Mikarrhea

Foxy Ladies





Earlier in the week, Mia had circulated a call to go out Saturday night to strip clubs in Providence (where, unlike in Massachusetts, you can legally have haptic relations (albeit highly ritualized ones) with professionals displaying their labia), so I skipped the final banquet of the Philly conference and flew home. Greta met me at the airport and we zoomed down to Providence, where, more or less feeling about in the dark, we stumbled upon a very nice restaurant, Z-bar, at which we realized we'd eaten a couple of years prior, on what may well have been our last Providential ecdysiast safari. It was the time, anyway, Greta borrowed a stripper's, um, costume (which, in accordence with The Universal Law of Sex Attire, took exponentially longer to don than doff) and shed it thoroughly during an amateur set garnering fifty-odd dollar-bills and the manager's instant offer of a full time position.

I don't know whether it's that we're polite or dress weird or exude pheromones or something but everybody is always astonishingly nice to us, even without our offering to shed clothes. We made great friends at Z-bar with the hostess and waitresses, who zippily supplanted Greta's medicinal orange-vodka "breakfast [sic (and sick)] martini" ("I forgot to tell you the bartender says nobody ever likes them") with a substantial Sapphire and gave us interestingly precise directions to the Foxy Lady.

When we got there, veteran strip club maven Sherman and enthusiastic disciples Mia, Desirée, and Eliza were already dollar-stuffing garters big time. It made me really happy that Mia said she liked being Mia in Mikarrhea. And Eliza lamented that she didn't yet have a blogonym, so after a few moments we came up with "Eliza," which Eliza said she'd always wanted to be called, so I promised then I'd call her Eliza in this sentence here, now.

I like the Smullyanesque tempero-referential unheimlichkeit of that sentence.

Speaking of unheimlichkeit and venues where flesh is sold and sex and smoke swirl you breathless: isn't it hilarious that Freud's whole theory of the "uncanny" germinated from his reaction to unintentionally finding himself three times in succession wandering among Viennese lupanars?

Oops! Vat am I doink in zhe prostitute district? Better make zis vay home. Achtung vher I'm goink! [zwanzig minuten später] Oops! Vat am I doink in zhe prostitute district again?! Must haf taken a wrong turn somevher. . . . Now vee goink shtraight home right away! Mach schnell!. . . . [zwanzig minuten später] Ach, du Lieber! Wiedermals! Again, zhe Vienna district for connecting up with zhe prostitutes[Die Wienerprostitutenanschlussbezirk!] Vat is zhis funny feelink I'm haffing? It's, ja, it's the uncanny!

The big difference I noticed in the couple of years since I've been in a strip club is the unremarkable inclusion of female customers, both those "escorted" by males and those not. (What a wonderful word, escorted! It's very insistence on platonism doomed it to an ineluctable tarring with sexual meaning by onrushing language's ironic swipers.) In the admission line behind us (a line otherwise, I concede, sequencing forty-or-so testosterone-twitchy butt-pocketed wallets) there was a pair of conventional (i.e., plainly presenting neither as obvious sexworkers, nor lesbians, nor sex-scene-makers) young women in bland jeans, sweatshirts, and long straight hair, looking like they might as well be queued for the late show of the remake (whose idiotic idea was that?) of Walking Tall, starring the Rock (who on SNL once looked really cute--and, well, almost passable in a Cory Eversonish way--decked out in drag doing a skit with Drunk Girl). I'm not saying they weren't lesbians or sexworkers or whatever, just that they weren't presenting themselves that way, and that fact was taken totally in stride.

In the "old" days, take it from veteran strip-club maven Mika, the customary demeanor of the one or two female customers --always accompanied by a male-- in a crowded strip club was a visibly game performance of polite interest, edgy raciness, and the desire to show willingness to dutifully accompany her guy into the very bowels of masculinity. That's a figure of speech, of course, not a euphemism for fisting, a propensity for which neither dyad member would ever be advertising. Performers either ignored the female partner, assuming a lack of real attraction, or offered her a few perfunctory spread-legged genuflections in the interest of feminism, before venturing on with erotic fires ablaze again before the penis-obliged wallet perched woozily on the stool next door. Female customers would never ask for, let alone receive, lap dances.

A few years ago, when we would go to the strip clubs somewhat regularly with Sherman, the situation had changed markedly. Some performers would perform enthusiastically for women, some wouldn't. Some would gladly give you lap dances, many would decline and look at you with the offended superciliousness of mainstream homophobia.

But last Saturday at the Foxy Lady, women totally ruled! Not a single performer in any way stinted any of the women in our gang. On the contrary, the women got boobs rubbed all over their faces, faces in crotches biting the insides of their thighs, clitorises rubbed on the backs of their necks, totally wild pitches at arousal--and the guys mostly got the standard ritual face rub between boobs. The women on stage and the women in the audience were totally bonding around real (ok, controlled, but much more real than the men's) sex!

As we left, our scantily clad waitress, who was gorgeous, said to Greta, "I don't usually do this, but I wanted to give you this." And gave her her phone number. Her name is Sarah.