A GENERATION EX-STRIPPER MOVES BACKWARDS INTO AN ACADEMIC
POSITION
Carrie Jo Coaplen
What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we
operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, bodies, our histories, our
families, our cities, our souls and our lunches.
–Elizabeth Gilbert
Prudishness is a kind of avarice-the worst kind
-Stendhal
FOREWORD
I hesitate to represent Generation X. I don’t know Douglas Copeland’s generation defining
novel by heart or even a favorite quote from it. My general understanding of the generation that I
supposedly belong to amounts to casual knowledge of sociological research conducted in
London by Boomers (1953), and Robert Capa who created the label with a title he used to
describe men and women coming of age right after World War II as depicted in a photo
essay(1950). Any idiot can Google the term and learn the same from Wikipedia. Upon reflection,
the phrase Generation X inspires more questions than answers. Is Generation X not an idea
created via privilege? I’m talking white middle to upper class. If so, most of us who write,
research, and critically evaluate “Generation X” would likely be included in that demographic.
More, do the Gen X-ers commonly referred to in the sociological imagination likely live in the
U.S. or Europe, at least those who share cultural experiences? While minority Gen X-ers, or
those who remain in poverty, would technically be included, might these voices remain unheard
as relates to generational experiences? I pose these questions to make clear that in exploring the
idea of “Generation X,” I speak from a narrow position of privilege, as does most work on
Generation X. Yet, I cannot explain how or even confirm that former presidents Reagan, Clinton,
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and Bush Sr. shaped the woman I was becoming during their administrations. The Challenger
Space Shuttle tragedy in 1986, while a kind of Kennedy-esque event for my generation, doesn’t
seem to have bound us as that tragedy did for Boomers. If it did, I do not consciously feel part of
that cohesion.
Instead, at nineteen (with a fake I.D. and cute enough to not get carded), I drank and danced
at gay clubs or bars hosting Goth/techno nights, and preferred dancing and drinking in those
scenes, though I attended memorable live shows in small venues: Smashing Pumpkins, Afghan
Whigs, Love Jones, and They Might Be Giants. My hometown, Louisville, Kentucky, has had a
respectable music scene for decades, and Louisville Gardens hosted Prince, R.E.M., and U2. But
The Space Shuttle tragedy, the Goth scene, and live music seem like weak engagements with my
generation. I feel a nagging suspicion that I should be able to express something meaningful
about myself and my fellow Gen X-ers. For example, women of my generation generally began
to not only critique hegemonic gender ideologies, subsequent practices, and act against them, and
continue to empower themselves through third wave feminism, as I imagine having done by
choosing to work as an exotic dancer for many years in my twenties, but I don’t know. I more
suspect that who I am, that I am my mother’s daughter, shaped my eventual stripping career.
This, my mother’s influence, seems more likely to have shaped me than has any Generation X
ideology or ethos that I feel secure about pointing to, politically, socially, or otherwise. Some
suggest that this insecurity partially defines our generation.
What is true today of me as an academic is that I don’t want to grow up and don’t feel grown
up. I care less how this attitude is perceived. Through casual reading about my generation, I have
come to understand that we are often labeled cynical slackers. I certainly chose a career that
others (my blue collar Dad, for example, who worked nearly every day of his life, seven a.m. to
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five p.m. earning perfect attendance awards at Porter Paints) view as a slacker job. I seemingly
take summers “off” and am not required to sit and work in an office nine to five. Outside of
teaching and office hours, I plan classes, research, and write when I choose, with nearly as much
freedom as was afforded me when I worked as a dancer at Déjà Vu, A Gentlemen’s Club. I
showed up for a shift when I wanted to earn money. Management did not require me to work a
set schedule, although I became known as a weekend/night shift girl because I earned the club
bank anytime I chose. I could sell table dance after couch dance after table dance, as well as sixdollar non-alcoholic drinks talking to anyone in the club, including skateboarding legend, Tony
Hawk. He bought two couch dances in a row and I danced for his whole crew in the late nineties
when they came through Louisville on a small skating tour. Nice guy. Polite. Oddly goodlooking.
Though I paid for about 70 percent of my Bachelor’s degree courses with stripping money, I
have since accrued more school loan debt than I care to type here, in print, for all to see like
some bag of shame confetti that I’d like to toss up during my eventual “I am finally tenured”
party. School loan debt connects Generation X-ers universally, a pecuniary thread of shame,
pride, and knowledge that debtor’s prisons no longer exist. I began my Master’s work at 30,
having quit dancing the winter before being accepted into George Mason University’s Creative
Writing M.F.A. program, and earned my Ph.D. by 40. I received maximum loan amounts most of
those years. I owe Federal Direct Loans as well as American Express and Discover.
Additionally, my career affords me slack time and cynical research agendas. These facts bestow
a Gen X pedigree if nothing else.
Two decades before loans and research and nudity, my mother began encouraging my
brother, Eric, and I to pursue art, skateboarding, writing, or whatever else we chose, and to be
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happy, and that happiness should be valued over pecuniary success. As a result, I embrace writer
Elizabeth Gilbert’s stance that
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon
it…You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And
once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about
maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that
happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.1
Along with the belief in happiness as a choice and labor, my family embraces practicality. For
my mother, the idea of me or anyone completing a post-secondary education meant job security
more than it did a liberal endeavor, a process that can change and direct understandings of, and
one’s ability to shape, her or his world. I would like to share that the utility of higher education
does not outrank the myriad ways in which its classroom teachings contributed to my academic
and sexual sense of self. I cannot, however, make this claim. University work taught me many
lessons including how to (not) follow directions, per an individual instructor’s proclivities, and
how to negotiate the almost always polluted bureaucratic waters flowing through financial aid
and registrar’s offices.
Thankfully, I inherited tenacity from my mother, tenacity that provided durable rafts upon
which to navigate those tricky waterways. Tenacity and practicality informed my exotic dancing
career as well. In Stripped, sociologist Bernadette Barton asserts that “Dancers are individuals
whose motivations I well understand. Most are intelligent risk takers, surviving in a world where
women have limited economic options. In this world, dancing is a choice with clear, practical
benefits” (x). For its utility and other benefits, stripping still ranks among the top three best jobs I
have worked. Summer camp counseling and teaching rank equally.
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1
Additionally, and following logically, while many women of my generation may hold more
sexually liberal views than those of my mother, or her mother, I attribute my particularly open
attitude and lifestyle, and –yes— earning potential related to sexuality, to my mother’s frankness
and comfort as a fully realized person rather than her motherhood persona alone. As a single
mom, and as long as her potential beaus treated my brother and I well, she dated and had sex. On
warm evenings, she cooked dinner in her bra. We could not afford to run our air conditioner full
blast all damn summer long after all. And if one of us needed to run into the bathroom and pee,
and if that peeing person did not manage to completely close the door, so be it. I grew up
understanding little bodily shame and sexuality as healthy. My mother may not have felt as free
to become a woman who talked with her kids about romantic partners and birth control had it not
been for her generation’s gender work, nor my generation’s resulting attitudes, yet I suspect that
generations going back many decades could boast women like my mother who, likely more
secretly, behaved less than appropriately according to cultural and societal norms. Yay Mom and
yay them!
Let me again emphasize that I don’t consider myself a Generation X expert. Generation X-ers
are, though, notoriously self-effacing and perceive themselves as having come of age outside the
man’s “expert” realms. I don’t research “us,” nor do my critical faculties naturally lean toward
making generalities of daily living. In a You Tube interview about his book, X Saves the World,
fellow X-er Jeff Gordinier, compares our generation with a “middle child sensibility,” claiming
that we are generally “detached, skeptical, quiet, question[ing], and concerned with the
improvement of the small world…the fringe.” Though no one would associate me with the word
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“quiet,” I do more make meaning of “the small world,” personal experiences; my
epistemological bent leans toward the micro level experiential. This and other characteristics
point toward my Gen X identity, yet in expressing the above, I mean to alleviate myself of the
pressure of being a sociological scholar of my era. I am, rather, my mother’s daughter, someone
who happened to be born in 1968 to Pamela Sue Wright, and also a Gen X-er, who, as Gordinier
suggests of our lot, may need to convince herself that she’s real, generationally speaking. Or not.
To be even more ambiguously clear, this essay will allow the reader to connect the
generational dots. To do otherwise would prove less than Gen-X authentic, despite that the
essay’s editor has requested that the “essayist” emphasize how she either does or does not
represent Generation X. This postmodern, meta-disclosure and the essayists’ subsequent refusal
to comply are, perhaps, somewhat representational of my generation.
I. INTRODUCTION PROPER: I’M TOO SEXY FOR MY JOB
‘It’s okay to say, ‘I used to be a stripper, but I got out of it.’ It’s not okay to say, ‘I was a stripper
for several years. I fucking loved it. I had a blast and I still miss it today’
–Barton quoting exotic dancer, “Morgan,” Stripped
Late October 2009: As I type, I am listening to “Don’t Change” by INXS. My Ipod Nano is
shuffling through Yaz, The White Stripes, Nappy Roots, U2, and Roxy Music. I am in my office
at 7:19 a.m., my faculty office, with a ten-foot ceiling, and an equally tall window that looks onto
the quad of my department’s building. The space is approximately 150 square feet. Through
twenty years of living on my own, I have lived in at least three spaces only a little over double
this size. In the hall I hear keys jingling and doors opening. I imagine those people as much more
qualified to teach and research here. Sure, I like words. I have written some poems and essays for
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fun and course work. I also eventually wrote scholarship that unknowingly pushed boundaries so
far afield from academic conventions that Terry Zawacki, a George Mason colleague, kindly
taught me how to compose more appropriate academic prose. So, here I am. Outside my office
window, a fruitless Mulberry tree’s leaves have turned orange, pink, and green. Fall on
Morehead State University campus has come and is about to go. In other words, after twelve
years off and on earning a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville, a three year
Masters of Fine Arts from the Creative Writing program at George Mason University, seven
graduate assistant years (between the MFA and a PhD), and two adjunct instructing years, I have
nearly completed my first semester teaching writing as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Like
most professors, I feel like a fraud. Eight total books line the floor to ceiling built in wooden
shelves. A few hundred would fit.
In 2000, I earned a Bachelor’s degree as a thirty year old with no mind about the academic
work that would follow, the idealism (and unrealistic university teaching expectations) that I
would look hopefully toward academia with. I would not have placed a Ph.D. in my future
anymore than I would have imagined finding a perfect pair of burgundy leather pants at Unique
Thrift store. Yet both happened. The Fall before I graduated from the University of Louisville
with a B.A. would be the last season that I would dance nude on stage or give a topless lap dance
at Déjà Vu in Louisville, Kentucky. The money earned from that work paid tuition. It also paid
for lazy months and years off between semesters, time spent beating Sonic the Hedgehog, or
dancing all night to The Sisters of Mercy and Ministry at Sparks nightclub, or tripping balls on
blotter acid with my boyfriend and his band mates. Or entire days wasted recovering from any of
those activities. Not exactly the identity most people associate with a woman who has earned a
Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition. Regardless, I respect Barton’s understanding of strippers as
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“complicated,” and her further contention that “Simply characterizing them with a onedimensional label—good or bad, whore or mother—perpetuates the stereotype and
neglects…subtle nuances…” I know complicated. I know myself as multi-dimensional. I
understand identity as a postmodern impossibility, yet… 2
Everyone else seems so grown up. Because this job necessitates a long distance marriage, I
live alone during the week, and am feeling my single girl identity, the one from my twenties and
thirties, resurfacing. She drinks too much, speaks when she shouldn’t, wears tight jeans, and
makes trouble. I find, for example, that even having come into a full time, supposedly
respectable, professorial persona, I still get crushes (a nasty one has been brewing recently) and
feel FEELINGS about things…things like music, poetry, and hiking alone to amplify those
feelings. I lay in my porch swing, drinking Prosecco, and look out onto the foothills of Daniel
Boone National Forest, and want to understand and act on nameless fuzzy life stuff. Lately, most
of this “stuff” relates to sexuality, specifically a sexual identity that helped me come into
academia. She wants to hunt, successfully. Wants to club man. Kiss man. Take man’s wallet.
Purchase Louis Vuitton handbag. One that will require more money than almost every car she’s
owned cost out right. And man will love her for it. In other words, my stripping persona,
“Tempest,” and her sidekick, the woman I was in my twenties and thirties, won’t go away. They
appear in the classroom, over drinks with colleagues at La Finca’s Mexican restaurant, and in
General Education department meetings. Like Tempest and like the student I have always been,
repression, restraint, and modesty do not come naturally. As an official faculty member, I
imagine that cultivating these traits might serve me, yet I refuse to shut up, dress down, and stop
2
Barton, Stripped, xi
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feeling things. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain
multitudes (Whitman 87).
II. FOURTH GRADE PRINCESS: BAD CARRIE. BAD, BAD CARRIE
When heaven has endowed you with a soul made for love, not to love is to deprive yourself and
others of great happiness. It is as if an orange-tree dared not flower for fear of committing a sin.
–Stendhal
Until fourth grade, I earned A’s, talked too much, and chased boys around Wilkerson
Elementary school’s swing set and monkey bars, but also read well out loud and held my hand
up often. I never made friends as easily with girls as I did boys. On special days, like “hat day,”
mom sent me to school with not only appropriate, but over the top requested attitude: a black
sombrero, for example. When I won 4th grade princess, via classmates’ votes (I voted for myself
and knew that I probably shouldn’t have, that it was kind of icky), I wore a cream gown
handmade by Memaw. As Lady Gaga might describe: I walked, walked, fashion baby, worked it
moved that bitch Cah-razy. At nine years old, I already loved clothes and attention. Popular,
precocious, and cute, I feel sure that had it not been for busing and my subsequent acceptance
into a traditional school my fifth grade year, I would have become a cheerleader, or class
president, or some other obnoxious teenager praised for being a leader capable of mindless
motivation, even if that motivation had been organizing a down low, senior cut day at Rough
River to get stoned and drunk.
Becoming this person would not have been the worst thing to happen. I probably would not
have struggled as much with listening to and then following advice. I might have made more
girlfriends. I might have saved money from part time high school jobs (Furrow’s hardware store,
and Ehler’s ice cream shop) rather than, for example, taking cabs to shop at Goodwill (This
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episode lives on in my extremely pragmatic, resourceful, good-with-money mother’s memory
and still gets related to new friends). I never saved enough for car insurance to be added to her
policy, much less buy my own beater, so I took a cab to spend money that, had I continued on as
a 4th grade princess, I might have obediently saved. I also might not have stayed out past a
midnight curfew on a Saturday night during my senior year of high school to attend The Rocky
Horror Picture Show. The year before, I might not have cut school, and taken a bus to the
University of Louisville to visit my 19 year-old college boyfriend and lose my virginity in a
Threckhald Hall dorm room.
I enjoy imagining that, rather than eventually becoming the all-black wearing artist rebel who
wrote nearly $1,000.00 in bad checks as well as dozens of bad poems during my freshman year
of college (and was eventually arrested for my pecuniary crimes), I would have saved thousands
of summer job dollars, earned a 4.0, wore clothes that showed off my svelte figure, been awarded
academic scholarships, and obsequiously pleased my hard-working, single mother, providing a
proud example of how to properly and responsibly come of age. She should have known better.
My mother, for her part, eloped at 16. My grandfather, rather than save money for a future
that might have included college (as he did for three of his four other children), spent those funds
on her orthodontist. She claims he was of the opinion that braces provided a better investment,
one that accentuated her most promising characteristics, her looks. My mother is 5’8” curvy
inches tall, d-cupped, with green eyes, and brunette curls. Her wit cuts with the sharpness of
broken stemware, but my Papaw did not see intellectual potential, and probably rightfully so.
Like me, she broke rules and lived life according to her manic, passionate sensibilities so unlike
good students and intellectuals, close friends whom I admire, who seem to succeed in part for
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their ability to understand and apply rules or at least conventions. Why can’t I be more like
them?
Mom’s cleverness, like mine, is housed in cultivating a love for life’s smaller wisdoms,
learning their pleasure and eternal lessons. We embrace experience over theory, everyday over
big picture. We flirt, laugh, and get straight to point. We talk, talk, talk and feel confident in our
looks and brains, in spite of traditional definitions of intelligence or attractiveness. In fact, I often
measure my intellect through enjoying life and facilitating others doing the same. It’s going to
end sometime, you know, life.
My eventual career in exotic dancing logically followed from most of these traits as well as
formative adolescent forays into bad decisions, boys, and my father’s abandonment. I probably
eventually thought of my father and strip club customers similarly. As exotic dancer “Rachel”
describes in Stripped, “When people say, ‘Doesn’t [stripping] make you hate men?’ or stuff like
that, to me the customers are not men; they’re this whole other species” (125). I eventually
relocated my father, Michael Wright, to the planet where those men, that species, lives. I left him
with a bowl of water, newspaper, and a few treats.
My parents divorced when I was five, but when I turned twelve my father, 32 at the time,
chose a new life with a wife 13 years his junior. This hurtful confusion simply ramped up my
already existent boy craziness. School had always provided boys to chase and still does. I rode
four busses a zillion miles to be schooled among kids who generally found me odd. Girls made
fun of me for not knowing the word “mauve.” After school, I played football with neighborhood
boys, and secretly wanted the cutest one to kiss me. Me. Frizzy headed, round faced, freckled,
thick-thigh’ed me. If I wasn’t writng, I was boy-ing. If I wasn’t boying, I was writing about boys.
Today, I often ask the question that Maureen Dowd asks in the title to her book about gender
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clashes: Are Men Really Necessary? For me, they sadly, torturously, obsessively, and
deliciously, are. As Dowd explains in the book’s opening, “I don’t understand men. I don’t even
understand what I don’t understand about men. They’re a most inscrutable bunch, really” (3).
Yet, beginning in grade school, I fantasized and wrote about them faithfully. A fat lot of good
that did me.
Rather than continuing on after 4th grade embracing a more useful, but I suspect less
reflective, persona, I soon became introspective, angst-y, and even more boy crazy. An aside:
Because boy craziness continues, today, to facilitate debilitating crushes and subsequent bad,
Carrie, bad, bad Carrie behavior, like any respectable scholar, I “research” crushes, relationships,
monogamy, and love. Among my favorite cherry picked passages related to my acute
appreciation of the male species (and consequent troubles) is the following simple statement
from The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, by
sociologist Helen Fisher: “As Darwin pointed out, those who breed survive. Thus it is to a
female’s advantage to seek sex” (33). Research and personal inquiry have provided numerous
responses to why I transform myself into a determined little monkey when I meet a boy whom I
like more than friends. I could also be inflicted with abnormally high levels of PEA, a natural
amphetamine associated with nerve cells. Harris summarizes one of PEA’s effects, explaining
that “Romantic junkies crave relationships,” and that PEA administers a fix of “exhilaration and
apprehension—a chemical high that accompanies a range of experiences, including infatuation”
(54). I don’t need to be tested. My PEA levels would very likely rival Zsa Zsa Gabor’s.
December 2010: I am in Louisville at home with my husband, whom I’ll refer to as “Robert.”
(What Gen X girl wouldn’t like to imagine Robert Downey, Jr. as her husband?). Since August
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and my faculty appointment at Morehead State, Rob and I take turns every other weekend,
driving two hours on I-64, visiting in our respective towns. We own a home in Louisville. I rent
a small house in Morehead. At home for a few holiday weeks, we feel comfortable again, almost
as if I don’t live in Morehead full time. Before going to work, my husband leaves a coffee mug
with two teaspoons of Splenda and a spoon in it, and a pot of coffee waiting on the kitchen
counter for his late rising wife. He takes me on Friday or Saturday night dinners and movies,
referring to them as such, prioritizing dates. He talks to me while I take baths. He has done these
things for as long as I can remember. We’ve been married over three years.
A colleague crush, and other longings, melt like snow in afternoon sun. I am a married faculty
member. I am one half of a heteronormative, monogamous couple and will behave as such,
despite an appreciation that “the term monogamy is often misused; the Oxford English
Dictionary defines monogamy as ‘the condition or custom of being married to only one person at
a time.’ This does not suggest that partners are sexually faithful to each other” (Fisher 63). Let
me count the ways I might remain monogamous.
Morehead State University’s wellness center, my elliptical and nautilus machines, sits two
hours away, empty during the holidays. I jog a couple of miles through my neighborhood every
evening and use free weights at the house. I hit biceps, triceps, shoulders, chest, quads, glutes,
calves, and abs. Jogging has become meditation. I hate it, always have, but look forward to dark,
cold solitude every evening and listen to a new favorite album, Beirut’s The Flying Club Cup as I
run. I have come to know appropriate landmarks by time according to album tracks. Accordions,
jangly percussion, a lilting male vocalist, violas, organ, and France. My favorite song, Un
Dernier Verre (Pour La Route), brings to mind the crush. He speaks French. He jogs.
Come sit at the table
Under October’s able skies
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Once we’d seen eye to eye
I’d known that I’d pass you by, and I tried
The bells chime seven times
Completed at nine
The world moves slower, I find
No, but I learned of time
By your hands
And in shallow waters’ end
I learned not to swim but to lie
I’ll wait for now
‘Til it’s ready to burn out
I insist on doubts
We’re already lying on the grass, the grass.
(Beirut)
The Flying Club Cup’s songs slowly build, but never to a pace that most people would
associate with exercise music. These songs, rather, exercise the imagination and heart. I allow
myself to see his face, to speak with him, to be coached in my jogging by him. His advice would
be stern. My jogging form displays all the grace of a Chihuahua hauling a cart of bricks up Clack
Mountain. He would push me to at least conjure the grace of a bird dog. I would act put out but
would like his roughness.
Along a relevant line, Helen Fisher also points out that “…despite our cultural taboo against
infidelity, Americans are adulterous…And we are hardly extraordinary. I recently read forty-two
ethnographies (my note: Who mentions, seemingly casually, having recently read so many
ethnographies?) about different peoples past and present and found that adultery occurred in
every one” (87). But good Americans? Are they adulterous too? My attractions are normal, yes?
I’m not cheating, I’m jogging.
III. TRADITIONAL SCHOOL:
THANK YOU AND FUCK YOU VERY MUCH
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In 1978, when I turned ten, mandatory desegregation busing would have required me to ride
several miles from Pleasure Ridge Park to attend a school in the West end, an area of Louisville
that was, and still is, known for poor schools, a minority population, and crime. Mom claims that
she looked into the Traditional public school option because she didn’t want me to be sent so
many miles from home, but I would travel just as far, riding two buses one way, to arrive at each
traditional school that I eventually attended, elementary through high school. As color blind and
non-judgmental as my family claims to be, Mom probably didn’t like the idea of me, at age ten,
attending a school in that end of town.
The Traditional school system’s campuses existed in other areas of town, areas either closer
to where people with money lived, or in their backyards: The East end. Lawyers, Doctors, and
The Binghams (Louisville’s equivalent to the Kennedy clan). I lived in the South, West end,
Pleasure Ridge Park: Stoners, Beer Drinkers, Ass-Wipers, Truck Drivers, and moonlighting
Stoner-Beer Drinking-Ass Wiping-Truck Drivers. Our once illustrious neighborhood developed
in large part because, during the early 1900’s, people from outlying rural counties visited a large
hotel that sat on Muldrough ridge. Guests would dance, drink, and gaze out onto the Ohio River.
Since the 1920’s, Louisville’s more sought after real estate included metropolitan expansion
toward the east and north, away from such debauchery. The traditional schools I would attend,
ergo, were filled with kids whose yuppie parents earned or possessed far more money than did
mine. Years later when I found myself holding two hundred dollars cash after working one
seven-hour, Sunday night shift at Déjà vu, I found the prospect of flipping my undressed bird
irresistible in the name of a big fat “Fuck you!” to the girl snobs I grew up with, as well as the
boys who rejected me. Look who’s hot with cash now. Look who’s smart and tough now,
bitches.
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Despite having been slotted to earn Miss Popularity through 4th grade in my small pond of a
redneck neighborhood, fifth grade at Carter Traditional (and, indirectly, avoiding busing) showed
me my true place in the larger social scheme of the Louisville elementary school hierarchy. I
wore no name everything, kept my cute, freckled nose in a book during class, and my hand
stayed far below my curly, frizzy head of hair. Despite my social ineptitude and outcast status, I
would win a publication spot in a city-wide junior high literary journal for a poem about drunk
driving (inspired by my mother’s opinion that drunk drivers constituted a life form lower than
“Ditch” Mitch McConnell, even though she, herself, has lately admitted to twenty-something bad
drinking driving calls). My seventh grade teacher also chose me to judge first, second, and third
place from among classmates’ self-made, short fiction books. A couple of years later, Ms.
Cookie, my freshman English teacher, commented to the entire class that I was a writer in the
making. These memories comprise the few proud moments that I recall from the general
nightmare of my years in the Louisville Traditional school system.
Like most of my fellow classmates, I felt lost. Geekish. Being cute, I attracted a few boys. I
also made one close girlfriend, but generally felt the hot discomfort of being less than. Then
there was Mrs. Thomas, Traditional Male High School’s Latin teacher, who inspired such strong
affection from all of her students that she earned the nickname “Tubular Thomas,” as in totally
tubular, (which was a good thing, classmate and popular girl, Emily Wilson assured her, when
she asked. Duh!). By then, mom had made keys for my brother and I to get into the house before
she came home from work; my relationship with my father began its eventual sky dive into
extremely formative adolescent years hell, and I earned average, at best, grades, except in Latin.
My love of Latin derives from Tubular Thomas and my middle school Latin teacher, Ms.
“Child, Please!” (This phrase, her tall, sizeable frame, and black/grey bun make up the vivid
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details I remember of her) from Woerner Traditional. I attended our state’s three day, two night
Latin convention, competing in “Vocabulary” but most loved attending the final evening’s dance
with straw-haired, braces-having, tall, skinny, blue-eyed, nerdy, hyper, but sweet, Brent
Crittenden, both of us wearing as close to traditional Greek garb as sheets and plastic leaves
afforded. So, with a few notices for writing, and outside of the occasional sole best friend or odd
boyfriend, for the five years that I attended Traditional schools, I thought of school as a place
where snobby kids, girls more than boys, waited to make fun of me but where teachers seemed to
like me okay and sometimes noticed something special even though I don’t recall embracing a
4.0 mentality.
Henceforth, all school, including university classes, can pretty much be summed up similarly:
I cared more about wearing my latest Gunne Sax thrift store find than about pleasing my
teachers. I got along better with boys than girls. Unless a teacher or professor offered a creative
opportunity, or seemed to like me (ah, the bane of students everywhere…that the teacher does
not like them!), or appreciate my manic learning, uh, style…I did not perform. For anyone. Not
even earning a doctorate, which required me to perform A LOT as others would have me
perform, broke me of not really caring about how others perceive me. So far, the potential to earn
tenure, therefore consciously and carefully edit interactions with and attitudes towards colleagues
does not seem to bring out an ass kisser in me either. I like most people, including many of my
colleagues and trust that, like me, their work is getting done and that they are not worried about
me getting my work done. As I have most of my life, I do for me, not others, and feel sure that I
know best what I would like to take away from any given situation. And how. I have been
wrong. Can I go back and run for class president? I will cheer. Wear pink. Every day. Promise.
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Despite my eventual resentment of public schools, yet relief in being at Pleasure Ridge Park
High School, away from snobby East End kids, I feel embarrassed that I liked attending
Traditional schools during my busing years. Should I not, instead, feel righteous indignation
about being deprived of a diversity event? Yet, I would not have become a writer without Ms.
Cookie and Mrs. Thomas. I might not have learned to love Latin, etymology, and maybe never
had set and attained the goal of traveling to Greece when I was 26. I might not have understood
myself as different, nor special. Because I was poor and knew it, a small, prideful, confident
piece of my identity eventually loved having grown up without Ralph Lauren, diamond studs, or
a new Honda on my 16th. I don’t need material crutches to feel happy. I spent three hours last
Easter morning scavenging my neighborhood for trash finds and hauled away end tables and
cabinets that grown up, spoiled, East End kids from my school days now pay hundreds of dollars
for. I developed into a young woman with ambivalent feelings about class, powerful romantic
and sexual sensibilities, and a developing understanding that more than ten ways exist to skin a
cat.
Superbowl Sunday 2010: I am driving back to Morehead from Louisville. I have finally caved. I
have added unlimited texting to my T-Mobile plan, not to stay in touch with Robert, but to text
with the aforementioned male colleague crush. Yes. I still like him--more than friends--as Adam
Sandler feels about his character’s object of affection in Happy Gilmore, but we are friends by
definition. He reminded me of my marital status when I confronted him about his flirtations and
was he attracted to me or not? Check yes or no already. A girl just wants to know because, well,
because of my PEA levels, alright? I might be rightfully diagnosed with a deadly case of the
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romantic lustfuls and you need to know the revved up pathology upon which your flirtations
have been treading. Like, for sure.
Not to be flip, but my marriage seems to be in real trouble for reasons that would seem
inappropriate to disclose here. I am thinking about divorce. When I write, “thinking,” I mean
thinking. I do not mean that I have decided or that one bad weekend constitutes considering
divorce. The idea has been building since last summer. The holidays stalled those thoughts. This
past weekend we did the usual: movie, dinner, dog walks, no passion. He read. I read. He typed.
I typed. We barely talked with one another. We acted like a couple who had celebrated their 50th
wedding anniversary, and had stopped producing the hormones to prove it.
In Morehead, during the week, I am single. I live alone again. I drink and talk with male
colleagues, and other men, including much younger men who have shown obvious interest. I feel
powerful, funny, sexy…dare I say alive? Living alone is becoming a pleasure. Visiting
Louisville has become a chore.
I feel compelled here to emphatically explain Robert’s wonderful qualities, and my best
marriage intentions, along with justifications for my crushes, attractions, flirtations, feelings, and
developing dubious stance on marriage and monogamy. Trust me. Rob is a good guy. I am not a
whore beast. It’s just not working, and I am beginning to work IT. Girl. Bad girl. I want a bad
romance.
For a while during my late thirties, I felt a bit put out that18 to 25 year old men no longer
checked me out. Until I turned 30, 18 to 25 year olds and up included the male demographic
from whom I earned hundreds of dollars dancing topless and nude at Déjà Vu. Lately, I spend six
days a week at the university gym, at least 30 minutes of cardio and 30 more strength training. I
fit into dresses and skirts 3 sizes smaller than I did one year ago. I like my body again. Feel sexy
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again. Like to flirt. Like clothes. And I like men again. Too much. I am thinking about cheating,
and not necessarily with colleague crush guy. Who am I kidding? I have decided to cheat. I want
to hunt. I selfishly blame Robert. I miss sensuality, passion, kissing for half an hour.
Realistically, I also blame myself. I underestimated sexuality’s importance in our marriage. I also
miss stripping. I have missed it since I last danced nude on stage. I write scholarship about my
sexual identity. I wear pencil skirts and heels in the classroom. I probably perform some version
of “Tempest” in most situations involving drinking and men, and do the same, somewhat, when I
teach. Tempest never left as I expected she might have when I married Robert. Like the hungry
plant in The Little Shop of Horrors, an evil voice has been demanding “Feed me, Tempest.”
IV. A GENTLEMEN’S CLUB: HOT FOR TEACHER
‘This smile will make you beautiful woman. This will give you power to be very pretty. You can
use this power—pretty power—to get what you want in life.’
– Elizabeth Gilbert quoting Ketut, Balinese spiritual medicine man
I am blessed with straight white teeth and an easy smile. If you imagine that tits and ass make
a stripper, then know that I am, on my tallest day, almost five foot three inches. I boast more ass
than tits, with freckles and reddish-brown curls. I nearly look like an Anti-Barbie. If I had a 20
dollar bill for every customer who commented on my smile…then I would have earned about
500 dollars average most weekend nights working 6-10 hours (6-8p.m. to 2-4a.m.). Unlike many
of the women with whom I danced, I made a lot of eye contact with customers and smiled on
stage. Do not think Pee Wee Herman. Think Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing. Innocent but this
close to sexually besting Patrick Swayze. There’s no coming back clean for “Baby” from
Swayze.
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As Tempest, I perfected “pretty power.” That power has been and remains extremely useful. I
am beginning to understand its application with women, too. An entomologist must have first
pointed out that one catches more flies with honey than vinegar. A super genius asked, “Who
wants flies?” Honey seems better used to add sweetness to that which one plans to ingest.
You probably have lots of questions about stripping right about now. I offer the following:
Yes, I really did like the job (more than most dancers, I think). Yes, I really did earn 500 dollars
a weekend night. Yes, I spent all of it beyond living expenses, school, and travel, somewhat
irresponsibly, saving nothing. No, I did not become addicted to drugs or alcohol. And, no,
stripping at Déjà Vu in Louisville during the 90’s did not involve prostitution. I chose the music
for my two song sets on center stage: Nine Inch Nails, Rolling Stones, U2, Metallica, New
Order, Sade, INXS. I wore gowns, skirts, vinyl short shorts, tight white tank tops and thongs. I
did not mind wearing heels all night. My thighs became quite muscular as a result. I got along
with almost every other dancer; we all did, generally. (Stripping taught me about being friends
with women). I occasionally felt grossed out, and occasionally turned on. Many bouncers worked
the club floor, and men who spoke disrespectfully, much less attempted to touch us, were
immediately rewarded with a hasty, forced exit. I worked eight years part time, from 22 to 30,
and took two long breaks from work, once for several months and once for more than a year. If I
could still earn good money stripping, I would probably do so.
For Generation X purposes, I am under the impression, as is Bernadette Barton, that
“although still a highly stigmatized career, exotic dancing is creeping into the continuum of
possible job options alongside modeling, acting, and beauty pageants as a means for young
women to make money from their physical attributes” (21). Women of my generation began
choosing sex work more often than our older sisters or younger aunts. In my day, being known
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as a stripper held a kind of positive sexual notoriety, and seemed to have become even less
stigmatized by 2000, the year I never returned to Déjà Vu to work another Saturday night shift.
Additionally, sex work has become one among many generational expressions of third wave
feminism, a feminism that some would relate to an idea Barton’s research bears out. She found
that dancers often admitted to eating disorders and body image issues (hmmm…female and
American…what woman doesn’t experience one, the other, or both?).
But women’s sexuality is also a site of power, as the women I interviewed elaborated.
For some women, exotic dancing may be the first time they experience their bodies
subjectively, and this is liberating. Moreover, stripping encouraged some of the
informants…to consciously explore a sexual side of their personality (93).
Since adolescence, the sexual side of my personality rarely felt neglected. I was enacting third
wave feminism while the first and second wave looked the other way. I came into stripping an
outgoing, confident, brainy, sexual creature, a flirt, clubber, bull shitter. University work
coincided with the personality that had been coming into its own, blooming like Elvis Costello’s
Poison Rose. When stripping ended, writing about stripping picked up. Through my post
stripping years, and graduate school, I thought of myself, and referred to myself as either a
stripper or ex-stripper, and often assumed that men judged me, wanted me, or were to be
conquered for sex.
Wait. Not all men. I sought romance and met sensitive guys on equal ground. To be frank, I
should probably simply express that since stripping, I view men first as I might have club
customers. I ask myself, “What does he really want from me?” “What do I really want from
him?” “Do I want him?” “Does he want me?” Most human interactions can be summed up
thusly, however considering my Gen X-ness, academia, and the reappearance of Tempest in full
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force, these questions have become troublesome because I will ask a mother fucker what’s up,
directly, colleague or not. Maureen Dowd warns, though, that “The way to approach men, we
reasoned, was forthrightly and without games, artifice or frills. Unfortunately, history has shown
this to be a misguided notion” (18). Dowd refers to the sixties and a generational perception of
sexual equality that she imagined might take. Not so much it seems.
At times like these, when I feel inspired to write a musical response, as did her highness Lady
Gaga, to Motley Crue’s Girls, Girls, Girls, I wish for a persona more like female high school
athletes; so many of those girls seemed more interested in owning their bodies differently,
through sheer physical strength and competition. If only I had wanted to play softball or
volleyball or Lacrosse. Why am I much more likely to show up for faculty volleyball night if I
know beforehand that the right boy will be playing? And who in my new professional world
would understand what a goofball I am? Besides, maybe, the male colleague, eventually.
One other note: I still don’t fit in like I didn’t in Traditional School. Most female scholars
wouldn’t know, or care to know, a Trina Turk dress nor a pair of Giuseppe Zanotti heels even if
they came with tenure and a Fulbright. And maybe they shouldn’t. These much more seemingly
brilliant, serious scholars are engaged in serious endeavors, unlike me, and unlike Tempest, who
does know heels and dresses, as well as which color (Cherry Lush) of $45.00 Tom Ford, private
collection lipstick she plans to pre-order. And she will wear the lipstick and the rest of it around
Morehead’s English department as if someone might still offer to buy a table dance. If the right
male colleague offered, I just might. In the department’s copy room around 1a.m. after we’ve
enjoyed a bottle of Bordeaux. I’ve got keys to the place now.
AFTERWORD
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A final reminder about Generation X and my expertise, or lack thereof, in representing and
documenting us: As a proper Gen X-er narrator, this piece has backed away from directly
claiming generational knowledge. Rather, if my experiences represent X-er’s, if you relate to my
narrative as a Gen X-er, or if you, like me, understand a shared experience of professional and
sexual identity struggles, then I trust that I have sufficiently performed an appropriately
disconnected connection with us, whoever we are. Here we are now. I hope that I have
entertained you.
Works Cited
Author Jeff Gordinier Discusses X Saves The World. 11 March 2008. You Tube. Web. 20 June
2010.
Barton, Bernadette. Stripped. New York: New York University Press. 2006. Print
Beirut. The Flying Club Cup. Un Dernier Verre (Pour La Route). EMI Music 2007. CD.
Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary?When Sexes Collide. New York: Penguin Group. 2005.
Print
Fisher, Helen. Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray.
New York: Random House. 1992. Print
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love. One Woman’s Seach for Everything Across Italy, India, and
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Indonesia. New York: Penguin Group. 2007. Print
Stendhal. Love. New York: Penguin Group. 2004. Print
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Vintage Books: New York. 1992. Print