Dehumanization, Issue One: Strip Clubs

No matter how many strip clubs I visit (and My [adopted] Fair City does like to style itself the Strip Club Capital of the civilized world) I always feel dirty. So last night, hunched over the stage-right table we’d collectively seized in a strip club on the outskirts of Portland proper, my partner, impertinent questioner that she is, asked why?

I, sloppy thinker that I am, found myself without an answer for her. Like so much else, it took a night of drinking, a long bus ride home and a follow-up session of hedonistic debauchery before I achieved the mental state necessary to formulate an answer. By then, my partner was fast asleep. So these things go. My mind is a slow, soft machine, and it takes a lot to prime that pump.

But I have to share this with someone, so into the wastelands it goes.

The decision to visit this particular strip club was a completely spur-of-the-moment. My Co-President informed us that one of our mutual friends had (A) secured a job there (B) working the 8-2:30 p.m. shift, assuring she’d be on stage at least occasionally until the State Liquor Control Commission-mandated closing time.

Thus, with altruism in our hearts, we trudged out into the perpetual wet and cold that is an Oregon winter, caught our buses, and arrived half an hour later. The club itself: a windowless wooden cube that squatted beside the road, its postage stamp of a parking lot sprinkled with a working class assortment of older American cars: Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs. We entered through the rear (no pun intended) and there she was: our fiend, on stage, naked but for her striped, thigh-high stockings. She recognized us on sight and smiled without breaking stride. Personally, I felt seized by the twin poles of embarrassment and lechery, both as naked as our friend on stage.

So I avoided eye contact and shadowed my partner and Co-President Action as we circled the bar. Inside, the club was hardly worthy of the word, and the more I visit them the more I realized how much our modern conception of the strip club owes to the modern rap music video, with its visions of New York and LA’s finest. The vast majority of “clubs,” share no resemblance to those storied establishments. Were it not for the stage, bar, tables, and video poker machines, they could easily function as portable storage buildings. (When the Revolution comes and all prisoners are released, that’s exactly what they’ll be…you can buy that for a dollar, though that’ll be $3.50 with inflation.)

A fat tub of humanity tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, did you bump my friend over there.” He’s at least six feet and tipping three hundred pounds, his chin studded with a pitiful-looking wiry tangle of soul patch hair. I have a vision of myself as Robin (Tim Drake, not Dick Grayson—if I’m to be Robin, I’ll be a Robin who wears pants, thank you very much) and calculated the likelihood of my striking a pressure point through all that fat before one of his canned-ham fists sent me off to the Blessed Isles.

—Not intentionally, I told him.

“Well, look over there at him.” I followed the fat man’s sausage-finger to a thinner, taller, mullet-wearing individual behind the bar. He looked like Jeff Foxworthy’s cousin, still plying the family trade and no doubt resentful of his uppity, rich relative. “Wave at him,” the fat man said. I did. Mullet Man raised two-fingers in response, a flying V—for peace, which means Victory and not, thank god, Vendetta. Everything, in the language of lower class bar etiquette, was cool.

“That’s what I thought,” the fat man said. I turned away from him as fast as I could, the better to hide the contemptuous look on my face. I think of all the random invasions of personal space that I suffer everyday, in the mere act of stepping onto a bus—bumped shoulders, knocked heads, stepped-on toes ect. Would that I could send a Personal Linebacker out to intimidate the causes of such slights. So that’s why I don’t go out in public, I realized. There are just too many people in this world ready, willing and eager to pull you into a Dick Waving Contest.

Admittedly, we were in ripe territory for such people: their natural stalking ground. The strip club, whatever its drink price, décor, or hook, is a stationary testosterone battery. Its walls hum with pent up sexual aggression, all the more pervasive for it being almost exclusively male.

Thank god we grabbed our table to stage right, a respectable distance from both bar and walls, within sight of the emergency exit.

Our friend, who’s taken the stage name “Starlet,” joined us soon, fully clothed in skirt a black pull-over blouse and matching mid-thigh skirt, the stripper’s version of dress-casual work clothes. Starlet is a compact (4’11’’) Jewish girl, only slightly elevated by her high heels. The short cut of her black hair gives her face a pixie cast, accented rather than spoiled by her cat’s-eye glasses. By executive fiat I’ve commissioned her as a Commodore in Monster Island’s Navy (which, much like the pre-Revolutionary American Navy, is practically non-existent) She deserves no less for the extraordinary services rendered to our splinter-nation, services that have nothing at all to do with stripping.

Still, I won’t pretend I dragged my ass all the way out there for purely altruistic reasons. As a twenty-first century woman, secure in her body and herself, Commodore Starlet doesn’t need my moral support. I’m sure it was welcome, but I’d be lying if I denied that the opportunity to see her unclothed was my primary motivation for leaving the house. How could I and remain true to myself as a heterosexual male? Who among you hasn’t taken a moment to mentally undress your Platonic friends? And regardless of other issues, the strip club does have its utilitarian uses. Only there, within the confines of its context, am I allowed to financially support the Commodore for showing me her goodies without feeling like a complete scrub. Anything to help a friend in need…right?

So it was with mixed motivations that we (my partner, Co-President and I) bellied up to the stage for Commodore Starlet’s performance. She did three “sets” in the parlance of her profession. That is, in the parlance of the uninitiated, she stayed on stage for three songs, shedding clothing to the overly-loud rhythm of so-called “classic” rock. I recognize the Door’s “LA Woman,” before the intro is over and my mouth forms words in time with Jim Morrison as the Commodore removes her top. She finishes the song in skirt and bra, her legs sculpted by those extraordinary stockings. I don’t recognize the songs that drive her second and third sets. By then my mind is elsewhere. Commodore Starlet has my full attention.

She begins her second set by letting the girls out, tossing her bra into a corner of the stage. I marvel at her ability unhook the damned thing without breaking rhythm as she pinches her nipples. They become buds of a springtime sapling as she leans over the edge of the stage, getting uncomfortably close to the fat gentlemen seated on my right. She dances away from him (sweeping his dollar tip off the edge of the stage) shaking her booty in our general direction, eventually earning my amazement as she shucks her panties (which, unlike the bra, glow a imperial purple in the obligatory blacklight) with a single, deft motion, kicking them out of her path. Throughout all this she smiles down at us, and in the diffuse lighting of this awful place her lipstick is the same color as her labia.

Somewhere in middle of all this I experienced a revelation. In other performance based media, audiences derive their enjoyment from interaction with individual performer. Musical performances, stand-up comedy routines, dramatic readings, plays…hell, even political speeches…all of them are dependent upon the individual performer putting him or herself into the proceedings, the public forum allowing their personalities to grow large enough to fill the room and capture the viewer/listener’s attention.

Sex shows—be they stripping, lap dancing, live, or filmed porn—are the exact opposite of this, and as such they are one of the most dehumanizing (legally recognized) professions on the planet. There the performer is reduced from an individualized human being into a collection of mobile body parts and it is these which command her (and, to be fair, his) audience’s notice. The fat man to my right and the skinnier man to my Co-President’s left don’t go to these places to see stripper x perform. They’re there for the purely visceral experience of having an anonymous person shake titties in their face. That is the extent of their involvement in all this...and every time I see their like I can’t help but wonder, Have you people heard of this thing called the internet? It’s great: it’s like Pornotopia, with more T&A than most people a generation ago saw in their entire lives. And you can enjoy it all in the comfort of your own home, without braving the rain or worrying about some pig’s opinion of your blood alcohol content. More to the point, in the privacy of your own home you’re free to say and do whatever you want to your chosen sex object, up to and including jerking off.

Most strippers (save the few “lucky” enough to break into the world of hardcore porno) aren’t provided with a marquee. They never see their name in lights. They do not receive wages, neither salary nor hourly, working exclusively for tips save at a few, enlightened establishments. Theirs is the absolute bottom rung of the service industry latter, and I can’t enter a strip club in the United States without being uncomfortably aware of these, and other equally unfortunate, facts.

So I tipped generously and waited for the Commodore to redress herself. Hugs were exchanged, promises were made, and the combined Executive branch of Monster Island departed. But not before we extended our promise to Commodore: once we’ve got our burlesque house up and running, there were will always be a place for her in its arms.

Holdays Always Make Me Think of Evil

Whereas my friend Nathan said, on his own blog (and church news letter, apparently),

“I enjoy Twinkies and canned ravioli as much as the next fellow, but bringing in our own small crop of corn, tomatoes, and watermelon tended from seeds by our own hand helped me realize that there is something more than magical, something sacred in the harvest. Sometimes we become too insulated from the great but subtle miracles which the Lord has placed in our lives, especially when we see them pre-packaged every day along the shelves in the supermarket. Sometimes we need to see the gifts of God springing forth out of the earth under our own imperfect hands in order to cultivate a spirit of gratitude and thanksgiving for our Father and Creator in all that he has done for us.”

I would say that we in the opulent West go through our entire lives “insulated from the great but subtle miracles“ that lay scattered all about us. We a kept so purposefully, that we might be more compliant, that much more susceptible to crowd control and mass indoctrination. We’re rich and powerful, you see, and if we were aware of even half the evil that goes down around the world every…single…day…we certainly wouldn’t tolerate it. We would not tolerate the destruction of our planet—our one and only home, with its clear cut forests, beheaded mountains, poison streams and lifeless oceans. We would not tolerate even a tenth of the senseless brutalities the human race inflicts upon itself.

We need seasonal shopping sprees to take our minds off all of this. That’s why Franklin Delano Roosevelt invented Thanksgiving on the second-to-last Thursday of November, 1939. Go on. Go look it up. Congress fought him over it, and 22 states (mostly the South…surprised?) didn’t go along with it, but it became a federal law on the books scant months before Pearl Harbor.

Nathan and I do not share the same Lord, however. If I’m to pick a Jesus, I pick the Living Jesus, of whom it is written,

His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?"
"It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."
--The Gospel of Thomas, v. 113

It’s the truth. And with that thought, Merry Thanksgiving and a Happy Christ Mass to come…(thought certain sects continue to warn that celebrating either might just condemn you all to Hell--if so, then I’ll see you there.)

Another Inspiring Message of Hope from Rage Against the Machine

Lewis Black on Life Within the Empire

The$e are the Thoughts That Set Fire 2 Your City (An Inspiring Message of Hope from Rage Against the Machine)

Norman Solomon on Getting Out of Iraq (November 21st, 2005)

Originally published at AlterNet. Note how nothing has changed.

If the Pentagon had been able to subdue the Iraqi population, few in Congress or on editorial pages would be denouncing the war. As in so many other respects, this is a way that the domestic U.S. political dynamics of the war on Iraq are similar to what unfolded during the Vietnam War. With the underpinnings of war prerogatives unchallenged, a predictable response is that the war must be fought more effectively.

That's what the great journalist I. F. Stone was driving at when he wrote, a few years into the Vietnam War, in mid-February 1968: "It is time to stand back and look at where we are going. And to take a good look at ourselves. A first observation is that we can easily overestimate our national conscience. A major part of the protest against the war springs simply from the fact that we are losing it. If it were not for the heavy cost, politicians like the Kennedys [Robert and Edward] and organizations like ADA [the liberal Americans for Democratic Action] would still be as complacent about the war as they were a few years ago."

In the United States, while the lies behind the Iraq war become evermore obvious and victory seems increasingly unreachable, much of the opposition to the war has focused on the death and suffering among U.S. soldiers. That emphasis has a sharp political edge at home, but it can also cut another way -- defining the war as primarily deplorable because of what it is doing to Americans. One danger is that a process of withdrawing some U.S. troops could be accompanied by even more use of U.S. air power that terrorizes and kills with escalating bombardment (as happened in Vietnam for several years after President Nixon announced his "Guam Doctrine" of Vietnamization in mid-1969). An effective antiwar movement must challenge the jingo-narcissism that defines the war as a problem mainly to the extent that it harms Americans.

Brought to you via Once Upon a Time...

Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK) on Eisenhower's Warning to Us All

The only rational being running for President speaks in New Hampshire. And while the corporate media would like to pretend this man does not exist they cannot stop us from learning who he is and what he’s done. This is the man who released the Pentagon Papers to the American public, giving us the until-then secret history of the Vietnam War. This is the man who’s calling for Universal Health Care, a National Initiative program and an immediate (not this September, not next September, not when the next President takes office) withdraw from Iraq. He probably won’t get past the primary season (baring an act of some god or another), yet it is unbelievable refreshing to see someone, somewhere, stumping for these issues…especially now that the corporately anointed candidates have revealed themselves to be mewling, spineless pantywaists.

A New Review and Bill Maher on Life Within the Empire (New Rules for March 15, 2007)

And You Thought It Was Safe (?) Reviews They Live. Enjoy it after Bill.

Noam Chomsky on Modern Industrial Civilization

George Carlin on the Ten Commandments

(Not) Our House

Our first choice for a house was owned by a very nice man. When another group of his tenants suffered a devastating fire in their house he offered them “ours”. We did not get that house.

My Ambassador and I discovered our second choice of a house while on a walk around the neighborhood. We were (or, at least, I was) on a St. Patrick’s Day quest for Guinness and noticed the house. Two blocks down from our current moldering roach trap. Three bedrooms. Two stories. A back yard. A detached, two door garage. A finished basement complete with carpeting and a secret room I’d loved to turn into a Batcave…all this and a tree in the back yard, its branches pruned and sawed away, true, but it was still a live and I planned to see that it grew strong in time…but we were slow.

As a unit, as a household, we were slow. Uncoordinated. There are four of us now: my self, my Co-President Dye, my Ambassador (who is also my love and heart) and our new member who of this writing has not received nearly enough ceremony. She has yet to be initiated into the modern self-made family/nation state we call Monster Island. I supposed she will be Speaker for the Conclave at some point (thereby giving us a Legislative branch to balance our Duel Executive) but that point has yet to come. At present she does not even live with us. And while she has the soul of a patient confidant I have the distinct impression that she is not yet One of Us…and will only become so through the same patient weathering process that drove all of us toward each other and made us all what we are now.

We will find a house. We must. We can no longer manage this place. Rent is up a hundred dollars in three years and we’ve suffered a parade of foolish, self-infatuated toads who’ve posed as our Apartment managers. The current batch are no better than their predecessors. They check smoke detectors. They hand out maintenance request forms. They accept rent checks and general ignore us, their “valuable” tenants. There is no doubt that when (no longer “if”) we get our house they (and their corporate masters) will rape us for every penny they deem necessary to repair all the “wear and tear” in this moist cardboard box.

I suppose I should take another walk. It’s warm enough. Spring has come and my adopted city is green and good again. Who knows what I might find.

My Presidential Predictions

With the Main Event still eighteen months away and the field crowded in what the The Daily Show has rightly termed a “clusterfuck to the White House,” I’m going to go out on a limb here and toss out my prediction for InDecision 2008. Because politics, like war, is quickly becoming a matter of who gets their first with the most, as the current obsession over the candidates first quarter fundraising (Mitt Romney leading the pack with $23 million in the bank) shows us. The most money in the bank and the most boots on the ground. The most Secretaries of State on your campaign staff and the most voting machine companies on your contributors list. The most family friends on the supreme court and the most family members in swing state governorships. And while it is exceedingly hard to measure little things like that at the moment (none of the current candidates have allowed anything more than the usual suspicious signs to flit through the media filter…hell, at this point, they all know no one but the camera crews are really paying attention…they can, at this point, pretty much get away with anything short of going on Larry King and admitting they enjoy sodomizing cheerleaders on the hoods of expensive sports cars) I will go out on a limb and predict that our next president will be…a white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant male.

Surprised?

Preface to Initial Conclusion after One Day of Experimentation in the Field of Modular Thinking

Today I mastered the ability to do my job without the need for directed, conscious thought.

Let me explain: though I am a thoughtful soul, and would never advocate the voluntary suspension of conscious activity. However, as my job does not demand even the slightest pretence of such activity, I would much prefer my cognitive energies be directed toward something else. Anything else.

So I began experimenting, knowing that while the Western tradition is quick to separate body and mind into distinct, oppositional objects, the Eastern tradition is in large part based upon the idea of mind and body affecting each other in a holistic unity. Trance states, hypnosis, self-induced feats of superpowered mental control...all these are, theoretically, possible, in so much as anything is possible. Proceeding thusly, I managed to spend the entire day plotting a scene from my current story, while at the same time working a full days work to my usual high degree of capacity. I know, because my work is so routinized, so autonomic, so absolutely unvarying, that any variance in the movement of my hands, the timbre of my voice, or the inflection in my callers response instantly dragged me from my self-induced, story-plotting state (what my bosses would no doubt label “daydreaming”) and into full attention.

I didn’t fuck up. And I didn’t get caught. Loose yourself in a story, especially one of your own, in any other public place…a school, say…and it wouldn’t be long before the local jumped up authority figure came down on you hard for having a spark of interest in your glassy-eyed stare. (Capital crime in my old school…you could drool all you wanted as long as you trained your eyes to follow the teacher…but all the gods help you if you stared out the window.) But at our jobs we are truly isolated…as apart as you can be in a room full of people, answering the phone all day. The walls of our “pods” (a cubicle by any other name still has three sides and no privacy and no view of anything other than my coworkers cubicles) separate us from each other. The phones separate us from our “customers”. Office doors separate our supervisors from us and miles of distance separate me from my home, this apartment, this chair, and the…absolutely…beautiful creature sleeping in my bed…

The point is, no one noticed me. Tonight I came home, wrote down what I’d thought about, and found enough inspiration in that to write more. It was (even though my superstitions make me loath to admit it) a good day, all told. I hope to repeat my experiment tomorrow. Whoever may read this: wish me well. I’d do the same for you.

April Fool

The scene: 9:45 a.m. I’ve just woken up.
Her: “You know those at home pregnancy tests?”
Me: “Um…yes…”
Her: “Well…I already took one…and you know what…we should play the lottery…because we’re good at beating long odds.”
Me: “…you’ve got be fucking kidding me. There’s no way. There’s just no way.”
Her: “There’s something else.”
Me:…what is it?
Her:...April Fools!

Spring is here and I feel a profound sense of disconnection. For the past months I’ve only felt comfortable when truly alone. When you’re alone there is no self-censorship. No selective omission. No need for strategic truths. When you’re alone you’re completely cut off from the responsibility of interacting with others. It is a condition as liberating as it is potentially dehumanizing.

Most of the time I long for nothing more than a quiet moment to myself. A moment to stare and think. An hour. An entire day. I rarely find time for things, being that I (foolishly, perhaps) chose to live in a major American urban center…with people that I love…rather than go all Walden on everyone. If, as Thoreau said, “A man is measured by the things he can leave behind,” then I have certainly inherited the dreaded “short gene.” I am too lazy to build a cabin in the woods and too antisocial to do anything else. I work all day at my mechanized job, and at night I lock myself inside a room and star into my computer. This soul-less, humming box that is certainly inhuman in its unfailing ability to do only what it is told.

I feel as if I have assimilated some of its less-enjoyable traits. I, too, seem to suffer from a bad habit of doing what I’m told, of acquiescing to other’s needs, of not getting what I want, or even knowing what that is. Of having nothing to want…or wanting only the impossible.

Jagger said, “If you try some times, you just might find you get what you need.” I will continue to try. Otherwise all of this is going to turn balls-up, into the sixth season of Buffy. And nobody wants that. That would just be maudlin.

Shamless Friend Promotion

This month my roommate, Action, is a guest D.J. over at church of girl radio. Those who frequent this page are herby ordered to listen to her chosen songs. There is no better, quicker, or more efficient way to fathom the depths of her. As I writer, I find her autobiography (visible for free) a work of craft, while her occasional bouts of self-expression (rough and ready though they are) have the spark of true Art.