Fluffy Lychees points to the "Naked" issue of 125 Magazine. I love this series of strip club interiors by Christopher Sturman. The most beautiful strip club I ever went to was the Crazy Horse in Paris. I sat by myself at a red lacquered table and had a lemon drop martini. Fittingly, Sturman's photos are beautiful and lonely. Elsewhere, the New York Times declares stripper-turned-screenwriter Diablo Cody a potential Oscar contender. If you're in the mood to ponder the relationship between men and strip clubs, check out Katherine Frank's "'Just Trying to Relax': Masculinity, Masculinizing Practices, and Strip Club Regulars" for an academic undercover dancer's view.
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.
