Why I like strip clubs

Best and most quintessentially JAP threat of my NY trip: "If you do that, I will wear sneakers to your wedding."

This is not as good as my previous trip's top quote,  a man in Queens shouting "Nigga, I will put a cap in yo' ass!" Not to me, thankfully.

Speaking ofNew York things, my friend and I had a decadent excursion last night in which I received four - four! - lap dances. Three from the same ridiculously hot woman. Like a good feminist, I spent a fair amount of timing considering the gender implications of the venue.

I like strip clubs. I like any scenario in which a smoking hot woman invests time in making herself look and smell amazing and then gyrates around on my lap. In my years of gaying it up with various fantastic women, I have encountered only two who wear sexy lingerie and only one who could put on the kittenish aggression of a lap dancer, albeit not very convincingly. I have met exactly zero who were as tasty-smelling and flawlessly made-up as a girl in a club. Real life girlfriends just don't manage that, myself included. I think I go farther than most in my quest to be a fantasy girl around my partner, but I really can't be bothered to put on make-up if I'm not going out and my Reed College Renn Fayre Softball t-shirt is often irresistibly more comfortable than lingerie.

Plus, women aren't generally attracted to me. So if I want a girl on my lap, $20 is a hell of a lot easier (and actually cheaper) than the epic endeavor of finding someone who'll do the same for free. More importantly, I want a girl on my lap. If she wanted to be on my face as well, so much the better - but what I don't want is a relationship. I have one. One is enough.

Now, I used to think I wasn't the kind of person who would lead someone on or misrepresent what they wanted. Then I met a woman so attractive I selfishly stayed mum about my intentions and dodged her attempts at relationship talk because I knew it would harm my chances of continuing to sleep with her. After about two weeks we did talk about it and I am no longer pouncing her, but my point is that lust can breed dishonesty and when all we want is sex it's hard to be honest about it - especially with women, as women have been taught that nice girls don't have sex-based relationships. One solution is to try to change the stigmatisation of casual sluttery; another is to condone aspects of the sex industry. I like to do both.

I think if I could pay a non-coerced professional prostitute to have sex with me that would be more ethical, and just as enjoyable, as having sex with a woman I knew I was screwing metaphorically as well as physically be implying a forthcoming relationship I knew I would never follow through with.

As that's illegal in the places I live and visit, the next best thing is lap dances. I could go to a gay bar and chat up a mediocre-looking girl in horrifically sensible shoes and

A) explain that I have a boyfriend and just want to grind up to her and have her on my lap (that would go down well, I'm sure) or

B) imply I am actually interested in her as a person and want to see her again and lie my way into her pants

Or I could have a straightforward financial transaction in which everyone is clear about what they are getting and giving.

The transactional situation is perhaps more balanced for me because I could, I assume, become a stripper myself and would be perfectly happy to provide her with the same service for the same price. So I mentally put myself in her six-inch-high shoes and behave as I would want a client to behave were I her.

The honest fantasy of strip clubs is great. And I enjoy receiving the attention of women who are out of my league. For me, hot women are mainly inaccessible because most women are straight, I have hang-ups about bisexuals, and a large number of lesbians seem to view such basics as razors, lace g-strings, and anti-frizz hair serum as unacceptable tools of the patriarchy. For me, I am consoled by being bisexual and professionally hot - two men asked me out on my way to the strip club so I could have consoled myself with them had I been so inclined. But some strip club patrons aren't interested in men and yet pretty much all hot women are out of their league. I like that such people can occasionally buy the hot-girl experience the same way a poor guy with an '88 Volvo can save his pennies and rent an Aston Martin for the day.

Strip clubs are not, however, entirely forced for good, and I'll end with just one of the things I don't like. While the club I went to had a range of heights, races and chest sizes, all the women were between skinny and slim. I find it hard to believe clients would object to someone with at least an average amount of fat. Even aside from the disappointment I feel as someone whose ideal is a 12-petite and who sees only sizes 6 to 8 in a club, the implications of this are grim. In restricting its performers to a certain body size, the club commodifies thinness and implies that other body types are literally worthless.

Why I am not Oxford and London's best bellydancer

Time and again I am bemused by my fellow UK bellydancers who advertise with phrases such as "London's best bellydance classes" or who register domains such as the now-disabled www.bestbellydancer.com. To claim one's performance or classes are the best is both gauche and factually suspect, unless one is making a joke like "Best bellydancer in Saddlestring, Wyoming!" when one is, fact, the only bellydancer in Saddlestring. Did van Gogh advertise "Best paintjob in London!" in the time he spent there? Did Martha Graham take out adverts saying her studio was the best in NYC? Quite right.

Not only are such claims logically questionable, they downgrade bellydance from an art to a trade. Because it may be possible to identify an area's "best" mechanic or cabinet-maker but art remains a matter of taste.

And the antagonizing hubris of such claims does not even require comment.

Visa application

Question from a UK visa application:
"Have you, or any dependants who are applying with you engaged in
any other activities which might indicate that you may not be
considered to be persons of good character?"
That's so vague! I'm tempted to answer "yes" and write an ashamed, detailed confession of how I sometimes watch rather gruesome German bukkake porn.

I am in New York

I am in New York visiting, riding, bellydancing, and having a yoga instructor crank me into stress positions that would probably violate the Geneva Conventions if I weren't paying for the privilege.

Anyway. Fantastic exchange this morning:

"Did you see the article about the Jewish women wearing burkas?"

"That's horrible!...It threatens my smug sense of cultural superiority."

Indeed, a few Jewish women have adopted the burka and there are several articles available online about it, such as this one at Lilith: http://www.lilith.org/blog/2008/01/orthodox-jewish-women-wear-burkas-and-their-men-dont-like-it/ I don't like the attitude of some articles that the women must be stopped. While I agree the jewburka wearers are odd and the movement's leader may be an unpleasant person, people should be free to wear whatever they damn well please when they walk down the street.

I am reading Morag Murray's My Khyber Marriage, which a friend from the blogosphere gave me upon our real-life meeting, and the author describes traveling to Afghanistan just after World War I to live with her husband, a chieftan's son she'd met whilst he was at university in Scotland. Morag casually mentions her burka at several points but it is always a casual aside, as when she mentions moving aside the niqab part to eat. But eighty pages into the book she has yet to properly comment on, let alone judge, the garment. I am intrigued that something that seems so radically foreign to me, living - as she did - in the UK, should be adopted so silently and with seeming ease.

Squeaks of pleasure

It appears one can get married in the Bodleian Library.

On ownership

I am content with what I own.

Apart from a tendency to buy satin knickers at Debenhams when I'm stressed (in a classically Freudian sublimation of the libido into the fetishization and pursuit of consumer goods -- see, if I say it like that it sounds like a fancier and more sophisticated problem), I have never been very excited about consuming. The anticipation, the shopping, the shiny newness are all nice, but I'd rather do other things with my time. And I feel uncomfortable when possessions are duplicates or if they are not exactly right. I am an extremely particular shopper, which makes most forms of shopping rather intense and tedious.

But I do love owning things. I love useful things, but I love beautiful things even more - and perhaps most of all, objects that are both useful and beautiful, like a Tuareg dining table or a perfect black handbag or an elegant pen. Marxists might suggest this is an extension of foolish consumerism, but the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement is a more accurate lens. William Morris once said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” and I believe the ideal is for everything in one's house to be beautiful and useful. A certain gentleman friend of mine, for instance, exemplifies this in being both decorative and able to fix my website problems.

Ownership makes me feel rich, happy and content and I am sated with it. I have all the furniture, clothing, shoes, electronics, costumes, music and books I want. Student loans keep my account empty but I feel rich. I like the idea that all my extra money can now be spent on knowledge, that I can throw my earnings into dance classes rather than worrying about buying a new stove or boots that don't leak.

From "The Still Time" by Galway Kinnell

I know there is still time -

time for the hands

to open,

to be filled

by those failed harvests,

the imagined bread of the days of not having.

I remember those summer nights

when I was young and empty,

when I lay through the darkness

wanting, wanting,

knowing

I would have nothing of anything I wanted -

that total craving

that can hollow a heart out irreversibly.

Housekeeping

My room is now spectacularly tidy, thanks to lots of coffee and the company of my friend Kate. I organised all my books and quite a lot of my papers from teaching War Studies papers. I have some pretty goddam weird book categories ("torture"; "dead languages") and some continued categorical problems, like whether to separate military and nonmilitary history and also Middle Eastern and Western history. Because I take everything Much Too Seriously I have been distressed that, for example, Fanon is in the "Middle East/North Africa" section, as though French colonialism in Algeria has nothing to do with France. I am also tempted to make a "manuals" section because I am having trouble finding where to put my manuals for things and I like the idea of having the IRA's Green Book next to an al-Qaeda training manual and instructions for how to use my video camera and my oven.

Adventures in film

You know your life is too good to be true when the hottest woman you've ever met, who happens to be an actress, tells you she's filming a queer comedy and needs someone to make out with in the shower scene.