This review refers to the Hardcover version. Bare has been
released in paperback by Seal Press under the title
Bare: The Naked Truth
About Stripping (Live Girls)
|
Bare: On Women, Dancing,
Sex, And Power
By Elisabeth Eaves
pp. 293, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. Hardcover
There’s a touch of irony in reading about the life of a stripper who bares
the most intimate parts of her body but struggles to bare the most
intimate contents of her heart. With her debut book, Bare: On Women,
Dancing, Sex, and Power, former Seattle stripper Elisabeth Eaves learns to
expose herself in a different way: uncovering the seedy world of Seattle’s
strip clubs while revealing her own motivations for working in them.
Eaves’ search for answers to the question "why did I do it?" begins with
her experiences as a child growing up in a culture that projects
irreconcilable images of feminine sexuality and leads fascinatingly to a
discussion about the psychic fragmentation that all women experience in
varying degrees as they attempt to assimilate these conflicting images.
"In a sense I had two bodies," Eaves writes. "There was the one that I
lived with, that had senses, hungers, and a connection to my brain. Then
there was another entity, separate from myself, that I could look at as
the object others held it to be... That people might think they knew
something about me because of the color of my hair, the size of my chest,
or the length of my legs was ridiculous, yet they did it all the time. And
it wasn’t even as though my body told everyone the same thing... It was a
blank slate for the projections of others."
As a teenager, Eaves learned that men’s fascination with her body gave her
a certain power over them, a power she chose to wield in her short-lived
high school relationships. Otherwise, being an attractive woman in public
was mostly a curse, filled with occasional catcalls and a constant sense
of fear whenever she found herself walking alone. Eaves chose to hide her
body in baggy clothing in order to deflect the stares of men, but the
muting of her sexual freedom gnawed at her, particularly when the culture
seemed to reward men for exploring their sexuality but punished women who
did the same.
"At some point women had become artificially divided into two types--the
good and the childbearing ones, carefully trained to disdain sex so that
they wouldn’t stray, and a separate, pro-sex class. The second group were
despised and disparaged so that the good women wouldn’t want to join
them."
For Eaves, the strip club was an arena where sexuality could be safely
celebrated instead of suppressed - a place to temporarily reconcile our
culture’s conflicting images of femininity. During her audition at the
Lusty Lady in Seattle, Eaves experienced a sexual epiphany. "These men
couldn’t get me. I was safe and in control. I felt none of the vague alarm
that accompanied stares and comments in the streets. I was taking back
what should have been my own, freedom from a sense of menace. I was even
feeling vengeful, glorying in the fact that they were down there, trapped
in their little boxes, and I was above them in every way. They were a
substitute for every man who had caused me fear."
Despite Eaves’ resurgent sexual empowerment, working at the Lusty Lady
eventually forces a more significant split in her personality. The more
adeptly she fulfills her customers’ prosaic fantasies, the more difficult
it becomes for her to step out of that role in her personal life. Bare is
most effective when Eaves focuses her attention on the arbitrary
boundaries each stripper establishes between herself and her customers in
order to maintain her personal identity and how the lure of money causes
each woman to reassess and shift those boundaries. This sexual dishonesty
and its threat to her personal identity caused Eaves to eventually quit
her job but also made her realize that she could never fully escape its
trappings.
"To try and avoid the commercialization of sexuality altogether would be
harder. Would it be possible, for example, never to use pornography? Never
to take a job where flirtatiousness and a tight T-shirt would earn me more
tips?... And could I be sure that I would never subtly cater, for my own
gain, to the way a man wished I would look or behave? Could I, once and
for all, escape the idea that a woman’s worth was in her looks? I wasn’t
sure but I would try."
It is here where Eaves’ confessional leaves us with a meaningful cultural
insight: we’re all in some sense engaged in differing degrees of
performance in our daily lives. These performances are unavoidable in a
culture as confused and manipulated by sexuality as ours is. Eaves’ job as
a stripper has only made us more aware of the insidious nature of our
performances and how difficult they are to escape. |
