whiteness, coldness, polished metalicism, and sterility) of the beloved,
amounts to no more than an “empty game” producing nothing (Sartre 1950,
78, 117ff).3 Clavreul’s theory of the perverse masochist and Sartre’s reading
of the characterological masochist intersect in a way that helps us under-
stand the necessity of renunciation and failure, of the nothing that lies at the
core of masochistic submission. Always “on the side of the eye,” as Clavreul
puts it, a patron in this instance calls on the dancer as the perfect merchant
of illusions with whom to enter into a kind of contract, so that his invest-
ments in the merely illusory can be proven and renewed. Dance for me, and
I submit … I submit to your fantasy.
Sylvia, a former dancer at the glorious Chez Paree in San Francisco,
describes the “essence of the tease” in terms that illustrate just how powerful
“nothing” really is within the simultaneously intimate and alienating strip
scene:

For a girl who likes to tease, this is the ultimate, to have the guy beneath while
you do everything to turn him on until he asks, and sometimes, deliciously,
literally begs for sex, a hand job, a kiss, none of which he is ever going to get,

3. Deleuze is quite obviously indebted to Sartre in his important essay on masochism, “Coldness and
Cruelty” (Deleuze 1989).
 STRIPTOPIA? 7

of course, because a true tease is at heart a sadist. She most enjoys the moment
when the customer has opened himself to her and made himself vulnerable, the
moment when she can break his heart and scar his ego with one little word: no.
I suppose that means that those who like to be teased have a bit of the
masochist in them, that the thrill they really seek is the moment of desire’s
culmination being slapped down, the anticipation of sexual desire being dashed
against the rocks of a dancer’s indifference. (Sylvia 2002)

The art of the strip-tease, its tricky sadism, what Sylvia calls “the dynamic of
‘I could, but I’m not going to’,” meets its match in the thrilling masochistic
surrender of the patron. The dancer’s sublime power depends as much upon
fantasy as the customer’s submission: each imagines he/she is arousing the
other through a form of withholding. This provisional, or contractual, couple
participates in an erotic game where libidinal energy is sublimated on each
side—the teaser’s cruelty is filtered out through the calculated movements of
seduction and the aggressive desires of the teased are sacrificed to the
intoxicating pleasures of abjection.4 The question who is seducing whom
here is remarkably complex, but in every good strip it seems that each
pushes the other to the brink, with the reassurance that the relationship will
never really begin, or, better, that the relationship is condemned to begin
over and over again.
Even looking to, or staring at, the dancer’s body, all we discover are more
obstacles to the love relation. Strip clubs are scenes of the impossibility of
certain kinds of jouissance, not because dancers are rarely more than remote
fantasy objects, but because they are in fact subjects whose bodies are
accessible insofar as they can be symbolized (with singles, tens, and twenties
in their garter), and inaccessible in so far as they are intractably real. The
paradoxical dancer’s body is thus a “zoned” body, organized and marked
with paternal signifiers (“dead presidents”), a body whose realness cannot be
encountered independent of the symbolics in which it is immersed. The
dancer’s body is a place of inscription, and yet, paradoxically, it is beyond or
“outside language”; thus suspended, it complicates any encounter with it.5 I
wonder always whether it is possible to uncover, or recover, the woman
herself, to hold her somehow to her promises made beyond the flesh.
Hers is a tight body. Strikingly tanned, the naked body appears costumed,
sealed, armored. The whiteness and coldness that Sartre, and Gilles Deleuze
after him, have attributed to the severe woman, the despotic mistress, are
the inverted equivalents of the tanning-salon glow. Likewise, the pasties,
garters, stockings, satin thongs, shiny shiny boots of leather, heels, gloves,
jewelry, piercings, tattoos, lipstick, makeup, hair weaves, wigs, breast im-
plants, neatly trimmed (if not cleanly shaved) pubis, whatever, all serve to
turn the body’s erogenous zones into eroticized zones, tightly covered with

4. The S/M game, insists psychoanalysis, squelches genuine destructive impulses; it wards off a
potentially aggressive encounter between self and other (Coen 1988, 51–56).
5. For an account of losing a direct sense of the body, to which I am indebted here, see André
(1999).
8 UEBEL

a “second skin” of mass cultural signifiers. Thus, a vitrifying of the body

beautiful:

The vitrification of nudity is related to the obsessional function of the protective

wax or plastic coating of objects and the labor of scrubbing and cleaning
intended to keep them in a constant state of propriety, of flawless abstraction.
In both cases, vitrification and protection, it is a matter of blocking secre-
tions … preventing them from collapsing and maintaining them in a sort of
abstract immortality. (Baudrillard 1993, 105)

A dancer’s body is never really in front of you at all—sealed in signs, it

appears as abstract, gravity-defiant youth. Such a hermetic body has peculiar
effects upon the strip club habitué, who is not necessarily, indeed rarely, an
admirer or addict of beauty. Rather, his gaze is pure envy (in Latin: invidia,
from the verb videre, to see) in the Lacanian sense, “envy that makes the
subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself” (Loran
1978, 116). In her distance and enviable narcissistic unity, the dancer
enthralls, but if ever she were reduced to a pure fetish object (just a mobile
nude body on stage), the gap, which keeps desire active by holding it open,
would collapse.6 Therefore, while at the same time a stripper encourages
fetishization, she works to inhibit it, her seductive power, her lure, becoming
tied now to her ability to self-enclose, to erotically “recreate her body as an
object for herself” (Baudrillard 1993, 108). The erotic dancer, with gaze
directed at herself (in the ubiquitous mirror or with eyes closed), constructs
around herself a protective envelope, wherein all her jouissance is reflected
back and concentrated. Her narcissistic body conserves its pleasure, expend-
ing it only when necessary.
In this flesh-for-fantasy world, perhaps the most satisfaction that one can
hope for at the level of identification with the elusive dancer is to gaze at her
in the same way that she gazes at herself. This is, in my experience, a rare
ability on the part of the dancer, the power to use the patron as a perfect
mirror for precise, (auto)erotic poses. This is also, I suspect, a rather unusual
ability on the part of the patron, to see what the dancer herself sees, to look
at the stripper with a feminine connoisseurship. The narcissism here is
overwhelming: the other is no longer an object, for now, in Rimbaud’s
famous ungrammatical expression, “I is an other.” The idea of your self as
subject and the other as object is undone by a projective desire to be desired
by women for whom you yourself are attractive enough. This identificatory

6. Defenses of stripping as a historical art form appear oblivious to this dimension of the dance.
Judith Lynne Hanna, a cultural anthropologist who has served as expert court witness in exotic
dance cases, unreflectively views the stripper as aesthetic object: “Circular theater stages in erotic
dance clubs allow patrons to move around and marvel at living sculpture, much as museumgoers
observe a statue and just as countless faces look up at the promenading new Miss America” (Hanna
2001). It is unclear whether Hanna sees these ideal bodies as frozen (statues) or moving (promenad-
ing beauty queens), but it is clear that her description reduces dancers to fetishes that close off real
desire—what would it mean to desire a statute, or, for that matter, Miss America?
 STRIPTOPIA? 9

tie with the dancer places you on an insecure border between eros and
suffering, at the line where pleasure, found in self-reflection, in the delicious
awareness that one is not the passive and dismal creature upon which one
reflects, spills over into the anguish of becoming an object, of being looked
at fetishistically, the victim of what Paul Virilio aptly labels “objective tragedy”
(1989, 22).
Conversely alienating and enticing, strip culture fascinates the eye, parad-
ing before the patron sacred bodies, fit for worship and sending mixed
signals of seduction and excommunication. Her self-absorption, her auto-
erotic coolness, is finally what makes us genuflect, with the divine thought
that if we could just constitute ourselves once and for all as the stripper’s
ultimate desire … Lamentably, the club itself is set up to disappoint the
devout sacrificial lover. There are limits as to how far this erotic space can be
further eroticized, and it is never only a matter of burly bouncers and
pony-tailed managers policing patron and dancer behavior. Recently, a club
DJ offered me some insight into the stakes of oversexualizing the dancer–pa-
tron relation. In response to the question why I never hear slower, sensual
music like, say, Enigma or Love Spirals Downward, he replied, “We’ve got to
keep the beats up, to 100 bpm plus, otherwise guys start thinking about
their wives, their current girlfriends, their ex’s. My job is to keep the guys
feeling happy.” While it sounds remarkably misogynist at first blush, the idea
that thinking about one’s past or present significant other somehow obviates
happiness seems to be more about the club’s enforcement of the fantasy of
a new temporal order whereby a future “significant other” (i.e. a dancer as
object of the customer’s desire) also obstructs happiness. To put it simply,
from the club’s point of view, a dancer’s job is to frustrate. What better way
to confine dancers to the role of tantalizing fantasy objects than to play
songs that militate against any sensual affectivity? High-tempo music fosters
the illusion that everyone is having a great time (it’s a non-stop party!), while
attention is diverted away from the burdens of personal relationship. This
illusion turns masochistic, which is not to say unhappy, when we, consciously
or not, sense the impossibility of having a relationship with the dancers
themselves. It is difficult to deny that there is relief, even traces of real
satisfaction, here in the metronomically regular strip club, but pulsing
through it are unexpectedly strong currents of anxiety. Infusing every
moment of bliss are fantasies conspiring to bring down limits on happiness.
In short, the pleasures of the strip club are ultimately bound up with the
unpleasures they inevitably become.
A note after visiting my favorite club where I spent an otherwise unre-
markable evening with my then favorite dancer India:

The double pleasure of the erotic dancer: control and the illusion of control at
once, a brilliant, if monotonous, dialectic of power and powerlessness. The best
dancers make you feel that you’re in control (you call her over, she’s dancing,
smiling for you, mildly flirting with you) while all the time she’s in complete
10 UEBEL

control, tempting you, knowing you can’t touch her where you want, that you
desire her, and the extent of your ability to act on that desire is purely a function
of money and not of any social or amatory graces. The best dancer makes you
feel as though she only enjoys dancing for you. The song ends, however, and
you are reminded that her enjoyment is a curious thing: the idea is that
somehow her enjoyment is contagious—I can only enjoy if she does, and the
more she does, the more I do.

“Nothing hurts like your mouth.” (Bush 1996)

Strip culture presents us with a distinctive cultural theater in which

masochism reveals itself to be as much a psychic strategy as a social one. To
describe the masochistic logic of strip culture, however, is not to celebrate
male masochism. It is simply untenable, given the social and political
inequalities of the present social order, to exonerate the special disavowal of
power always available to, and chiefly exercised by, those who have power
in the first place.7 When the possession of power starts to give way to its
continual disavowal, the immiseration of the powerless is increasingly dereal-
ized. The reasons why the explosion of “gentlemen’s clubs” in this country
took place in the yuppified, and Rambo-movie-saturated, 1980s are not
mysterious. The white manhood acquired under Reagan and Bush was,
quoting Michael Kimmel:

the compulsive masculinity of the schoolyard bully, defeating weaker foes such
as Grenada and Panama, a defensive and restive manhood, of men who needed
to demonstrate their masculinity at every opportunity. Men who feel powerful in
their lives do not need to wear “power ties” or eat “power breakfasts” or “power
lunches.” (1996, 292)

It is my contention that men rather quickly came to realize that power ties
and power lunches do not enhance manliness. Masculinity predicated upon
the constant demonstration of power is doomed to go limp, if only because
it requires the constant stimulation of a world of subordinates and enemies
who cannot be counted on to remain fixed in their places. A new strategy
is required, where the giving up of the masculine position is made easier by
identifying with, rather than trying to compete with or rule, the dominant
woman. In this new erotic union, men, no longer required to act like men,
recognize that “manhood can be a let-down, and male masochism [is a]
paradoxical attempt to infuse more pleasure into it” (Phillips 1998, 104).
As I have argued elsewhere, contemporary male masochism is a largely
compensatory affair (Uebel 2002). Men who have internalized, however
imperfectly, 30 plus years of the discourse and political effects of feminism,
know it is now unacceptable to evince outright patriarchalism. So, the liberal

7. Recent feminist and queer theories of masochism, although not always compatible, are rightly
critical of the failure on the part of some current theorists to acknowledge that masochism is an
essentially male—gay and straight—prerogative (Modleski 1991, 135–163; Hart 1998, 86–123).
 STRIPTOPIA? 11

male in particular finds himself in a difficult relation to culturally embedded

patriarchy, a relation that would seem, quite simply, to call for an end to
dominance, but in fact is politically viable only as a form of compensatory
masochism, which, mainly at the level of fantasy, works continuously to
reclaim and consolidate masculine hegemony. There is a strong sense in
which the contemporary male is either unwilling or unable to assume the
sadistic role Catharine MacKinnon and others have assigned to the masculine
subject generally in a patriarchal society. This, however, is only to affirm that
this same male can, through masochism, achieve the affectivity of domi-
nance without having it linked to violence. The demonstration of masculine
power is now twisted according to a masochistic logic: how much power you
have is strictly a function of how much you can give up. Thus the lure of strip
culture may be that it allows one to enter a fantasy world wherein differ-
ences between power and powerlessness crumble as submission and
jouissance collapse into one another. Yet, it seems to me, any signs of utopia
found in such a scenario are destined to fade quickly, and this form of
masochistic practice becomes still another neon sign of crisis in contempor-
ary masculine subjectivity.8
As I have proposed, to understand why men go to strip clubs one must
consider their masochistic identifications with the erotic dancer and all that
she offers for a moment that seems at once far too fleeting and far too
exciting. My contention that masochism explains why men visit, and revisit,
the strip scene is predicated upon a post-Freudian insight often ignored or
forgotten: namely, that we describe a situation as masochistic not because it
is painful and thus exciting, but because it is thrilling—too thrilling—and
hence painful. Masochists of all stripes do not seek pain or suffering for its
own sake; for them, unpleasure does not become pleasure—rather, they are
defending against the possibility of pleasure becoming unpleasure.
Masochists carefully manage pleasure so that it does not spill over into
unpleasure. The fear of intensified pleasure, the fear of a world of boundless
stimulation or, especially, as is so often noted in psychoanalytic case studies,
of abrupt shock, drives the masochist to seek refuge in a world whose
existential rhythms and repetitions excite, but only along what Wilhelm Reich
describes (1949, 263) as a low, “non-climactic,” anal curve. With the proviso
that they do not overstimulate, the masochist can safely play his erotic
games. When excitement appears straightforward, as in the apparently
uncomplex voyeuristic pleasures of strip clubs and mainstream pornography,
there is little if any temptation to link such spectatorial thrill-seeking with the
production of unpleasure or anxiety. We know, or think we know, what
excites men in these scenes—naked women—but to link this sublime object
of masculine desire with real anxiety, and hence with masochistic rather than
sadistic pleasures, is not simply counterintuitive but in a certain sense
politically risky, if not retrograde.
8. On masochism as symptom of masculine crisis in postwar American culture, see Savran (1998).
12 UEBEL

There are, of course, compelling psychological and phenomenological

theories to account for why men might be made anxious by nakedness (and
I will rehearse one or two later), but the main reason for shying away from
such theories seems to be political: to understand the fantasies and pleasures
of the dominant class (white men) is socially irrelevant when, systematically,
women are being oppressed under the daily regimes of patriarchy. From the
point of view of the subjugated woman, it simply does not matter whether
the primary fantasy at work in the mind of the dominant male is fundamen-
tally sadistic, masochistic, or a twisted combination of the two.
Feminism—and here its radical forms have been the most insightful—reveals
the extent to which sexual inequality and violence are perpetuated by
systems of masculinist enjoyment, to the point where inequality becomes
synonymous with the very enjoyment of sexuality. It furthermore seems an
eminent condition of modernity that power tends to express itself sexually
and to consolidate itself through jouissance. In the revolutionary writing of
Dworkin and MacKinnon, pleasure and passion are never in themselves
pathological, but are said to become so when distorted by sexual injustice
and social alienation. There can be no pleasure, in their view, when it is
contaminated by masculinist fantasies of domination. The existence of sexual
inequity guarantees the degradation of the desire for pleasure and the
pleasures of desire, and hence the ruin of the psychic and social well-being
of both women and men. Without a revolution in intercourse, sexual justice
will continue to be foiled by the elements of human fantasy tied to
domination, submission, abstraction, objectification, and so on.
Much of the so-called sex-positive critique of radical feminism, preoccu-
pied with debating pornography’s significance, its social impact and sexual
codes, misses the utopian drive of a revolutionary writer like Dworkin, who
imagines a highly sexualized universe free from abstraction, cynicism, perver-
sion. Such a utopic realm is, for Dworkin, based upon forms of “sexual
passion outside identity … passion outside the control of the ego, which is
the servant of routinized civilization” (1997, 26). “Skinless” sex, her term for
this kind of self-less passion, constitutes a return to the “irreducibly human”
(Dworkin 1997, 29), to what is beyond or prior to the culturally constituted
self. “Society,” Dworkin writes, “interposes itself—by creating the necessity
for identity, by making rules—between two humans, keeping them separate,
even during intercourse” (1997, 23). The masochistic dimension to skinless
sexuality can be overwhelming, for it involves a radical opening up of the self
to the other, to the world, in such way that everything outside the self has
a “merciless” contiguity (Dworkin 1997, 27). Touch, which for Dworkin is the
essence of what it means to be human, to have knowledge, and to be part
of a community, is precisely that which is usually denied in a strip club. In
place of the self-negating eros of undefended contact another kind of eros,
according to Dworkin, flourishes, one depending on the distance necessary
for the violence of abstraction. Whereas Dworkin would not hesitate to
 STRIPTOPIA? 13

equate this new kind of sadistic eros with strip culture, I would suggest that
it is wrapped up in, and even partially softened by, its masochistic perform-
ance.
The utopian strain of Dworkin’s argument—the idea that masochistic
surrender of the armor of identity opens the way to knowledge and
humanity—I find compelling, and although Dworkin herself would resist
linking masochism to skinlessness, precisely because of masochism’s associ-
ation with femininity under patriarchy,9 there does seem to me real value in
analyzing just how masochism can be taken up as a strategy of power,
identity, and community. Given the undeniably significant political reasons
for thinking about erotic pleasure as a dimension of oppression, the
masochistic strategy of empowerment through disempowerment merits
special attention in order to understand the forms taken by oppression
through pleasure. Strippers, in my experience, tend to have an acute
understanding of sexual power and pleasure, so that for them the pairs
sexual inequality/equality and sadism/masochism do not necessarily form
violent hierarchies, but rather points on a reaching continuum of erotic
relationality. They in fact experience power in terms of its fluctuation, its
inherent reversibility, and their lives and jobs seem to dramatize this. As
dancer Faith comments:

In here [the club] I’m the master, the domme or mistress really, without the whip,
and I dictate the mood and agenda for the customer. I preside over his pleasure,
sometimes ruthlessly, but that doesn’t mean I can always control my own
excitement. Outside the club, I’m not always the mistress, because there are
personal and intimate situations where I don’t have all the power or I choose to
give it up. (Personal interview 2003)

The strip club is a laboratory for the creation of power and for its dramatic
relinquishment, a more or less sterile space in which dancers and customers
can test the reality of their own social and libidinal limits along with those
of the other, free from the messiness of the intimately personal.
These experiments with power, performed repeatedly, convey the very
essence of performativity: the interplay of teasing and submission “conjures
up the contradictory nature of all performance, which strives to create the
truth of illusion and unmask the illusion of truth” (Hart 1998, 68). Through
the strip performance, truth and illusion vie with one another on the
ambiguous field of flirtation. Flirting between dancer and customer undoes
commitment to a single truth (e.g. the truth of a relationship and all the
promises sustaining it); at the same time it holds out the illusions that
promote the wish for more desiring. “It is inevitable,” Adam Phillips writes,

9. There is a tendency among feminist analyses of masochism to equate it with a lack of power,
particularly women’s self-subordination under patriarchy. See, for example, Chancer (1998, 200–228).
Given the complex psychodynamics and non-essentialist nature of masochism, this view is unten-
able.
14 UEBEL

that flirtation—the (consciously or unconsciously) calculated production of un-

certainty—will be experienced at best as superficial and at worst as cruel.
Flirtation as sadomasochism with a light touch is a modest exposé of excitement
as inextricable from tantalization; of desire as desire for a certain kind of torture,
an enlivening torture, so to speak … The generosity of flirtation is in its implicit
wish to sustain the life of desire; and often by blurring, or putting into question,
the boundary between sex and sexualization. (1994, xvii–xviii)

Strip clubs are the spaces par excellence where the sexual and the sexualized
become tantalizingly confused, and male patrons, by masochistically surren-
dering themselves as interchangeable objects, are attempting a solution to
the inherent discomfort such confusion can generate. If seeking the reality of
sex yields only an encounter with fantasies of the sexualized, just as seeking
only fantasies reveals that they are indelibly marked with real sex, then one
solution is to turn all desire into a kind of exquisite torture, which, while it
enlivens the subject, making him keenly receptive to the world, also fixes him
into the more or less enviable position of being the object of someone else’s
flirtations. Flirtation suggests that sexual desire is always already in play, even
while it must negate the relations that such desire might build. This is the
sovereign power of the dancer as seductress, a power that, as Baudrillard
argues,

stems from her ability to “eclipse” any will or context. She cannot allow other
relations to be established—even the most intimate, affectionate, amorous or
sexual (particularly not the latter)—without breaking them … She constantly
avoids all relations in which, at some given moment, the question of truth will
be posed. (1990, 85)

Contrary to received opinion, dancers do not seduce with their naked bodies,
not when they offer them up strictly for erotic consumption. I suggested
earlier some reasons why this might be so—considering the stripping body
as vitrified, admired more for its self-closure and self-pleasure, the way in
which it impedes and then channels desire in new directions, than for its
sheer eroticism—but there are phenomenological and psychological dimen-
sions to the masculine response to nakedness that offer some clues as to
why being in the presence of nude women is so imperative. Dworkin makes
a provocative claim regarding female nakedness: it has the power to
“unnerve” because it reminds men that they themselves are deeply uncom-
fortable with the experience of being naked as such. The fact that men do
not attempt to avoid this anxiety by turning away from naked women
suggests that they are coping with it in some other way. According to
Dworkin, femininity can only be experienced within specific phenomenolog-
ical frames: heterosexual men, although they are not alone, take a hard look
at women through the protective lenses of abstraction and of fetishization.
Experienced remotely, voyeuristically, the nakedness of women allows men
to defend themselves against the unhappy reality of their own nakedness,
 STRIPTOPIA? 15

against the loss of self-possession that nakedness signals:10 “men need

women to survive their own nakedness” (Dworkin 1997, 33). Nude women
thus shield against the self-absorption and loneliness into which men would
fall if they did not view femininity as “the escape route … into reality,” where
women themselves come to stand for “the world, connection … what is real,
the physical, what is true outside [their] frenetic self-involvement” (Dworkin
1997, 33–34).
Doubtless I appreciate the significance of Dworkin’s argument for reasons
that she would not necessarily. Her argument about the male response to
nakedness is intended to show how the sexism inherent in it leads to sadistic
violence. Because men, she argues, are incapable of achieving a state of
“skinless” identification without clinging to the power that comes from
possessing an inviolable self or ego, they will resort to sadistic control over
the other. I want to propose that, within the sexual dynamics of the strip
scene, men, as Dworkin claims, do find nakedness unsettling on account of
their own insecurities and insufficiencies, but these signs of masculine frailty
do not herald violence. Instead, the sexism of the strip club—and there is
plenty of it—resides in the masochistic appeal of feeling the violation of the
sexist power defining maleness. Naked women are attractive to men because
they represent a potential point of identification with subjection. The chal-
lenge of identifying with the dancer is the very secret of the male voyeur,
even while, as Anita Phillips contends, men are protected against the full
implications of such an identification.11 Visuality itself, she argues, protects
men “with its insistence on a physical distance between the viewer and the
viewed” (Phillips 1998, 98). The strip club is one space in which men can pay
for that protection, enjoying the luxury to be made anxious, while masochis-
tically surrendering in an act of identification with the naked dancer.
However, what can look rather like benevolence, the generosity of masochis-
tic submission, is almost never a political alignment with femininity. It was
the arguably most brilliant theorist of masochism, Theodor Reik, who in his
monumental Masochism in Modern Man laid bare the aggressive
identificatory logic of masochism, a logic based on reversing the simple
ethical proposition “Give what you would wish to receive.” Male
identification with the feminine position, says Reik (1941, 240), signals
precisely the submissive position in which the woman would like to be seen.
Masochistic men, in other words, receive what they would wish to give, and
in this way obviate their will to domination.

10. Bataille makes a similar point about the way “stripping naked” undoes “the possession of a
recognised and stable identity” (1986, 17–18). This dispossession of the (we assume masculine) self,
Bataille argues, is symbolic of sacrifice and even a simulacrum for the act of killing.
11. Phillips’s argument here is about masochistic male identifications with pornography: contra the
usual reading, it is claimed that men identify with women in a position of objective powerlessness.
This claim is corroborated by others (Soble 1986, Kaite 1995). Soble provocatively suggests here that
all pornography can be understood in terms of “a revolt against the male sex role” (1986, 84, n. 81).
Kaite suggests that the porn consumer is one who “flaunts his identification” with a female body
that offers simultaneously castratedness and phallicity (1995, 59–60).
16 UEBEL

Figure 1. Strip club currency, purchased with a credit card.

Men, as a rule, do not become aggressive in the presence of nude women

in a strip club, but discover the pleasure values of wrapping any pre-existing
antifeminist aggression in the cloak of masochism. This is precisely what
makes this cultural space remarkable: despite how firmly the club is predi-
cated upon sexism (not to mention its contenders, racism and ageism), men
are paying for, and sometimes addicted to, the opportunity to deny that
sexism. Interestingly, as I have discovered in many interviews with dancers,
this ruse very rarely fools them. Dancers describe a typical approach made by
a patron that involves presenting himself, by way of contrast to other
patrons, as a kind of “sensitive guy” who refuses to gawk and who treats the
dancer with the utmost respect—right up to the point that he proposes that
they get together in his hotel room after her shift.12 And while many dancers
will in fact admit, if pressed, that their opinions about men and masculine
sexual expression have deteriorated since they started dancing, there is also
a smaller number who, in seeing their role as therapeutic, wish to support
men and their impaired masculinity. These dancers try to effect a kind of
talking cure that aims at healing narcissistic wounds of the kind, for example,
that might have come from recent divorce or widowerhood or chronic social
awkwardness. The men who pay for this rudimentary therapy (note the club
scrip in Figure 1), opting for an interpersonal experience rather than a
voyeuristic one, view the strip club as a safe zone where their damaged
manhood is not a social liability. Such dancer–patron interaction opens up
the possibility of masochistically accommodating, if not celebrating, a mas-
culinity liberated from the conventions of machismo.

12. I would propose here the category of the “sensitive guy,” who makes up a significant subgroup
of the major type of club patron, “the detached looker,” the latter comprising, according to Erickson
and Tewksbury, 56% of all customers. Men in this majority group present themselves as indifferent
to the nudity surrounding them. They defeat their wish to look at nudity, and thereby avoid
demeaning women, while “their demeanor remains passive” (Erickson and Tewksbury 2000, 285).
“Sensitive guys” draw attention to their detachment, while they focus on one dancer.
 STRIPTOPIA? 17

While this brand of therapeutic masochism is not nearly as radical

as the ecstatic experience of masculinity untethered from the limits of
power, which for Leo Bersani derives from nothing less than “the masochistic
thrill of being invaded by a world we have not yet learned to master”
(1995, 100),13 it is nonetheless a genuine, if momentary, reprieve from
the expectations governing masculinism. The sexual inequality of this rela-
tion, whereby dancers are cast into the traditional role of nurturing
care-giver, is in part neutralized by the submissiveness of the men,14 on one
hand, and the compassion of the women, on the other, a compassion, as
peepshow dancer Tawnya Dudash stresses, that “form[s] the basis of our
resistance to socially accepted and repressive ideologies surrounding sexu-
ality” (1997, 115). The political charge of strip-culture intimacy, however, does
not always prevent it from degenerating into what Masud Khan appositely
terms “auto-erotism à deux” (1979, 24). Whereas I suggested earlier that a
dancer’s libidinal relation is always with herself first, the same would seem to
hold true for the patron whose primary erotic energy is self-directed—for
example, through the identificatory fantasies structuring masochism and
autoerotism. Thus, Bersani is almost certainly right to identify the psychic
promise of masochistic surrender with its inherent anticommunitarian im-
pulse,15 although this theory should not militate against the ramifications of
the erotic “communication” that arguably supplies the strip club’s raison
d’être. It is in their brilliant reading of the erotically inviting paintings of the
baroque artist Michelangelo Caravaggio that Bersani and Dutoit theorize
erotic address as soliciting a kind of intimacy that has nothing to do with
collapsing the distance between persons, but rather with setting itself up so
that it can blocked with a secret. In this way, the erotic subject “enjoys
narcissistically a secret … [she] performs” (1998, 9). This secret is the work-
ings of power and powerlessness captured in the abbreviation S/M (a
neologism, incidentally, created by Alfred Kinsey to keep his sexual investiga-
tions secretive when he and his team discussed their research in public, for
example, over lunch in a diner).
Admittedly, few patrons are clued in to this secret. However, my argument
about the dynamics of control and submission within strip culture has been
less about what men know, or think they know, than about the operations
of desire and pleasure conditioning their experience. And I do think there is
a utopic dimension to this experience, if precisely because what is finally so
compelling about the strip club, even for the crusty veteran, are the
possibilities it tantalizingly markets, the promises it ambiguously holds out.

13. Indeed, Bersani is quite clear about therapeutic masochism amounting to nothing more than a
“nonhypocritical acceptance of power as it is already structured” (1995, 85, see 83–91).
14. Here, male passivity seems to manifest a wish, conscious or unconscious, to be a little boy,
rather than a woman, with either wish exemplifying the Freudian notion of “feminine masochism”
(Freud 1961, 161–163).
15. For Bersani, masturbation is the primal moment in which a lesson in the rhythms of power and
powerlessness is instilled, in so far as masturbation is an act of control indissociable from loss of
control (see 1995, 103).
18 UEBEL

If the allure of strip clubs was merely the flesh parade they so radiantly stage,
then such places would have become obsolete long ago.

University of Kentucky

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