blood and guts writing

Tara and I decided that the writing for us is written with blood and guts. The writing that isn't afraid to be visceral. The writing of women who live and write in the visceral world. I could write a whole poem about the viceral quality of working in a club. The regular visual treat of watching the women bend over in the mirrors to open their lips with their fingers in order to check out their cunts last minute before they run out on stage. It's a particularly embarassing thing for a dancer to dance with toilet paper shreds collected in her vag because she forgot to use a babywipe after she peed. On the dressing room counter there's an endless row of make-up, crushed blushes and powders, a cigarette always smoking away in the ashtray where the dancer left it burning for her when she gets to get off the stage, and babywipes galore, here and there, and sometimes the dancers don't mind if you use one of theirs if you forgot to bring your own- because babywipes are a dancing essential. It's so casual, the bending over, the quick pussy check, some girls ask their friends to check it for them and the other dancers in the crowded, smoky room think nothing unusual when I say, "Hey Tara, can you check my cunt?" I bend forward and Tara gets down to eye-level with my snatch. She opens it up with her hands and checks. She says, "no, you're fine" and I stand up, fix my thong, and run out to the stage where the DJ is already calling my name. This is blood and guts and so many people are afraid to write about the visceral.

I was telling Tara about Natasha Tretheway's "Bellocq's Ophelia"- a collection of poems about light skinnd black girls working in the red-light district of turn-of-the-century New Orleans. It's an amazing collection, very important, and I love that Natasha Trethewey has made it her life's work to give voices to the forgotten, those that were, because of their minority status, ignored and never heard. From a collection of photographs of the girls, Tretheway creates the character of Ophelia and most of the poems are written from her perspective, her story at the whorehouse.

Although the poems are great and the book is important, I felt unsatisfied after reading it. When we had to buy it for a class, I was so excited to be reading a book about sex-workers because we are so under-represented. Women in general are underrepresented, but peripheral woman, whores, are usually invisible.

My main complaint with the book was the lack of visceral details. Tretheway writes a lot of the lighting, the lighting reflecting off skin, the postures the women had to assume to be sellable, but she never once in the book gives us Ophelia's thoughts on the actual moment of intercourse, the private moment between her and the customer when the doors are closed and the real work begins. Why did she leave this out? Not once does she mention the pussy, the penis, the bodies brought together by business, the breath, the violence (because violence from Johns is very common)- why didn't she include that in her portrait? I voiced these concerns to my professor and she made a good point, she said perhaps Tretheway didn't want to include these details because it wasn't conducive to her overall aesthetic. Maybe so, but if you are going to write from the perspective a sex-worker, you should do some research with sex-workers and be able to portray those essential moments, those blood and guts moments. Life for any turn-of-the-century whore in the brothels wasn't all light and jewelry, perfume and make up. It included a lot of blood and guts and Tretheway didn't venture there and I still want to know why.

My guess was that she had never worked as a sex-worker and so, couldn't imagine those moments enough to write them. Or maybe those moments would have been too shocking and disturbing to poetry academia, who really, honestly prefers poems about flowers and soldiers than they do about women working the front lines of patriarchy. Tretheway wrote for her audience and her audience was middle class academia- what do they care if Ophelia had an unpleasant experience with a John who forcefully held her down and wouldn't let her speak and/or wanted her to fulfill his fantasies of sleeping with an exotic black woman by having her call him master? I've read accounts written by real sex-workers of color who unapologetically write about those moments, when race, gender, and class collide in crazy ways during the sell. Should we assume that these moments didn't happen for Ophelia- and if they did, should we ignore them for the sake of the squeamish reader?

Tara got an email from a graduate student writing a thesis on Strippers and Agency. The grad student admitted having no experience as a stripper, but she wanted to write about it and she sent Tara a long questionnaire that she wanted her to answer to aid her research. Tara has chosen to ignore it for now, until she can figure out what she wants to say to her. Tara and I then discussed the strange compulsion that these middle class academia types have toward writing about sex-workers. If you aren't willing to actually work and experience "that world" then why do you feel you can appropriate the experience for your own unexperienced research?

The books about stripping you can find at Barnes and Nobles are pretty criminal. Two popular ones are Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping and Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Both books were written by upper middle class women who don't know a thing about stripping. Elisabeth Eaves, the author of Bare, worked at the Lusty Lady, which is a peep show. To her credit, she does include a lot of the visceral details of working there, but later in the book she admits that she never gave a lapdance, would never imagine working at a place like that. She tries to work in a regular club and is about to give a lapdance and then turns away and walks out because she found it so repulsive. Throughout the book she gives big hints to her upper-class white privilige. In one part she laments about some money issue and she actually says something about "just imagine having your credit ruined at the age of 24" or something. I read the book a few years ago so I don't remember the exact age or the exact issue, but I remember her shock at the possibility that her credit could have been ruined. I read it at 24, broke, stripping in South Dakota and I thought, "wow, my credit has been completely ruined since age 18." To be in your twenties and to have good credit usually means you are priviliged as fuck. And why couldn't she work at a real club and give real lapdances? And if she couldn't- why in hell would she call her book "The Naked Truth about Stripping." Why? Because she, as an upper middle class woman, had no problem assuming that her limited experience qualified her for writing a bible of stripping. The title connotes an all-encompassing expose of the phenomenon of Stripping, yet she never actually stripped, never worked with poor women in seedy clubs, never experienced the psychological work a stripper does when she is in direct contact with the customers. This is criminal. She appropriated a word and used it to tell her story. It doesn't add up and it pisses me off, but her book got great reviews because popular readers don't want to read about real working women, real whores and strippers, they instead prefer the watered-down briefly roughing it tales of rich white women. Candy Girl is despicable. The catch phrase in the title lets you know that this book is only interesting because she wasn't a real stripper- she was an ivy-league girl who decided to strip for a year and then write about it. The book is popular for the same reason- people like to read the stories of their own people slumming it in the underworld where the rest of us live and struggle.

My point is I want to see more blood and guts writing from real working-class women who aren't afraid to write the real stories- every moment, every cunt bent over in front of a mirror, every moment between the stripper and the customer as their bodies are in close sexual contact and the customers are saying crazy things and the magic of hustling happens. I want to read the stories of women who dance to survive and know what is going on.

Elizabeth Eaves went on to write a book about dancers and power- funny thing since she never worked in a real club. This means she is leaving out the majority of dancers in the assessment and where else does the real power struggle happen than in a close contact club where the girls, usually working-class, have to hustle dances in order to pay their bills? Once again we have an upper middle class woman taking it upon herself to write a know-all book when she really doesn't know anything. *anger*