Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 2000 | Page 70

66 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