There was something surreal about reading Susana Maia’s Transnational Desires: Brazilian Erotic Dancers in New York during down time in the strip club where I now work. Perhaps because I was reading about Astoria strip clubs while in an Astoria strip club, Maia’s ethnography hit close to home. Maia and I are both social scientists;… Continue reading Transnational Desires, Suzana Maia (2012)
Category: Books
Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today’s Sexual Culture
Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today’s Sexual Culture is the seventh installment in the series. Started in 2005, the annual compilation of journalism and personal essays on a wide range of sexuality issues are presented as a collective reflection on current sex culture. Whether opposing the various ways in which we criminalize sexuality or… Continue reading Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today’s Sexual Culture
John Franc Wants Us Hooked (2011)
“We were all monsters” the nameless narrator tells us four sentences into Hooked by John Franc. The “we” refers to nine men who live in a city where prostitution is conveniently legal and when the men learn this fact, they begin a downward, hooker-hopping spiral of frightening velocity that ends in the most melodramatic plot… Continue reading John Franc Wants Us Hooked (2011)
Unequal Desires by Siobhan Brooks (2010)
Unequal Desires is a long overdue work that (finally!) focuses on race as central in the lives of strippers. While some of the literature on stripping focuses on race as a footnote or tangent, for Brooks, race is the central concern. Everything from everyday micro-level issues (hiring decisions, shift availability, and stage sets) to the… Continue reading Unequal Desires by Siobhan Brooks (2010)
Stripped: The Bare Reality of Lap Dancing (2011)
Jennifer Hayashi Danns says she wrote Stripped: The Bare Reality of Lap Dancing “to give a voice to women who have direct experience of lap dancing but are often unheard, and to peel away some of the gloss surrounding this industry”—a laudable goal in an age in which pole-dancing classes are offered at every gym… Continue reading Stripped: The Bare Reality of Lap Dancing (2011)