Choose Your Own Adventure, the Sexism Edition

Club or Classroom?

You slowly turn the crammed corner by a construction zone, veering left onto a parking lot littered with cigarette butts. The drab boxy building looks sexier at night when wraparound lights cast magenta shadows. In the clarity of day, it resembles an unremarkable warehouse or storage facility. Despite the lot’s emptiness, you make a sharp left to angle park next to the manager’s car, where security cameras reach—lest a customer follow you out of the club. You pop your trunk to grab an overstuffed duffel bag and head inside. Your Halloween-themed tumbler glows green in the dimly lit foyer, illuminating the unmistakable aesthetic of 1980s corporate carpet, like Mondrian and Pollock got sad drunk and challenged each other to a paint-off.

You pass the door girl’s booth to the right and the bar entrance just beyond to the left, then through a musty room lined with purple velvet VIP couches, before reaching the dressing room where you plop your stripper essentials down on your favorite corner countertop, which you secure by being the first girl to arrive slightly after 11:30am when your shift starts, seemingly on a rolling deadline. (Your punctuality will wane with your moods over time.) You can show up just before noon to avoid being scolded by management, once you are more practiced in throwing together an ensemble, lacing up eight-inch heeled platform boots, applying matte red lipstick, and cutting beige pasties to the size of your nipples before adhering them carefully around the areola to create the illusion of a full nude bar.

“Hey girl,” Daphne nods in your direction as she strolls in wearing an oversized anime shirt and spandex shorts. She sighs loudly while unpacking a takeout container from her electric blue faux fur bag.

“Hey,” you muster, intentionally missing a step, as you’ve learned that being too friendly is off-putting to and off-brand for dancers at the club. Bending over from the waist, back flat and shoulders back, with one leg propped up on a chair, you check the mirror to make sure your thong is covering the only parts of you that club guests cannot see, nipples aside.

Navigating the windowless club labyrinth, your T-bar, stripper name, and studied nonchalance are the only armor tethering you to this world of make-believe while simultaneously protecting you from and magnifying the real one.

You spray mango deodorant under your arms and walk through a curtain of perfume aimed toward stained ceiling panels so the scent settles on your hair and shoulders. You smell like a different person, all tropical floral, cotton candy, and sweet pea, while you much prefer a smoky bergamot, sandalwood, and tobacco. When you got hired you felt obliged to purchase women’s deodorant, which you think generally smells like a baby’s butt (in the same way that storebought hummus generally smells like feet), and toss your Old Spice, the unofficial scent of queerdom, below the sink in your apartment.

Adorned in holographic leopard boots, a glittery gold micro-mini skirt you will later sell to a customer who wants to wear it himself, and matching bikini, you take your tumbler and purse to the VIP booth. Elijah, a slight, strikingly handsome androgynous man with long black hair, who doesn’t look like he would manage a strip club save for the faint mustache, vest, and wallet chain, asks for your numbers to clock you in.

“Thank you,” you almost sing, shyly glancing away. Your work wife teases you for this harmless crush, perhaps because intuitively she knows how gay you are, a fact you have all but abandoned since moving to a military town in the South. While Norfolk, Virginia is full of butch women, their Navy uniforms and earnest swagger throw off your gaydar for years since most are inexplicably married to men. Your longing for queer community was the initial impetus for your move to the state capitol, but by the time you get to Richmond in the wake of COVID-19, you have a boyfriend in tow. Pandemics can make a brokenhearted bi girl lonely.

With strong ankles and deliberate, confident steps, you glide past the stages—one large with a spinning pole and one small with a stationary pole. Only the most talented strippers can make static pole look effortless, twisting their hands as if grinding pepper to create fluid movement. Stopping to fill your tumbler with ice, you greet Sky, an attractive, masculine-featured, busty athletic woman stocking beer behind the bar. Her surface piercings accentuate the ample cleavage exposed by the black corset all bartenders are required to wear with their fishnet tights and booty shorts. Her voice is all grumble, cigarette breaks, and upstate New York.

“I got you, sweetie,” she says as you lean on the counter, ass popped out. The stale club music quietly seeps out the speakers, louder when the “fake DJ” (i.e., the automated voice that orchestrates the dancer lineup) announces in his cheesy sportscaster sound, “Zoe, you’re up in two.” Your work wife enters the room a minute and a half later, looking weary as is the mood of day shift. You wait for her gaze to wash over you, knowing you’ll soon swap stories, her marriage on the rocks and your long-term relationship punctuated by your boyfriend’s disdain for your entire personality. Once he got mad—seriously mad—at you for being so “rude” as to cough in your sleep, your only defense for this inconsiderate transgression being that you were unconscious at the time.

Night shifts are not safe for sharing personal anecdotes, as one must maintain the façade of numb fun, but being there from noon to 8 o’clock guarantees enough downtime that it seems possible to stretch hours to insulate the intimacy of friendship between dance sets, exhausting small talk, and lap dances, which you often refer to as “looking sexy while trying not to get assaulted.” You know it’s no laughing matter, but you can’t help but call it what it is, too often.

While some people might point to this joke as proof of the industry’s inherent evil and exploitation of women, you are all too aware of the unfortunate fact that everything happening in the club takes place outside the club—the only difference being that in the former a fleet of cameras, bouncers, and dancers have your back. Dancers are a scrappy bunch, in general, with an I don’t have time for this shit attitude. Firm boundaries and unflappable confidence are basically job requirements. Here, you are compensated for the caprices of men.

If women, femmes, and genderqueer folks got a dollar for every time someone sexually harassed them on the street, the skies would rain money like a celebrity procession stepping into a Miami strip club.

∗ ∗ ∗

I experienced a more sinister brand of sexism in academia than at the strip club. In a classroom setting, if a student who hates women takes your upper division Women Writers seminar—to prove a point, or out of pure sadism—you must endure the semester, delicately rebuffing his constant barrage of bigotry with morally exigent but ultimately futile reference to the actual texts and historical contexts relevant to the course. You are too jaded, too experienced, to hope you might reach someone allergic to facts. At the strip club, there is little need to waste words. You can simply ask management to kick out the offending patron. Done.

No watchful eyes of administrators making sure you’re entertaining “both sides”—meaning those who believe in the inherent worth of people and those who do not—no course evaluations for promotion and tenure to worry about, no nasty Rate My Professor insults to stumble upon. Rate My Professor, the Yelp of reviewing college instructors, is merely a symptom of the student-as-consumer model of higher education. Once, a review on Rate My Professor was so obscenely misogynistic toward me that the platform took it down. Trust me, teachers don’t get paid enough.

To be frank, though, most reviews were glowing. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t flattered when students evoked words like “genius.” I mention this not to brag but to make a point. During the annual teaching portfolio review process, colleagues highlighted the traditionally feminine emotional labor signaled in my student evaluations, over and against mentions of, for instance, rousing lectures. While academics tend to regard young men in their early career as remarkable, indeed, as geniuses, young women in academia are just, well, young. Cute even. Confused and in need of mansplaining. But so caring, so nurturing, so kind.

Such coded characterizations did not protect me from being the target of occasional vitriol from the aggrieved student who earned an A- instead of the A to which they felt entitled by birthright—or, more frequently, Incel-types angry that my class didn’t reproduce the white western canon. Such reviews brought down my average, as is typical for academics burdened by the additional emotional and intellectual labor of managing gendered and racialized expectations, both in and outside the classroom.

But at the club, it’s just your word, a bouncer, and the door to a monitored parking lot. The patron will be richly mocked upon getting kicked out, palliating whatever unoriginal offense he reproduced. No sleep lost, no anecdotes to share with friends about how your Turning Point USA bro of the month tried to derail the entire class discussion of Margaret Atwood’s “Backdrop addresses cowboy” by asserting how cowboys—apparently frat code for heterosexual, ruggedly virile white men—are an oppressed social group.

Of course, I never expected men in academia to treat me with respect. I remember in high school, the revered teacher of Theory of Knowledge, a chauvinist title if I ever heard one as well as the capstone course of the International Baccalaureate program, groomed students. My friend group did not escape predation and sexual harassment, the least of which was when said teacher told me after class that I should start wearing baggier shirts, as according to him my “breasts are distracting.” At the time, I pushed this comment aside in pursuit of his acceptance and accolades, as he held power in the IB program, power he wielded over impressionable young women.

So I wasn’t surprised when in college, the campuswide coordinator of the Rhodes Scholarship selection process essentially echoed my high school experience. Another old white dude, once the highest paid faculty member (who I imagine is sitting on a pretty retirement package right now), closed the door to his office when I arrived to prepare for my nomination interview. Later, as a professor myself, I learned the ground rule that one must never close their office door with a student inside (barring some kind of mental health emergency), knowledge to which I am sure this professor was privy and from which he presumed himself exempt.

He offered me a Diet Coke from his mini fridge—the college equivalent of gingerbread in a twisted retelling of Hansel and Gretel—before sitting me down to inform me that I must downplay my looks to be taken seriously by the interview committee, as I was in his words “too pretty.” Once again, my body—a body I was socially conditioned as a teenager to not even like much less think was worthy of any kind of attention—was cast by men as a barrier to accessing scholarly prowess. Experiences like these followed me into graduate school, where men who fashioned themselves superior to me in standing or skill tried to insert themselves into my life as shepherds of knowledge.

For women, predatory men in positions of power are like the weather, remarked upon in casual conversation but generally managed with a change of clothing or simply staying inside. To be absolutely clear, what women are wearing does not in any way deter or defend sexual harassment and assault. People wield patriarchy to pin responsibility on women survivors (she did this, she wore that), a redoubled violence that attempts to obfuscate the obvious through victim blaming. The agents, not the victims, of sexual violence must change their behavior, attitudes, and actions. Even so, there are times I have chosen to cover up more—no matter how scorching the summer sun—in order to appear more “professional,” conceding to the uneven application of that term. As in, a white dude can bumble around campus wearing flip flops and be regarded as a sage. Meanwhile, I know for a fact I’m not the only femme whose hand was forced into purchasing a suit from Express, heaven forbid red lipstick blot out a formidable intellect. These days, though, I wear what I feel like wearing, sexist, ageist, and classist projections about how I should comport myself be damned.

Of course, social mandates about what women can and cannot wear has a long history that is deeply racialized as well as classed. In the Victorian Era, for example, a young white woman of a certain social standing and age was supposed to sartorially appear delicate, even breakable, and womanly, meaning ready for marriage. Far from the contemporary trend of white women appropriating the fetishized bodies and fashions of women of color, in the Victorian Era their racism was more transparent, in the literal sense—as a desirable visage needed to be whiter than white, ghost white, translucent white, to reflect not only her class standing, the privilege of staying indoors all day, but also to physically manifest the imagined chasm between “pure” white bodies and those systematically subjected to the organized violence of global racial capitalism.

What the body wears tells a story, for better or worse; clothing can both reflect prevailing structures of power and strive to visually confront them. Yet for many women it’s simply easier to ditch the cute new mini skirt when around your creepy uncle Fred. I don’t have an uncle named Fred, to be clear, but you get the picture. Men apparently fall apart in front of the presence of a short hem faster than fast fashion in the washing machine.

While I may not have a creepy uncle Fred, we all know the type. As a young professor who was at the time very poorly managing—with copious booze and cigarettes—intense anxiety, work stress, and a trauma history not unrelated to the topic at hand, I remember one summer when a certain man haunted me. Sitting alone on the front porch around ten o’clock, I pulled smoke from my menthol American Spirit, mentally debriefing from a party hosted by academic acquaintances earlier that evening, replaying my most cringey moments on a loop. I was alone with my neurotic thoughts until I saw the faint trace of a figure in the distance. My eyes squinted to bring him into focus, a streetlight casting enough light to notice, in an instant, his hand moving in frenzied motion over baggy workout shorts. Upon realizing what he was doing, I tossed my cigarette in the direction of the alley to the left of the porch and ran inside. From my second-floor vantage point I peeped out of kitchen blinds to make sure my cigarette spark didn’t set the neighbor’s bushes on fire, mostly worried about this unlikely biblical scenario and annoyed I couldn’t finish smoking in peace.

But also, a bit rattled, I thought to myself, this man must not be well. True as this may be, too often men’s bad behavior is excused with the alibi of mental illness, which adds insult to injury for folks (including myself) actually living with mental illness.

I had a few more encounters with the public masturbator that summer. The last time I ever saw him was in the alley of the creaky Victorian home renovated into apartments, which were all very surely haunted by ghosts from World War II, a fact confirmed by an eerie letter addressed to the entire house that fall. In any case, I was tossing my cigarette butt in the trashcan on the side of the house. When I turned around, he was within arm’s length, hands in his shorts, jerking fervently. As I instinctively screamed “Get the fuck away from me!” he climaxed onto a little red cum rag he left behind, the only trace of his unwelcome presence.

Disturbed, I narrated this story to my mother, only to find it was an intergenerational experience. While my mother was living in France, she encountered a masturbator who would watch her through her bedroom window from the abutting terrace. Equally disturbed, she wrote to her mother, my grandmother, a passionately opinionated and brilliant writer who lived married life in the shadow of my grandfather, a celebrity academic in his day. When I was young my grandmother published a murder mystery based on the English Department at his prestigious university, the humor of which I can now fully appreciate after my experience in academia. She responded to my mother’s anxious letter as if casually bantering about the changing seasons: “Ah, yes, they tend to come out in spring.”

The weather, indeed.

Yet, pundits have historically pathologized stripping as not just upholding but producing, in the words of one white feminist anti-sex work activist, “wider social attitudes, which is [sic] breeding Harvey Weinsteins.” In such configurations of blame, women, sex workers, and femmes are doubly shamed, not only for allegedly, somehow, upholding a dominant culture and structuring logic of violence through their individual life choices, but for misappropriation of their reproductive capacity. That is to say, their bodies become the site for the literal reproduction of those choices through, in the words of the aforementioned white feminist, “breeding.” This rhetorical move alleviates Harvey Weinstein himself from culpability, as if he were passively born into existence.

Men who regularly visit strip clubs are not aberrations but mirrors. All the Todds and Chads about whom strippers have inside jokes run amok in academia.

“No, Todd, I don’t want to be your boudoir model no matter how many Sports Illustrated shoots you’ve done.”

“Okay, Chad, thanks for three crumpled dollars in exchange for wasting thirty minutes of my life passively boosting your fragile ego.”

Replace model with muse and, instead of a sweaty wad of bills, imagine opening another exasperating email asking to “pick your brain.” Their flavor might be a little different—the white liberal philosophy professor who tries to gain social capital by dating an anarchist student half his age; the beleaguered religious studies professor whose atonement for years of womanizing compelled him to teach feminism by quoting Jacques Derrida, the first feminist. With delusions of grandeur and/or deep insecurities of which they fill the cracks by condescending to women, these men populate classrooms and faculty meetings everywhere.

The type certainly served on, for example, the ineffectual Diversity Task Force at my university, which seemingly existed for the sole purpose of celebrating the mere fact of its existence. There is much to say about the profligatory circle jerk behind many university DEI initiatives (satirized by Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt, for example), which defang the transformative demands of social movements and repackage them as empty gestures absent sustained action, but for now I will mention only one inconsequential irony: this college-wide committee’s acronym was DTF, which also, of course, stands for “down to fuck.”

With some notable exceptions, the committee members seemed equally oblivious. One day, I sat next to a geography professor somehow as snide as he was sleepy. On cue with the topic of tackling sexism, he whipped out his phone, which upon unlocking boldly displayed a paused Porn Hub video. Not a trace of embarrassment, just a casual swipe to close the app after taking a beat to squint into the screen as if it were a Magic 8 Ball.

Meanwhile, I rush like I’m about to miss an international flight if there’s someone behind me in line at the grocery store, stuffing receipts, cards, or change willy-nilly into my wallet. Porn Hub guy had all the time in the world to not care about anyone else’s.

I was more startled by the fact that in this so-called professional environment he reacted with the unfazed annoyance of a stripper caught on the floor with her cellphone. Except, in my experience strippers are much more professional than entitled white men in academia.

Such men are so infallible, so powerful, in fact, that I left my tenured position as Associate Professor of English at the public university I worked at for nearly a decade in part to protest how my department was willing to silence and slut-shame survivors to protect this power.

∗ ∗ ∗

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To be continued. . .