Eaves - Bare: on women, dancing, sex, and power

This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright 2002 by Elisabeth Eaves

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eaves, Elisabeth, {date}
Bare : on women, dancing, sex, and power / by Elisabeth Eaves.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81449-4
1. Women dancersUnited StatesBiography. 2. Striptease.
3. StripteaseSocial aspects. 4. Sex in dance. I. Title
GV 1799.4 . E 15 2002
792.70280820973dc21 2002069373

v3.1

To preserve anonymity, some names and identifying details have been changed.

I would like to thank Samuel G. Freedman, Betsy Lerner, Peter Gethers, and Leyla Aker for helping to shape this book.

I am especially grateful to all the women and men who appear in these pages. Many of them opened their lives to me and trusted that I would tell their stories fairly, which I have tried to do.

And finally, I thank my parents for teaching me to explore, think, and work.

You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at.

Edmund to Fanny in Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

I was naked.

I looked at my reflection in the dressing room mirror. At five minutes to the hour, I noticed faint sweat beads on my forehead. At four minutes to, I patted my face with flesh-colored powder. With three minutes to go, I remembered that I was supposed to punch in. I slipped my time card into the clock, which gripped it for a second, made a loud clunk, and let it go. At two minutes to the hour, I brushed my hair for the fifth time and stepped back into the black shoes that I had kicked aside.

When the clock ticked over to seven p.m., I was supposed to climb the three steps through the narrow bottleneck between the dressing room and the stage. I hesitated, and April, who had been having a smoke down the hall, materialized in the dressing room, liberated herself from a sarong and jean jacket, then strode past me and up the stairs without so much as a glance in the mirror. Venus came the other way, out of the bottleneck, and paused on the landing to punch out. Clunk! Even in my apprehension I admired the efficiency. Then Georgia came down the steps, a leggy brunette in a pearl necklace. She didnt punch out; it was her turn to take a break.

The clock was on the zero, as the managers said, so with one last breath I mounted the stairs and entered a dazzling scarlet and silver womb. The stage was a rectangular room about the size and shape of a hallway in a modest suburban home. The floor was carpeted with red velvet, and every other surface, including the ceiling, was mirrored. The space was lit by hot theatrical lights covered with pink and red gels, giving the three women who were already in it a rosy glow. I joined them with the sense that I was stepping into a well-oiled machine.

Onstage were Sasha, a creamy-skinned redhead in black gloves and thigh-high boots; Satin, a tall, caramel-colored woman in a curly bobbed wig; and April, whose wavy blond hair cascaded to her thighs. And then there was me, Leila, five feet seven inches tall, in black knee-high stockings, my lips painted plum wine according to the label on the tube, my body pale, my blond hair shiny from multiple brushings. I was surprised to realize that I didnt look out of place. From a quick, sidelong glance at the mirror I could barely pick myself out of the group. I was just one of the naked women, and the anonymity was reassuring.

While the stage had only one entrance and exit, which I had just come through, it had twelve windows. Each window was covered with a mirrored screen when it was not in use. I heard the clink of coins hitting coins and then the low whirring sound of a lifting screen. I turned my head to where the sound was coming from and saw a man appearing on the other side of a pane of glass. First his waist, then his chest, and finally his face appeared as the mirror lifted away. He was white and middle-aged and wore a beige jacket. If he had disappeared a second later, I wouldnt have recalled a single detail of his appearance. He stared at me expectantly. I glanced around at the other dancers for guidance, but they were all looking elsewhere, so I approached the man, trying to exude confidence that I didnt feel.

I neednt have worried. I watched his eyes follow my different body parts as he decided where he wanted to settle them. He seemed to be a breast man. Closer to the window now, I looked down as he undid his pants. I danced for about two minutes, he came, the screen went down over the glass. Whirrr.

That was how my hours on the red stage began. It wasnt my very first time onstage; I had danced for about eight minutes during my audition. The only difference now was that I would do this for the next three hours. The strangest thing about it was that it wasnt very strange. I had never done this work before, but it felt like a fragment of a dream coming back to me. There was the music, and I was dancing to it; that wasnt new. There were the mirrored walls, much like a dance studio or a health club. And there were men watching me. Always, it seemed, men had been watching me, assessing, surmising, deciding. Even the masturbating strangers werent without precedentI had run across public masturbators before. Once a taxi driver had done it in front of a friend and me, and we had yelled at him and made him stop. I felt onstage as though a combination of different experiences had been scrambled in a machine and come out as something familiar but new. My only fear was that three hours of this would make my legs ache.

Half of the windows were two-ways, through which I could see the customer on the other side. The rest, the one-ways, reflected my own image. The one-ways were easy, like dancing in front of a mirror at home. The two-ways were harder to get used to. I watched the men behind them watch me, and sometimes one of them looked up at my face, even up beyond my mouth, and made eye contact, and it was hard to say who was more disconcerted, him or me.

Through the two-ways I saw their heads bob and swivel, their attention flicker around the stage before alighting on a particular body. Most of them smiled, and some even tried to talk, but I couldnt hear them well and didnt much want to anyway. Some tried to communicate with facial and hand gestures, only some of which I could decipher. One made frantic licking motions, another did a miniature breaststroke intended to convey spread your pussy.

Just tell him you dont want to go swimming, called Georgia from across the stage. She was back from her ten-minute break, and now Satin had disappeared.

One guy pointed his finger in the air and circled his forearm, possibly asking me to turn around. My first instinct was to complyI was in the habit of being accommodating when I was in a new jobbut then I remembered that I didnt have to, and stopped midturn.