One of these tourist reports typically pops up in my Google alerts every week. Someone ventures inside a strip club for the first time and shares his/her tale with the world as if he/she is Neil Armstrong. Last week it was an insecure lesbian who felt threatened when a stripper at Jumbo’s talked to her date. Even cool writers are guilty of lame tourist reports where they sound grateful to have made it out alive.
This week’s gem is featured on dating advice website, YourTango, and it’s a doozy. (YourTango was never even on my radar until the founder/CEO embarrassed herself last summer with that bizarre Indian fetishist piece in the Huffington Post.) The author starts off by letting us know that she’s boldly going where no woman has gone before: a bachelor party weekend in Atlantic City with 27 dudes.
The 26 friends of her college buddy are bummed to have a chick crashing the party, but she is prepared to prove herself at any cost, “Even though Josh inviting me should have been enough to vet my worthiness, I had to convince these guys I wasn’t a spy.” Most of the piece is an account of how desperately she works to win each and every last guy’s approval. She keeps up with their partying and gambling. She lets the dudes watch her shower. She babysits the drunkest ones. And of course, after eating steak with the boys, she partakes in a strip club expedition.
She stops to reflect on how “extra degrading” it is that the strippers have to wipe the pole off between sets. Out of all the judgy things that I’ve read by outsiders, I’ve never seen anyone get stuck on this pedestrian strip club occurrence. When the bachelor party starts buying dances, she jumps at the chance to join in on the fun and settles on a girl named “Treasure.”
At this point, she feels that she has won almost everyone over. Five dudes weren’t kissing her approval-seeking ass, so the weekend was not yet a success. What was she supposed to do? Let them not like her and ignore them? NO. She does what any sensible woman would do in her position; she gets a kneejob in front of the group and then brags about it.
To the amazement of everyone in the room, including me, I got a full on happy ending, something none of the other 27 bachelor party participants were lucky enough to get. The last five holdouts admitted to Josh that I might be the coolest chick ever. I manned up, even more than the men, and the irony was lost on no one. Well, maybe on Treasure, just a little bit.
Sigh. Where to start? Who does that? (If one of the other members of her party wanted to show off like that, he would have to jizz his pants… Would that be “cool”? Would it?) If she “put some effort into it”? That means she probably dry-humped the shit out of the stripper’s leg. Nice one. (When women keep raising their crotches up at us, we call that the “dentist chair.”)
It seems to me that she’s not aroused by Treasure, but rather by having 27 men watch her hump someone’s leg, arch her back and squirm her body around. It’s also great that she doesn’t bother to tip the dancer extra for helping her (allegedly) impress “everyone in the room.” It’s just so ironic that she’s the one female in the group and she’s the one who paid to get off. Of course the woman performing for the group of men for money wouldn’t understand the irony, because she’s just a pole wiper with a messed-up childhood and not the author of Divorced By 30.
I had a dream about getting a knee-job from a stripper once. I called it a nightmare at the time though. Having said that, she could have gotten some real help if she’d just gone to a therapist…because this broad has some issues she needs to handle. Let’s discuss some of them, shall we?
1. Girl. Men are not that interesting. Being considered one of the boys isn’t an actual achievement. Especially when the guys are douche’s who have so much shame around the things they do with their friends that they think ANY woman who deigns to spend time with them is a fucking investigator. How arrogant do you have to be to think your life is so fascinating that somebody is going to run and tell your wife about it later? Why did you marry somebody so insecure that they would send an investigator? Why are you doing things you’re afraid of your wife finding out about? Coward.
2. You do realize that needing validation from strangers as badly as you seem to means you have a festering mortal wound you need to heal, right? Fuck thinking we have emotional issues and bad childhoods; How was yours? Actually, don’t tell me, tell your therapist, I don’t actually care.
3. I think wiping a pole is less demeaning than, say, touching another person’s sweat and having everyone watch me freaking out on stage because I am borderline Obsessive Compulsive and literally cannot handle mystery wetness. Literally. But, you know, whatever. Maybe it wasn’t about keeping things clean, maybe you weren’t being an ass and making an ambiguous act bigger than it needs to be.
4. You didn’t have to go to Atlantic City to let men watch you in the shower, you can do that in your own home…and get paid for it! I can’t think of any other reason to let men you don’t know scratch their voyeuristic itches, but maybe you know more about it than I do. Taking showers for strangers, I mean. Not the voyeurs thing…because I do that for a living.
5. I don’t know 20 people I would like to eat with, never mind having an orgasm with them watching. And certainly not so that they can like me. DO you keep in touch with them? Do you think they left thinking “That’s a down ass bitch!”? They probably don’t remember you, does that make you want to cry?
LOOK AT YOUR CHOICES!
“If one of the other members of her party wanted to show off like that, he would have to jizz his pants… Would that be ‘cool’? Would it?”
My very very favorite line ever!
That fate could have been avoided if she’d had a sassy gay friend who could shout “What, what, what are you doing?!” as soon as she started spreading her legs.
I too wrote a tale of my Neil Armstrong experience. I’ve learned a little more about the culture since then but wouldn’t call myself a mooninite just yet. I’d be very interested to hear your take on it.
Bettie, in reply to your #1 statement I’d have to say guys don’t like having girls around when doing guy stuff because they take a lot of the attention. It’s just not fun that way. Also, girls tend to blab more in my experience. Aaaand when guys get pissed they just punch and wrestle each other, girls bring up something that happened in the past. What I’ve seen at least. So less fuel is better.
If you’re past the age of 25 and you’re still trying to make people think you’re cool, you’re doing it wrong.
please bring us more tourist stories plus your analysis! there’s a sort of reverse examination going on. they come examine us all the time. but now we get to examine the tourists. what are they really thinking? why are they doing THAT? and what the fuck did they go home and write about? thanks for searching these strange creatures out and giving them to us here.
holy good god, i just read the whole article.
she actually said, ” Usually I would comment about this demeaning state of affairs but not tonight. Tonight I wasn’t a conscientious woman wondering about these girls and their messed-up childhoods. Tonight I was one of the guys participating in a long-standing bachelor party tradition.”
please don’t ever wonder about my messed up childhood
since god forbid you ever release yourself from the incredibly arrogant assumption that i even have a messed up childhood.
I don’t understand why psycho jealous lesbian couples go to strip clubs. I like to go with my girlfriend and we pick out the one we like the most and play that scene from showgirls where Crystal Connors and the dude that bangs Jessie Spano in the pool go to the Cheetah!!! Good times!
Btw… I love Jumbos, if you go there ask for Violet. She’s a total babe!
And check out how I blasted “Chaz Bono” on the she-wired blog, under the pseudonym “philanges”. 😉
Bravo on the showgirls roleplay! That’s a good night out.
I don’t get it. She clearly had a fantastic time. She had some sort of fantastic sex (if even in her own mind) with Treasure. Why does she have to be so shitty about it?? And dismissive and mean. it seems like she is “roleplaying misogyny in “”a further attempt to be one of the guys. Pardon the quotation marks, I can’t seem to remove them from the comment. I see how tourists are going to fuck up on some level because they don’t know exactly how to act. but she went somewhere and someone nice that she picked made her come. shouldn’t she say something good?
On 2nd thought I’m calling Bullshit on the whole thing. I think she faked an orgasm in a pathetic attempt to get positive attention from a set of very douchey guys who don’t come out of the woodwork as seeming like human beings either. This is why I could never make it in the straight world because I don’t accept that people act like this. She’s an asshole.
(Totally late to the party, just stumbled onto this site!)
Okay. So I’ve never danced or stripped, just done fetish and vid work (I’m in no way coordinated enough to dance).
When I worked in a dungeon, each girl disinfected all the surfaces after each session. It seems like such a no-brainer. It completely baffled me that THAT was what the girl thought was super demeaning. Not deciding in her head “Okay, since I’m a dude, these women aren’t complete beings anymore. tra la la. I shouldn’t have fantasy patronizing moral issues! I’m a MAN.”
and just… ugh. To the whole thing. Her advice to the dudes? “Don’t try to solve her problems, just listen. Ask her if she’s lost weight every now and again, even if you know she hasn’t. And when dealing with her nether regions, always go softer and slower than you think you should.”
I … can’t even… excuse me? There is so much wrong with that sentence! Internalized misogyny, fatphobia, gender essentialism, S&M phobia bingo!
I don’t feel like going into the “one of the guys” business since everyone else has done so well, I just had to express my 0.0 eyes at reading this article.
~bunny
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