Stripping away Society

I've been to a couple of strip clubs, both openly in Amsterdam and on the sleazy underground scene in the UK, and I was always left wondering at what a bizzare ritual it is, beneath the visible surface of "Whoo - Hot chick getting dirty."

As flatly as possible: In the UK I went last to a semi-legal Stripper's night at a Working men's club, hidden away on the outskirts of Nottingham. Large basement club, probably a dancehall in its better days, filled with pissed middle-aged workmen served by middle-aged topless waitresses who had all seen much, much better days. Three strippers came on, and proceeded to strip with all the eroticism of a mechanic taking off his dirty overalls after a hard day at the garage. After a lot of squatting and the inserting of various household fruits the threesome pulled some poor sod out of the crowd, tied him to a chair, cut off his clothes, laughed at his admittedly short and frightened dick, and then with the help of some of his colleagues carried him out and dumped him naked on the street. Then they walked about, still nude, with pint glasses to collect tips from the strangely subdued and silent audience. I gave her a pound coin, which was enough to elicit a small shrug and a wobble.

In the red light district of Amsterdam we were ushered up some stairs into a large space and packed bizzarely into old church pews set back on tiers, like an old amphitheatre, from a small dark stage. No entrance fee, but exhorbitantly-priced (and manditory) drinks. The first act came on naked, selected a willing volunteer and stripped off his shirt. She shaved a small bare patch on his chest, then, inserting a marker pen into her vagina, she wrote "I love you" across his pecs in a fair copperplate hand, or rather pussy. The second act was a small Asian woman in a towel, and a big fat naked guy sitting in a deck chair reading a newspaper. After some amateur acting they got down to business doggystyle, with great concentration on the part of the guy, and some cavernous stage-yawns from the lady. the third and final act was a chubby, vivacious and rather petite blonde, whose party piece was to insert a banana, squat and arch herself way off the stage and invite people to take a nibble.

Well worth a couple of watery and overpriced beers, but more freak-show than sex-show.

But why does stripping exist at all..? I mean, go ask any little girl in school what she wants to be when she grows up... "Please Miss, I wanna be a stripper." Is going to fall pretty low on the list. Does anyone really choose to be a stripper..?

Let's talk about egg-boxes for a while. And social topography: Say I put down a whole lot of empty egg-boxes down on the floor and then start chucking ping-pong balls at them. (You can do this at home folks). Anyway, they may bounce around a bit but soon they'll settle - Where will they sit..? That's right - in the holes. Why..? Because that's the easiest, most stable place to rest.

Not impressed..? You should be. Did the balls create the landscape..? Could they have chosen to settle anywhere but in the holes..? No and no. Their behaviour was dictated to them by forces outside of their control.

This principle works on any scale: The Universal laws of physics dictate what kind of matter can exist, in what forms. Matter, and the interactions its nature allows between the differing types, dictate the formation of enviroments. Enviromental conditions dictate wether or not life is possible, and if so, the forms of life that can live there. The requirements that a lifeform must fulfil in order to maintain itself, its needs, dictate the way in which it lives. Its society. Only at this very end point do the capabilities and properties of the individual, together with great big chunks of random luck, dictate the position that individual will occupy within that society.

So far, all these stages have been physical topographies. But once a society of thinking beings has been created, that society creates yet another topography wholly of itself, another egg-box.

Back to our experiment - Okay, so by now I've chucked in enough ping-pong balls so that almost all of the holes are filled. But I still have a bucketful of balls left. I throw some more on, now where do they rest..? Easy - they come to rest supported on the shoulders of their brothers: The 'Underballs'. These new 'Overballs' have found new positions of stability that did not exist before the lower strata of ping-pong society was formed. They 'prey' if you like upon the lower balls, and rather than working directly to support themselves, derive a living by offering an 'unnecessary' but desired service to those members of the ping-pong society that are willing to support them.

But basically, everyone born, needs a hole. And when there are enough people to fill all the nice, respectable holes... Then people start choosing from the lesser degrees of many evils. Men like to look at naked women. People need money... You don't need to be Nostradamus.

ie: We may not be able to predict exactly which individual will suddenly stick on the pasties and start putting scissor-locks on a poor, innocent pole under a hot spotlight, but we can predict with absolute certainty that someone will. Strippers, like hitmen and sewage disposal workers, are inevitable. There is nothing ethical or unethical about it, no-one to blame, unless you want to blame E=mC2, or the laws of thermodynamics.

So, now we have a basic concept of stage; audience; woman taking off clothes. Simple. But what real purpose does it serve..?

For a start, it's not an exercise in sexual relief or gratification for the audience - it's a exercise in frustration. It's a crazy concept. Imagine you are thirsty, you walk into a shop licenced to sell miscellaneous beverages. You pay your money and this sleek, curvaceous bottle of cool water bounces out onto a small stage and, after some rythmic gyrations, coyly removes it's cap. It stretches and contorts, flashes a bit of open neck - maybe sprinkles a few drops of raw H2O on your face - and suddenly you're gasping, your throat's constricted, dry as a whistle - you'd be sweating like a pig if you had any moisture left in your body to spare - trembling, you reach out to grasp it, drink it...

...And some huge bouncer jumps out from behind a curtain and beats you to a pulp.

So now you're bloody, beaten, poorer, and even more thirsty than you were when you first went in. Then you do it again. This time maybe tucking a few more precious Dollars under the dancing bottle's plastic ring for good measure. Or perhaps saving up your cash for that really exotic foreign water from the darkest reaches of the Ivory coast that you saw advertized last time.

Fun..? Duh. Madness.

Still - Naked women dancing about. Men sitting around like lemons with hard-ons. No harm done. Trouble is it never just stays like that. Strippers, whilst they may comfort themselves that they are exploiting the hormones of any singular spectator, are still bound into the role of having to please the audience en massé to earn their daily bread. The trouble comes when the industry starts to compete with itself to first meet, then anticipate the desires of its audience for flesh.

A quick flash becomes blatent full frontal. Full frontal becomes spread wide. See how much can I cram in there. Full sex. Watch the dog. The horse. Whoops, I just peed myself. Shit myself. Tie me up and stick needles through my thighs till I cry. Hurt me. Beat me. Burn me. Kill me..?

Don't kid yourself, it happens. For every drop-dead gorgeous stripper there are a hundred so-so ones, and for each one of those there are a hundred more real boilers. Of those boilers there'll always be a couple so desperate that they're prepared to do some really awful stuff to make ends meet. And equally there will always be some people jaded enough, bored enough, or simply just fucked up enough, as to want to see them do it.

Curiousity creates availability. Availibility encourages demand. For anything. As a race, we're bored. Don't believe me..? Let me tell you a story:

Winter of 2006 I was in a Bus crash. The bus I was travelling on to work hit a woman crossing the road and splashed her brains out all over the asphalt. She had been carrying her shopping and there was food scattered all about her corpse. Crushed chicken was mixed in with her brain tissue. Her long skirt was up over her thin white thighs and her jumper was rucked up under her breasts revealing her untanned midriff. This was a devout muslim woman who'd been wearing a headscarf, normally you would never even see her ankles.

We were sat there until the traffic police came about twenty minutes later. No-one covered the corpse. People with mobile-phones got off the bus and took pictures. People grumbled about the delay. Cars slowed down to rubberneck. One person said "Don't look, it is shameful." She was ignored.

...Continued...