What Strip Clubs Can Teach Us About Dharma
Dharma Snobs, The Burlesque Scene in The Graduate, "Gentleman's Clubs," Kind Wiccan Priests, LeTigre, The Male Gaze, Nakedness vs. Nudity, Unadorned Bliss, Sensuality & Meditation
When I was nineteen, I nearly became a stripper in order to study Buddhism. I desperately wanted to learn everything there was to learn about Dharma, but there wasn’t much accessible to me in the small city where I lived and studied. I frequented a local Dharma center on a few Sunday mornings. The members were friendly and kind enough to give me basic meditation instructions on counting the breath. At the same time, they intimidated me. I could have been their daughter. They were middle-class white boomers, many with professional ties to the large public university where I was enrolled. They were nice to me, but I felt suspicious. I worried they were snobs.
Growing up in a college town, I came across older Western converts whose interest in Buddhism had an academic bent. They also had a Bohemian elitism towards people who drove Chevys and went to church. God forbid you enjoy fishing with your mamaw, aspire to own a pair of Ray-ban sunglasses, listen to country or rap, or speak in a southern accent.
Mostly, though, I didn’t understand why learning Dharma cost so much money.
Around the center, posters advertised weekend courses that sounded interesting but unaffordable. The weekend classes cost over two hundred dollars—about what I made in a week. I worked part-time grilling Philly cheese-steaks at a sandwich shop. Although I went to the center somewhat regularly for a few months, there seemed no way to advance my studies as Dharma student. No one spoke of scholarships to attend the weekend courses, or offered me teachings besides counting the breath. It didn’t seem like they wanted young people around at all. I decided the best plan of action would be to study abroad in a Buddhist country. I chose Mongolia, because it seemed most closely related to Tibetan Buddhism.
My parents, two women who lacked the privilege of marriage and filing joint-taxes, thought this idea was ridiculous. (It was.) They were both professionals and by no means poor, but they would not dip into their life-savings to pay for a study-abroad to Mongolia—a location which had no practicality whatsoever in terms of finding employment after college. It was bad enough that I was an English major. They questioned why the study abroad program was so expensive when Mongolia was a low-income country. They thought I was getting fleeced.
Finally, when it seemed like I was determined to go, come hell or high-water, they took me to a local sporting goods store and bought me an expensive three-layer coat. If I was going to live in a yurt for a semester, they didn’t want me to freeze to death.
I haggled down the director of the study abroad program to a slightly more affordable price. It was still outrageously expensive. I wasn’t sure what to do. One day, I broke down in tears while washing dishes at work. A fatherly Wiccan priest—the sub shop manager—gave me an extra forty-bucks for groceries, then went next door to the hippie bookstore and bought me a malachite ring for energy protection. He told me it was obvious that I had a past-life connection to this tradition. He had a vision of me in a tall furry hat. He said he’d pray for me.
A few days later, my friend Lydia came in to grab an early dinner. She was just about to go to Regina’s Gentleman’s Club where she danced as a stripper. Lydia was conventionally pretty. She an hour-glass figure and had felt objectified by men since puberty. Now she was reaping revenge. Men had to pay her for looking at her body, something they were doing anyway.
Some historical context might be needed here: It was 2001, a few months after September 11th. Kathleen Hannah, a former stripper herself, was the front-woman of Le Tigre, a punk dance band which played constantly at any sort of queer progressive gathering. My group of friends protested the Iraq war and went to rallies against police brutality, but we felt like changing the gender dynamics of our everyday lives was a hopeless cause. For example, the idea of asking people to use “they/them” pronouns would have been unthinkable outside the most radical spaces. Looking back, much of what we felt was really a type of cynicism.
The feminist discourse of the time followed a sort of logic that both Lydia and I subscribed to. We were regularly harassed by men for our youth and gender, and whatever else might intersect with it, like race and sexual orientation. Sexual harassment was ubiquitous. Men tried to feel us up at the workplace, cat-called us when we walked down the streets, and hit on us in their faculty offices as soon as the doors were closed. We both figured that if men wanted to look up our skirts so badly, we ought to be compensated.
Lydia told me what she made dancing the weekend before; I told her how much money I needed to study abroad. You make that in four months, easy, she said.
It might seem outlandish for a young woman to dance as a stripper in order to study Buddhism. But it never occurred to me, not for a single moment, that I couldn’t be a stripper and also a Dharma student or at the very least, a spiritual person. I could think of plenty of women who considered themselves deeply spiritual but monetized their sex appeal. (No one doubts that Dolly Parton remains a sincere Christian even though she received breast implants.)
More importantly, if Vajrayana Buddhism claimed that everyone has Buddha nature, this meant strippers had Buddha nature and horny drunk men did too. I had no idea what any of this meant exactly, but based on my reading, I’d gathered that it was part of the tradition to not avoid difficult situations. Besides, I’d heard about a Tibetan meditation master who blessed people with his penis. Dancing naked for money seemed pretty vanilla in comparison.
My roommate and I went to the club on a weeknight to scope it out. Hardly anyone was there. We were underage, so we ordered soda waters with lime. We sat around a table near the back. Music from twenty years ago blared from the DJ booth, as a way to take back the middle-age men to their heyday. A skinny girl with long blond hair came out, twirled around the pole a few times, then took off her bikini top and thong.
The dancer went over to male customer who had come up to sit near the stage. He looked a lot like my middle-school science teacher. The girl bent over, showed her asshole and the mound of labia, and twerked her ass. The position, and the raw-animal quality of it, reminded me of being a child and seeing a brood mare taken out of her stall to be bred, her tail tied up, her hindquarters quivering.
I’d never seen the female body—mine, or another woman’s—in this position. Suddenly, I could almost imagine what my boyfriend was seeing as he watched me bend over to pick up my underwear off the floor. Whenever this happened, I would turn around and see some kind of hypnotized, half-crazed look on his face. He would catch me noticing him and blush. He was there and not there, I was there and not there. This is what the exchange was mimicking, but not the feeling. There wasn’t much feeling in it at all.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. But a twirl around the pole and that money shot wasn’t it.
The dancer took the man’s cash from his hand and smiled.
I expected more flirtation. More dancing. I thought it would be like the scene in The Graduate, where a woman spins pasties on her nipples at a nightclub.
I thought it would be like modeling nude for an art-class, but with pole-dancing and drunk men who tuck in twenty-dollar bills in your g-string. The strip club wasn’t at all what I expected. It was not entertaining. Just sad, raw, gross. A little dull. And the dancing wasn’t even good.
But I could do it. Sad, raw, and gross wasn’t all that bad. I wanted to study Dharma to understand what connected me to a sense of the world that was greater than myself. I wanted to cultivate the feeling I sometimes felt accidentally, usually under a tree, relaxing outside on a spring day, of everything in the world being completely okay, even the stuff that was terrible and went beyond my understanding. Even the stuff about my own life which felt hard and alienating and sad. That state of non-duality wasn’t something I knew directly, but the idea of it—of happiness and pain running not only along parallel streams but coursing through the same river—was why I wanted to study Dharma. The river led to something which my instincts told me was ineffable.
If coming to a deeper understanding of Dharma required me being uncomfortable, then that was fine. I would do it. And then maybe one day I would practice and somehow help the other people.
Another girl walked onto the stage. My initial shock had worn off by then. It occurred to me that while the dancer wasn’t wearing any clothing she did not seem naked. It was not as though she’d just had sex with her boyfriend and was searching for her underwear on the floor. It was not as though she’d just gotten out of the shower, reaching for a towel, smelling of acne-prone face wash. I found this relieving, a sign I could muster up the courage. In my very limited nineteen-year-old erotic life, sex had seemed to me about removing a sort of mask. But no mask was removed here. The mask stayed on. It was not real sex.
A third dancer came on. She used a stage name, of course, but I recognized her from high school. I heard she started using meth. We smoked pot together a few times and she dated a friend of mine.
My resolve weakened. I’d grown up in the same town I was going to college in. Someone would inevitably recognize me. It was likely that I’d eventually run into my middle-school science teacher, not just someone who looked like him. But this too, was a consequence I was willing to risk.
I looked over to my roommate. I don’t know if I can do it, I said. We left the club, and didn’t talk that much on the way home.
I wrestled with whether I should go to amateur night the following week.
Already, it didn’t seem like it was in my best interest to be attracted to cis-men. Our relationships were filled with irritating heteronormative power struggles. They didn’t seem to realize that I was just as smart as they were, what foreplay was, or that I wanted to feel desired without feeling possessed. They wanted to have other girlfriends—but their feelings were injured if I wanted to date other people.
And yet: The men who attracted me were strangely endearing. A lack of information never kept them from having an opinion on anything. They had incredible confidence based on extremely limited life experiences. They wanted to tell me the things they knew, even though I often knew those things already. And they seemed to have a very hard time comprehending their feelings. Men were human beings, like myself, only not as good at it. I thought they were cute.
I wasn’t sure how I could continue to enjoy my attraction to men if I regularly exposed myself to the type of masculinity I found in the strip club—a masculinity that seemed sad, dehumanized, and pathetic. I barely knew what real sex was, and exposing myself to this transactional performance of sexuality seemed like it could distort the real thing.
A self-protective instinct took hold of me. There was no clear way of articulating this at the time, but I had the fuzzy, undefined hunch that sexuality and spirituality were not distinct containers with no overlap. Years later, I would find this instinct confirmed by what others have taught me: that being open, comfortable, and secure in pleasurable experiences—whether that was making love or simply having a nice meal with friends—is important in opening oneself up to blissful, non-dual states of meditation. How we relate to our sexuality and sensory experience—pleasure, the body, the self, the other—has a corollary with meditative awareness. Although these meditative states are beyond sensual pleasure, and even the gross body itself, a comfort with positive experiences is a closer proximate to the experience of nirvana than our painful experiences. Who we are, ultimately, is not our suffering or pain or grief. Who we are, ultimately, is much closer to our joy.
I would never go to Mongolia. I wore the inordinately warm winter coat my mothers bought me for the rest of college. My canceled trip wasn’t the end of the world, nor was going abroad necessary to find teachings. What I needed was patience and a move to a larger city, where I would find a sangha.
It wasn’t until many years later, that I was able to better connect that cross-stitching relationship between sensual pleasure and spirituality. One day, before we sat down to meditate, my older Dharma sister who was the age that I am now, suddenly looked back at me and said, The thing they don’t tell you about meditation is that after you’ve practiced for a while, it becomes incredibly blissful.
Our sense of aliveness, in all its fleeting pleasure and overwhelming pain, can direct us to more lasting experiences of happiness. I hope that by writing my thoughts down and sharing them here, I can inspire someone in the way that my Dharma sister inspired me. To practice. Unadorned bliss and emptiness are not as far from us as we think. May all beings know this as their true, lasting nature.
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I love this Sara!!!! Ok, I'm officially a superfan. Please forgive me when I fan-girl you. We've got some things to chat about :)