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Thread: Books:  For Us And By Us

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    Default Books:  For Us And By Us

    Saw a book about stripping while at the book store today. Thought you all might be interested.

    Bare
    by
    Elizabeth Eaves.

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    Member violet's Avatar
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    Default Re: Books: For Us And By Us

    haven't seen that one, but i got Strip City by Lily Burana a few months ago for my birthday and i LOVED it.

    i'd recommend that book to anyone.
    i'm a vegetarian because i hate plants.

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    God/dess Zofia's Avatar
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    Default Re: Books: For Us And By Us

    Lily Burana used to post at Tre's site and was just a wonderful person! I read her book too, and it's great! Makes me want to go on tour.

    Z

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    Veteran Member anais's Avatar
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    Default Re: Books: For Us And By Us

    Anyone read Bare?

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    Default Re: Books: For Us And By Us

    I went to the book store to look for this book and it was not in the computer. What book store did you find it from? What is it about? What did you think of the LILY Burana book? I found it to be a little slow...

  6. #6
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    Default Found some info

    Elizabeth Eaves isn't a journalist who went undercover as a stripper, nor a writer who interviewed a group of women who stripped for a living. No, for years she stripped for the money, plain and simple, not with an eye on an eventual book contract. Only later, after she'd become a professional journalist with a B.A. in International Studies, a Columbia University graduate degree, and experience working for Reuters in Jerusalem and London, did she revisit her past in the industry. (Her writing -- cold and clinical -- has the dispassion of both the professional international journalist and the jaded stripper -- she's a walking double whammy of two types who've seen it all.) The passing years had deepened her fascination with society's attitudes about strippers. Unable to answer her own questions about why she chose sex work, she hunted down former colleagues, left New York for a Seattle strip job, and began what would become Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power.

    In her first run as a stripper, a curious Eaves answered a newspaper ad asking for strippers, did a naughty practice run with her then-boyfriend, and ended up employed by Seattle's Lusty Lady, a female-run operation whose employees were famously well-treated. During her job interview, she was asked to watch the dancing women through a coin-operated slot that opened a view through a one-way mirror. There, the statuesque "Korina," wearing only a pair of white go-go boots, danced her way over to the mirror, turned around, spread her legs, and bent over. Eaves was stunned by such a blatant display of the private recesses of the female body, but she was also mesmerized by Korina's boldness, by the dancer's utter lack of restraint, and by the sheer liberation of seeing sexual power exercised with such boldness. "It wasn't that I wanted Korina," she writes. "I wanted to be Korina."

    She enters her muse's world soon enough, paid a paltry $10 an hour to start, and the glimpses of life as a stripper begin. One enterprising peep-show co-worker uses a speculum to charge customers for a look at her cervix. Eaves never speculates about why a gynecologically close-up view of the vagina holds such appeal to the clientele, though she does make it clear that it's a popular item on the menu. Throughout the book, compelling tidbits like this are casually dropped, and the lack of her professional opinion as both journalist and former sex worker makes Bare more hollow and less substantial than Eaves' insider commentary might have made it. But if we get nothing but facts, well, they're fascinating facts about a world that holds an undeniable dark appeal.

    Popular culture abounds with the notions that strippers "have" to strip and lack viable job options, that they're drug addicts, that they're less intelligent than workers outside the sex industry, that they're abused, amoral, or in need of rescue. Unfocused or not, Eaves' attempt at showing the reality of the modern stripper as independent woman captaining her own six-figure destiny blows the lid off any number of movie and TV stereotypes readers deserve to be rid of. The book can be seen as a methodical gathering of evidence attempting to prove that sex work can be just a job, that there is no shame in it, and that it offers significant financial reward to those young, smart, beautiful and strong enough to survive its unique demands.

    If the book has a theme, it's the exploration of limits. OK, you strip behind a one-way mirror, but do you do a peep show with a man you can see and talk to? OK, you do the peep show, but do you do a lap dance? OK, you do a lap dance, but do you do bachelor parties (where it's just you, another 110-pound woman, and 10 drunken, horny men -- alone in a house together)? OK, you do bachelor parties, but do you have sex for pay (when, say, the money is good and the man is disease-free and nice to you)? In Bare, Eaves explores successive strata of paid sexual transgressions, discovers her own boundaries, and reports on others' as well.

    Eaves' approach is unusual: her work isn't a memoir, as she spends much of the book detailing anecdotes and engrossing glimpses of the lives of her many former co-workers thrown in.

    Bare, like a trip to a strip bar, lets you feel a few shameless thrills, allows your darker desires to rise to the occasion, gives you an objective and brutally deconstructed view of male-female interactions, and sends you home smarter about the freakish and endlessly fascinating world of sex.

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    Default Re: Books:  For Us And By Us

    I just finished reading Bare a few minutes ago. I thought it was a pretty good read, though at the end she had a pretty derogatory view of dancing as a profession, and the book did not (in my opinion) do much to silence the stereotypes associated with dancing. Overall, I enjoyed reading it, though. I found Elizabeth's friends to be far more interesting than her, as she seems to me to be pretty reserved and not very comfortable with her choice of working as a dancer. When I bought it, I was not aware that her own experience was centered mainly around the peep-show profession...myself being only familiar with club dancing, it was interesting to get a glimpse into another branch of the profession. It was also very interesting to see how clubs are in another region (the book takes place in Seattle, whereas I have danced only on the East Coast, and the Midwest).

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    Default Re: Books:  For Us And By Us

    On another note, I forgot to add that I absolutely LOVED Strip City, which I read last year. I would recommend it to anyone. Does anyone know of any other books by us, for us?
    Last edited by layla_x; 11-23-2004 at 07:34 PM. Reason: typo which affected spelling!

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    Default Re: Books:  For Us And By Us

    Illusions I forget the author

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    Default Re: Books:  For Us And By Us

    Butterflies of the Night: Mama-sans, Geisha, Strippers, and the Japanese Men They Serve, by Lisa Louis (about the industry in Japan)

    Behind the G-String: An Exploration of the Strippers Image, Her Person, and Her Meaning by David Scott (an intellectual PL from Canada analyzes the SC experience. Some good thoughts)

    Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry by Ronald Weitzer (scientific and full of stereotypes)

    An interesting article by McCaghy and Skipper is "Stripping: Anatomy of a Deviant Lifestyle" which appeared in the journal Life Styles, Diversity in American Society in 1972.

    Wagner and Wagner did another study, where they tested strippers, flashers, and housewives for sexual disturbance, exhibitionism, and aggression. Strippers scored higher on exhibition than the exhibitionists, but scored normal on teh disturbed and aggressive scale.

    That's from the bibliography of a paper I did for a sociology class, so a lot of it's pretty dry.



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