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The Mundane Behavior of Strip Club Regulars: A Book Review
Katherine Frank. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 331 pgs. $19.95. ISBN 0-8223-2972-7
Reviewed by Lisa Johnson, English, Coastal Carolina University
...The focus of G-Strings and Sympathy is on the strip club regular—men who frequent a club or a number of clubs daily, weekly, or monthly, who find these visits satisfying and consider it a significant personal practice (xxiv). Resisting the cultural tendency to sensationalize strip clubs and what goes on inside them, Frank instead analyzes strip club patronage in relation to parallel leisure practices, seeing in the strip club regular many of the same characteristics attributed to the contemporary “tourist” of John Urry’s work in The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990). The strip club provides a space separate from home and work in which to relax, socialize, and engage in conspicuous consumption; through architecture and ambience, it combines the masculinized pleasures of sports bar, golf club house, and Tahitian beach. While some customers attribute the appeal of the strip club to the excitement of the exotic—the sexual, racial, and economic otherness encountered there—many regulars consistently downplay the erotic and exotic aspects of this space in interviews with Frank, adopting a blasé attitude of “seeing through” the illusions of the dancers’ costumes, stage names, and performed lasciviousness. This inversion of the exotic with the everyday is for regulars a way of constructing themselves as worldly and perceptive, not the dupes of feminine wiles and capitalist exploitation that mainstream American culture might see them as. They are “post-tourists” of the red light district, articulating a personal aesthetics of the mundane, unshocked and unhussled.
G-Strings and Sympathy is at least as interested in the other half of these men’s lives—their relationships and marriages—as it is in the time they spend at “Diamond Doll’s” or “Tina’s Revue.” Yet Frank examines the link between marriage and the sex industry in a way that resists simplistic truisms about intimacy, honesty, and fantasy. “[S]trip clubs,” writes Frank, “are not necessarily antithetical to marriage, as some social theorists and community members would like to think, but neither are they unrelated to it. In fact, visits to the clubs are related to particular ways of practicing marriage (and heterosexual relationships more generally) that make this a desirable venue for some men” (xxi). Drawing on the work of psychologist Otto Kernberg and the field of object relations, Frank interprets the behaviors of strip club regulars in terms of triangulation; the male customer can play out certain fantasies of introducing a rival to his wife without the wife necessarily knowing or witnessing the imagined struggle. In this way, he expresses what some psychologists perceive as inherent in intimacy and long-term romantic commitments: aggression towards the love object. The strip club, then, is used as a tool to maintain an otherwise uncomfortable monogamy imperative. It is not antithetical to marriage; it is marriage’s exotic alter-ego.
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