Male gazes in a female sanctum

On Saturday night, I did something I've been wanting to do for a while: went to a male strip club. A dear friend, A, called and said that a friend of hers had bought a table for a girls' night out, and that I was the fist person she thought of when her friend told her to bring another person. (A and I and several other friends had a plan last summer to go to this very club after we saw Magic Mike. Cliched, yes, but we were excited about it.)

What I did not expect, and what became A's favorite moment of the night, was that I would lean over to her from our VIP couches and comment, "The male gaze is all over this place." I'm not even sure that men are allowed in, but the desire of the straight male was the backbone of the entertainment. Unlike Magic Mike, which features dancers in a Tampa strip club who do routines, the bulk of the show at this joint was what the dancers would do to women in the "hot seats." They were brought up on stage in groups of six and, one by one, lifted and grinded and ravished by the dancer on stage with them. I'm not easily shocked, and even I turned red when one of that dancers put his face through the leg hole of a woman's thong.

I know my experience with this is limited by fiction and by my experience in one particular club, but I wasn't expecting a venue that caters explicitly to straight (and often engaged) straight women to indulge so heavily in tropes that would attract straight males. I wonder, too, how many of the men performing these acts might actually be gay. The most pandering to things straight women purportedly want was when one of the dancers was billed as "the original Magic Mike."

Less surprising was the blatant pandering to American military and civic power in a segment with different dancers dressed as Marines, policemen, firefighters, and a Navy Seal. What A and I didn't expect was the introductory film strip that featured, prominently, footage from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We were not among those who cheered.

It was interesting, invasive, and also often hilarious (not all at once). I left feeling slightly dirtied, slightly confused, and slightly intrigued by one of the dancers. I have never seen so many dollar bills on one floor.