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Popular Culture Review
enhancement. Basic garden variety strippers are likely to earn more than LSU
Instructors with Ph.D.s, hot house headliners more than full professors or department
chairs, and the varietal stars more than presidents of large universities. The economic
incentive can be substantial.
Adah Menken and Stage History
Striptease has come a long way since the breathtaking audacity of Adah
Menken — who, tied to the back of a horse, and clad in pink tights, set the crowds
beyond the hissing arc lights into gales of enthusiasm (Mankowitz, 1982). There is,
on the other hand, little to differentiate today’s striptease reception from that of the
past. Back in 1861, when Menken performed what is considered to be the “first
public striptease act ever witnessed in a theater” according to Wolf Mankowitz,
biographer of Dickens and Poe, the audience watched with almost religious attention.
So did the audience in this century, ogling the early Mae West in her
shocking diaphanous gowns (Leonard, 1991), Josephine Baker, the jazz Cleopatra,
in her banana skirt (Rose, 1989), Vegas show-girls in their sky-high headdresses.
Madonna in her rocket bra (Andersen, 1991), and the nineties’s popular girl-girl
acts playing the circuit. Reporting on “tittie” bars in Hawaii, travel writer Paul
Theroux noted that “there was as much veneration in [the man’s] goggling at a
woman’s averted private parts as you would find in most church services” (Theroux,
1992, p. 489).
Nonetheless, Philip 0. Sijuwade, a sociology professor, believes that
strippers, with their parti-colored, sequined, Brazilian slings and bulging saline
bags, struggle to create a sense of false or counterfeit intimacy in these performances
(Sijuwade, 1995). The fancy costumes, so quickly shed, the fabulous use of
chocolate syrup, wild animals, and sophisticated, computer-controlled lighting
systems are there, he says, to help draw customer and performer closer emotionally
if only for a brief moment. There is more to it than sipping a diet coke and watching
acres of toned flesh come to light.
In part because of this, “rationality is maximized in perfonnances explicitly
designed to be counterfeit” (Sijuwade, 1996, p. 396). Those actions and movements
which seem the most au F