It’s five dollars to enter, and that covers four dances (excluding tips).

Recently, I went to Les Gals on Market Street with some friends. Les Gals is a strip club for men that features pornographic films and “real live girls.”

It was a cool experience, mostly because it was ridiculous. The music was ultra-bizarre in the context of the club (a Dipset remix of the Supremes’ “Wait A Minute Mr Postman”), and the dancers could probably tell that I was, in a sense, kidding.

Watching yourself watch strangers at Les Gals (Photo by the author)

The entire wall behind the stripper pole was mirrored. The last place that you should go for self-reflection is a strip club. Watching yourself watch strangers dance naked in front of you requires more cajones (or less self-consciousness) than I have.

I couldn’t figure out whether I was allowed to enjoy myself in the moment, or whether I should be feeling bad about it. Was I being a good feminist? I didn’t feel guilty, but I felt like I should. Personal politics would be much easier to explain and maintain if everything were hypothetical.

My brand of feminism definitely condones strippers. If a woman wants to expose her body and to make money from the endeavor, that is fine. Everything about the stripper checks out.

However (and this is where it would be easier if people didn’t interact), the role of stripper requires someone to strip for, and that introduces numerous characters that might not check out at all. My guess is that not all customers clap politely and quote Our Bodies, Ourselves. More likely, customers heckle the women, think of them as a collection of gyrating body parts and don’t tip well. The bouncer and the owner are probably not touchy-feely in anything other than the literal sense.

I was endorsing the behaviors and attitudes of the lowest common denominator. No matter my good intentions, I was still culpable, since I was participating in an institution where people are frequently anti-feminist. While I felt like a respectful customer, it wasn’t about what was happening in the moment.

But why couldn’t it be? What’s with the guilt? For starters, why can’t something that seems fun just be fun? And secondly, could the pluses of a woman being proud of her body, able to fully control it and to use it to her economic advantage, outweigh the negatives of the customers? I might have to go back to Les Gals, and think about it some more.

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