BARE

Former Reuters journalist Eaves reflects on her years as an exotic dancer in Seattle, the path that led her there, and why she’ll never go back.

“I had a deep distaste for clothing as a child,” she tells us. Other than a fondness for nudity, however, Eaves seemed to exhibit few girlhood indicators for her eventual stage work, raised as she was by scholarly parents who emphasized the importance of intellectual achievement over all other. But it was this exclusive focus on the cerebral, the writer insists, that made her all the more determined to explore gender issues and sexuality, which began puzzling her as soon as she hit adolescence and was confronted with a seemingly arbitrary moral universe. Irritated by the rules required of nice girls, she became fascinated with what she perceived as the sexual freedom enjoyed by strippers. After graduating from college and moving in with her boyfriend in Seattle, she finally took the plunge and began dancing naked at the Lusty Lady. Twelve months passed and she gave it up, moved on, and got a graduate degree at Columbia; years later, however, she was driven to return to the exhibitionist profession to explore why, exactly, she’d done it in the first place. Her personal justifications for taking up dancing (pursuit of personal freedom and stereotype-busting) and giving it up (it was screwing with her behavior in relationships) are unremarkable. The strength of the work lies in her non-sensational, balanced look at her coworkers, with all of their singular histories, and at the backstage of a strip parlor, with the attendant headaches of workplace etiquette and labor relations.

Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.