Death of a Gentleman

Notes From the Club on Lap Dance Psychology

Dear beautiful people,

I am excited to kick off this newsletter with a work in progress that I started drafting during a Sex Writing Workshop facilitated by the amazing Raechel Anne Jolie. I want to thank Raechel, whose memoir I loved so much I made a Rust Belt Femme Mixtape, and the equally rad writers who workshopped the piece with me in small groups—Margeaux Feldman and Cameron Steele. I highly recommend you check out all of their work (including the linked newsletters) if you haven’t already (and consider a paid subscription). Also, as a paid subscriber myself, I have three gift subscriptions to Cameron’s newsletter to give away, so please let me know if you’d like one!

This piece begins in medias res, with the steamy scene I scribbled down on scrap paper during the workshop. Then, I drafted a longwinded preface attempting to contextualize my unusual trajectory from professor to stripper. But I decided to trash it, because it’s too full of rage as frankly I’m still reeling from the complex circumstances surrounding my resignation.

Instead, here’s the abridged version: in January 2024, after experiencing whistleblower retaliation for two years, I resigned from my tenured position as Associate Professor of English at Old Dominion University (ODU) in protest of the department’s gross mishandling of cases of sexual violence and mistreatment of survivors. Of course, experiences of public shaming and victim blaming are not unique to ODU English but indicative of a broader culture of racialized misogyny. The creative nonfiction I’ll be sharing in Napkin Manifestos is born of this personal and social setting. More specifically, it draws comparisons between my two most recent employers: a public university and strip club.

I also want to mention that while I seek to accurately represent my lived experience, I change the names of people involved out of respect for their privacy. Memory and perception are fallible, and I do not wish to mine the narratives of anyone else. Their stories are their own to tell, and their perspectives may differ from my own. In short, I want to be faithful to my recollection of events while recognizing the partiality of any one perspective.

I rate the following writing TV-MA: Mature Audiences Only, for nudity, indecent language, explicit sexual activity, and references to drug use. I know I’m conveying this information in a slightly silly way, but I take content warnings seriously and will let you know in advance when what I’m sharing discusses gender-based violence or other traumatic events.

Without further ado, we will begin in the messy middle of things.

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∗ ∗ ∗

The room was damp, partially illuminated by haphazard rainbow LED strips, and the fake leather couch shone ugly with the grease of fingertips and bare thighs. Familiar with the choreography of the upstairs VIP, a dingy room eerie enough for me to believe the rumors it was haunted, I hovered over an ancient desktop until a decades-old top forty playlist flooded through two speakers suspended on stilts, much like my aching body in eight-inch platform boots. Zoe was on the least shadowy sectional unbuckling some classic nude Pleasers, her multitoned blonde hair swept over her undercut, as Tim eagerly looked on in anticipation. He had quickly completed the ritual of removing his belt, an assumed courtesy to dancers whose labia already ached from routinely squeezing upper inner thighs together to suspend ourselves midair, pole to pussy. I used to lather arnica gel like lotion on everything but after an eight-hour shift, the entire surface of my body a tender bruise from stage sets. Over time though, without any noticeable shift in my dermal texture, I developed an immunity to floorwork and friction—a newfound toughness to protect the intimacy of skin.

With Kelly Rowland’s sultry voice crooning the opening lines of electro-R&B hit “Motivation,” I floated across the room toward my work wife, industry slang for the only girl at the club you can actually trust, or, as it were, think you can trust before she blows up your entire life. But this was before betrayal, before sex and crisis sullied friendship. This was a fun way to earn $700 each in an hour, our first double dance. It was her regular’s idea, as I piqued his interest after he discovered I not only knew Kierkegaard and Sartre but could quote them.

∗ ∗ ∗

My chance knowledge of continental philosophy owes to a quirky and brilliant English professor who taught Marxism 101 and made me fall in love with the Aliens trilogy during my first year of college—not only because of the obvious, Sigourney Weaver, but how he critically analyzed film in ways that caused my brain to buzz with excitement. I especially loved his special topics class titled “Death in Los Angeles.” So, I knew he was a bit morbid but was almost surprised one summer when I found him on his office floor making snow-angel shapes amid stacks and stacks of yellow-lined legal pads and sun-faded file folders. With his trademark wild and wide-eyed stare, frantic with the terrible joy of living, he said something ominous about Nietzsche and suicide, I can’t recall what exactly—probably not something he should have said to someone with my family history, although I didn’t hold it against him. In fact, maybe because of how I learned to cope with said history, I love morbid humor. Plus, he was also the one to explain to me that nihilism wasn’t so much about negation as it was about refusing artificial structure, choosing lawlessness, breaking everything arbitrary, and creating one’s own meaning out of chaos. Nietzsche was a cat lover, after all, as well as an existentialist.

Little did I know in 2004 that a year before resigning from my tenured job as an English professor twenty years later, my nerdy and obnoxious philosophical pretension would also endear me to lonely men with a metaphysical itch to scratch. Waxing poetic about dead white philosophers always attracts the wrong kind of men (namely, living white philosophers who self-identify as feminist while dating students half their age), I learned the hard way, but it sure as hell works like a charm to woo clients at the strip club.

∗ ∗ ∗

After the word wooing, though, begins the silent pantomime.

During a lap dance, my mouth would often move only to feign sexual tension, calculating sharp inhales and elongated exhales with the cajoling consistency of crashing waves on a sleep machine. If you squint, you can almost see yourself on shore, absent the human static that distinguishes machine from memory. But I dissociated so frequently at work, I was mostly a blur at the edge of the frame.

This orchestra of soft moans was dialed in at a set volume—never loud enough to attract the attention of staff, lest anyone confuse acting with actual foreplay. Extras were strictly prohibited by club management and for this I was grateful, as customers were pushy enough as is without rumored blow jobs in the backroom. While in my experience strippers overtly challenge the hierarchy of sex work, the clean/dirty divide that reinforces the most oppressive cultural divisions, I knew my personal limits. And it’s easier to draw boundaries when they’re supported and enforced by management.

While strippers at the club sometimes joked about my apple juice drinking girl scout vibe, Zoe had a more relaxed attitude. She got chastised in a subsequent double I did with her for making super loud sounds evocative of the kind of porn cis het men watch then imitate while their girlfriend fakes an orgasm. I was embarrassed by association, one of many gut feelings I ignored about her until it was too late. Zoe not only pushed boundaries at the club—she pushed my own. And I started to feel like for her, there was nothing sacred or special to safeguard concerning the spectrum of intimacies because everyone in her orbit became a mere prop for her pleasure. While I thought I could distinguish between shared vulnerability and self-interest at the club, with her I lost the line. But this dance was before, when I only knew Zoe well enough to near worship a fantasy version of her, just like every other fool at the club. Except my fantasy was up to this point much more about friendship than fucking. Today, with Tim, our orchestra of muted moans was a well-rehearsed performance.

Until it wasn’t.

∗ ∗ ∗

Zoe and I straddled Tim, first me sandwiched between them, her long legs wrapped around mine. I could feel the heat of her breasts on my back, hard nipples barely covered by the thin pasties we had to wear, and chiseled torso. Her fingertips traced the sinewy contours of my arms, exaggerated by hours ascending a pole as if it were a damn escalator. I felt her breathing, and, as I arched my spine, her lips grazed the back of my neck.

For the first time since being dumped over the phone from across the country by the man I lived with and thought I was going to marry, I didn’t check out. I didn’t dissociate. I felt her heat, and it stirred something in me I regularly feigned but hadn’t experienced during my sad girl era in what seemed like forever. Arousal.

Lil Wayne in the background, riffing on rain:

Uh, girl I turn that thing into a rainforest
Rain on my head, call that brainstorming

Pushing senseless guilt out of my mind, still feeling loyal to a man who didn’t respect me enough to end our long-term relationship in person, I tasked my uneasiness not with the phone call that broke me but with the arithmetic of body angles and camera placement. I knew lip contact of any kind, including but not limited to kissing, was strictly prohibited. And despite my rebellious spirit, my people-pleasing side adheres to rules, like many neurodivergent children growing up undiagnosed in a chaotic household. I assured myself that her cascading hair was hiding our transgression, a makeshift curtain that smelled of the tropical-scented dry shampoo that descended over buzzing florescent lights in the dressing room like cumulus clouds.

My moans relaxed, no longer a metronome counting down the hour. Tim’s bashful excitement grew, his modest erection nonetheless visible under his generic pleated department-store khakis. To avoid the agony of constant eye contact I threw back my head, elongating my neck and faking pleasure for him while feeling another drive entirely devoid of his arbitrary and unwanted presence in the room.

Zoe and I switched positions as he slowly took another sip of overpriced champagne, seemingly worried his excitement might tilt the flute, which was permanently cloudy as if lip gloss were smeared into its fibers, and rock sticky liquid over the narrow circular edge.

“Careful,” she whispered under the static of a slow bass beat muffled by fuzzy speakers, “we don’t want him to cum too soon.”

I nodded earnestly, still puzzled by but long accustomed to the very real physiological possibility of ejaculating without direct stimulation. I had read all the clichéd steamy equestrian lesbian scenes centered on the erotic possibilities of straddling a saddle or otherwise sustaining pressure on one’s pelvic floor to reach orgasm, but this involved finesse. Dudes seemed too literal to reach orgasm so creatively. But creative they were, if you could call it that, preparing for the big event in the bathroom prior to a dance, perhaps applying a condom between bumps of cocaine or jerking off just enough to get things rolling, snorting and grunting like a pig behind a stall door he didn’t give enough fucks about to latch.

Or so I thought about many customers, but not Tim. He was far too square, too polite, too sweet—despite his social awkwardness occasionally landing him on unintentional insults, at least according to dominant society. For example, while contrasting my college athlete body to Zoe’s tall lean frame, he once described me as stocky—a term not often embraced given rampant fatphobia.

While the sizeism, racism, classism, and ageism of clubs is widely critiqued in stripper forums, as it should be, something you don’t learn online about giving a lap dance is how to hide your repulsion the first time you notice a wet splotch spreading like fake blood in a horror movie as you strategically hover over a customer, alert to his every move—your body a spring ready to release or recoil, your reflex trained for self-protection, your intuition and experience knowing to be on high alert in the presence of a man who thinks money gives him the right. He is paying for access to the illusion of power, not for the dance.

∗ ∗ ∗

The club has its own rules, its windowless walls and sorrow growing mold, its carefully measured time outside of time. A place where angry or awkward or grieving men can go when they’ve Xanaxed themselves into oblivion and a woman will not only pretend they make sense but laugh and touch their legs just above the knee, or even a tiny bit higher if her shift is slow. And she is fake enamored of his social media posts, they’re so cool, you’re so cool, wow, you’re so talented, and he will forget that awful feeling of people pitying him. He repeats, I am a nice guy. I take care of my girlfriend and/or wife and/or sick grandmother. I work hard. I love my daughters. You look just like one of them. I save money. I put her through college, so she doesn’t have to pay off student loan debt like you did, if you ever went to college? You poor thing. I am good. I am great. I am godlike.

Sometimes, as was the case with Tim, he is desperate for companionship. More often than not, in my experience, men across the spectrum of affectations are paying for the illusion not of power but of privacy, the tender anonymity of a stranger to whom you can cry while sinking into a loveseat brittle with abject stains and body odor, sugar and beer, ketchup, stray hamburger meat, latex, Lysol, a stale French fry, nauseating cologne, and sorority-scented perfume spray. He is paying for what he cannot fathom or muster in the bright light of the world outside the club.

I guess it gets exhausting, pretending to be good all the time. Godlike and all. Omniscient, objective. Knower and fixer of all things.

∗ ∗ ∗

Sometimes you want to fall apart, and after a short trip to the ATM you can—at the fringes of civil society, in a place that is wholly acceptable for men to frequent but not for women to work at—finally be a man and also be weak, be sad, be a mess. You can cry about your wife with cancer, or the one that got away, whom you get wistful over after your third glass of cheap chardonnay, or the girlfriend you loved who drowned because she existed in the real world, the dangerous world that wounded you. You and your shame, your hurt human heart.

You thought you wanted to escape reality with a fantasy rack that defies death and gravity. Instead, you pay to tap into your own humanness. To lean into the sublimated ache that makes you punch walls, buy zippy cars and rare guitars. You pay to take off the mask of being a cis het man, and a striking femme who is probably queer as hell and whose name you don’t know looks you in the eyes and says, it’s okay to cry.

And she really means it. Therapy play is a break for our sore bodies. We can loosen the invisible string tying our shoulders back, maybe even slouch a little, stretch, take off our shoes, not worry if they stink, and they do, but you might rub our feet anyway. Our knees can soften, no longer bending from the waist like a mechanical sex barbie.

This is the unspoken but fundamental exchange that happens every day in the strip club, on a couch as tawdry as the drapes providing the illusion of privacy until the bartender busts through stiff velvet to drop off an ice bucket of beers, the kind you drank before you could legally enter a bar, and molten chocolate cake for the lady, she emphasizes, of course.

Once she leaves in a flash of tooth gem and fishnet, the air stops stirring, and the woman whose time you paid for knows she no longer needs to ooze sex appeal. In exchange she must let down her guard enough to see you. It’s a risky game for her but worth the tradeoff. She can relax just a little because you no longer feel compelled to perform the man who wants to possess her. You’re just sad, and drunk, and lonely. Here, your flaccid penis energy is welcomed and appreciated, but never mentioned. You need someone to listen. She listens. In this space, for a moment, often tinged with regret and alcohol, you can simply be, your masculinity a pair of Spanx you get to slither out of like a second skin, without the grace of a snake or the practiced determination of your wife after an exhausting day. Spandex snaps and skin sags. Why do we punish soft. Grow hardened to the hurt we choose.

Here in VIP, despite the dick-wagging contest to which you will return on the floor, you can be vulnerable. You know because that’s what you paid for. You understand the mask goes back on in, oh I’m not sure, maybe twenty or so minutes. She doesn’t show her hand, her phone timer ticking discreetly in her purse stuffed full of ones, lest the manager get distracted or petty about a perceived slight or sexual rejection and fail to end the dance promptly. Your phone, watch, and wallet are neatly stacked on the armrest. But her gaze doesn’t wander, and she doesn’t tell your secrets. They are of no use to her. She has dramas and dreams far more decadent of her own, parts of her you will never, ever touch. You don’t know her real name or age or aspirations, but she enjoys finally, for once in her life, being paid for her emotional labor.

You don’t know this fact either, and you couldn’t understand how it will make her less likely to offer gendered labor outside the club, how this will both free and burden her.

Here, in this unlikely space where the fundamental artifice of heterosexual masculinity and femininity somehow feels a little less heavy, for a brief time glitch in a clockless place that revolves around this very artifice, inside a boxy rundown building haunted by stripper ghosts and the inescapable melancholy of monetizing everything she once thought was magic, here, at the hollow center of the mirage is its undoing. Filling a void, she is reminded of the bartender’s gift.

You both eat the cake.

∗ ∗ ∗

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I know we started in one place and ended up in another, as there is so much to say about the power dynamics of strip clubs and academic spaces. I find it fitting and slightly humorous that my first newsletter coincidentally falls on Father’s Day this year, seeing as how much of my work invokes the Emperor Tarot Card’s connections between patrilineal ghosts and the authority masculinity wields with impunity.

Moving forward I plan to publish a narrative excerpt from my work in progress every other Sunday, and then, for paid subscribers, some poetry from the same hybrid project the following Friday. I’m working up to weekly, but for now biweekly is all my little bisexual heart can handle. I am hustling to support myself in the wake of my resignation so I would be grateful if you purchased a subscription for $5 a month, but trust me, I totally understand if this is not in the cards for you. I hate the idea of a paywall so I’m trying to think of paid subscriptions as an emotional boundary to protect the more vulnerable parts of me.

If you would like access to my poetry but money is a barrier, please message me in the Substack app or on Instagram @napkinmanifestos, as I don’t want to turn anyone away for lack of funds! There are other ways to support my work, if you have capacity, such as ‘hearting’ my posts and sharing content of mine you enjoyed with folks you think might enjoy it, too. I want to shout my rage against the dumpster fire machine that is academia from the rooftops, and every new reader is a potential confidante and co-conspirator.

I’m so grateful you chose to be here, and in two weeks (on June 30th), I look forward to sharing the next newsletter, which—unlike this hopefully not too tedious introductory letter—will dive right into my creative writing. To deliver on my promise of two poems per month, I’ll be publishing them the next two Fridays (on the 21st and 28th). In July I will adjust this schedule to every other week. I’m also considering other paid subscriber content, so please let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like me to share on a regular basis.

In the meantime, if you’re so inclined, you could check out three very short and hopefully comical notes (linked via TV show titles) on the topics of: 1) what the absurd spectacle of Love is Blind reflects about very real heteronormative relationship dynamics, 2) Unlocked, the gross reality TV “experiment” exploiting incarcerated men for diabolical political campaigning, which is of course nothing new, just like 3) the ongoing racism embedded in American Idol. I didn’t own a TV or smart phone until I started my job at ODU in 2015—at the request of a former girlfriend and boss, respectively—so this series of critiques is a little random, but I had fun writing them.

Thanks again for reading. Your support truly means the world to me <3

xx,

Alison