"Just trying to relax": masculinity, masculinizing practices, and strip club regulars

Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 2003 by Katherine Frank

Strip clubs are a visible, profitable, and growing form of entertainment in the contemporary United States and are primarily, though not exclusively, marketed to and visited by heterosexual men. Not all American men, of course, enjoy visiting strip clubs. The focus here is on those regular male customers who visit strip clubs often enough to consider this a significant personal practice, returning again and again to venues where contact and sexual release are prohibited and for whom voyeurism and conversation are the eroticized practices. What exactly is the appeal of modern strip clubs in this particular voyeuristic form for certain groups of late 20th-century heterosexually identified American men?

One assumption in the literature has been that men are motivated to use the sex industry out of a desire to maintain sexual mastery and power over women (Edwards, 1993). Granted, strip clubs as they now exist are indeed intertwined with male privilege. Although euphemistically called "adult entertainment," most commodified sexual productions, from strip clubs to pornography to erotic massages, are still aimed at male consumers. Most strip clubs are owned and operated by men, and many also have roles prohibiting women from entering unless escorted by a male, precluding some women from becoming customers even if they so desire. Men may do business in strip clubs on corporate expense, something for which there is no comparable practice for women. Further, despite the fact that men experience some stigma as a result of being customers, this stigma is relatively small when compared with that experienced by the women who work in the clubs. Customers also often have particular advantages over dancers in terms of educational and social capital. And finally, there are also often large discrepancies between the earning power of male customers and female dancers (even though dancers may do quite well compared with women working in other service industry jobs).

Yet the idea that strip clubs, or the sex industry more generally, inherently exist to reproduce male privilege has been challenged by texts that highlight the agency of sex workers and the "sex negative" cultural context in which such transactions take place (Bell, 1994; Chapkis, 1997; McElroy, 1995; Nagle, 1997). Further, many men declare that sex workers have the upper hand in commodified sexual transactions, and very few men understand their visits to strip clubs or their use of other venues in terms of an exercise of personal power or a desire for dominance. Although it is a mistake to assert that transactions in strip clubs are unrelated to social structures of inequality, it is clearly necessary to explore the experiences and subjectivity of men in relation to power and commodified sexualized services in more detail (Cornwall & Lindisfarne, 1994; Segal, 1990).

My primary argument is that the customers' understandings of their visits to strip clubs are deeply intertwined with cultural discourses about masculinity, sexuality, leisure, and consumption, and that these visits become meaningful in relation to their everyday lives and relationships and their own personal and emotional experiences of gender and sexuality. Rather than fulfilling a universal masculine need for domination or a biological male need for sexual release, strip clubs provide a kind of intermediate space (not work and not home, although related to both) in which men can experience their bodies and identities in particular pleasurable ways. Although customers' motivations are indeed related to existing power structures and inequalities, their visits are not necessarily experienced as exercises in acquiring or wielding power. Understanding the customers' subjective interpretations of these practices can inform us more generally about the links among sexuality, gender, and the marketplace.

METHODS

My ethnographic material is drawn from over 7 years of research on the adult entertainment industry in the contemporary United States. The data for this paper were gathered through participant observation, a traditional anthropological fieldwork technique, and through a series of multiple, in-depth interviews with 30 male customers of strip clubs in a large Southern city, which I refer to as "Laurelton." As a participant observer, I worked at five Laurelton strip clubs intermittently over a period of 14 months as a nude entertainer. Because contemporary strip clubs are highly stratified in terms of "classiness," field sites were selected that represented different positions on this social hierarchy: from the highest ranked clubs in the city to more stereotypical "dive" bars. Each venue offered stage performances by the dancers, along with the opportunity to purchase "private" table dances. Table dances were offered to the customers at their seats, on a raised platform or table or while standing on the ground between the men's knees. These private dances involved a more individualized interaction between the dancers and their customers, but although dancers could disrobe completely and place their hands on the customers' shoulders, other forms of bodily contact were prohibited. Dancers were also required to keep at least 1 foot of space between themselves and the customers during dances. Customers were not allowed to touch either the dancers or their own genitals. As the dancers circulated among the customers to sell table dances, the individualized interactions that took place became an important part of the experience. Dancers also sat with customers between their sets and their table dances, and thus conversation became a (public) service in and of itself. There are adult entertainment clubs in the United States that offer lap dancing (or "friction" dancing), a practice that involves varying amounts of contact between the dancer and the patron and can lead to sexual release for the customer, who may even wear a condom underneath his clothes. For the purposes of this research, however, lap dancing was considered a different form of entertainment. (The interviewees also considered it a different form of entertainment; there were a few topless clubs in town that did not serve alcohol and permitted lap dancing, but these served a different customer base.) Though Laurelton was a Southern city, and there were laws and attitudes reflective of the Bible Belt that influenced regulations surrounding the clubs and the meanings of the customers' visits, I have also worked in, observed in, and interviewed customers frequenting clubs in other parts of the U.S. Laurelton's population was also diverse in terms of geographical background, and the interviewees and customers in the clubs were just as often from other parts of the country as native to the city or region; thus, I do not think that the customer concerns, beliefs, and practices discussed here are essentially Southern.