Baby Oil and Ice: Striptease in East London

Rating:
Summary: (un) conventional wisdom
Review: Of all erotic art forms, striptease is at once the most accessible and the least acceptable. One just doesn't recount their last trip to the nudie bar over sushi or cappuccino as one would a visit to a gallery showing of paintings, sculptures or even photographs. When conventional media (eg: anything other than HBO's "Real Sex") addresses stripping, it opts for the social reform angle, depicting the dancers as victims, tramps and thieves, forced to strip out of circumstance, addiction or ignorance. Feminist doctrine and conventional wisdom have long established that no woman would willingly choose, let alone enjoy being a sex object for a living, right?

Right?

While this book isn't conventional, it is quite feminist...or maybe female-positive. A dancer herself, editor Lara Clifton employs the voices of the women (and men) who work the East Side strip pubs to tell the tale. Easily breeching any wariness her co-workers may have, she concocts a thoughtful pastiche of the London pubs. With heir words reproduced in their own handwriting, dancers, club owners, bouncers and a few patrons tell their stories in entries peppered among the images like snippets of conversation one might hear in and around a club any given night. Sometimes fanciful, sometimes funny, sometimes quite erotic and always thoughtful, each passage further dispels the pity/slut/bimbo concepts commonly held. Most of the entries are signed with first names only, a few not at all, the kind of notes that friends and co-workers leave for each other. One submission, printed to include the butterfly-shaped paper it was written on, tells how much the pubs are nicer to work at rather than table dance clubs: "The girls in the pubs are working together, not competing," she writes. "Ruby's" contribution tells a frank, funny and deliciously nasty tale of a girl getting her period right before going onstage. There's lots of discussion of relationships and how the dancing affects them:
( "how did she meet him?" "at work." "was he a punter?" "yes.") The women offer poems, song lyrics, fiction, confessions; each entry as varied and colorful as the routines the women perform onstage.

Photographers Sara Ainsliee and Julie Cook combine their image styles into a single, luxurious kind of ero-journalism. Their photographs are edgy, impressionistic, occasionally reverent and often beautiful. Ainsliee and Cook mix scenes of backstage life with kinetic, flickering visions of dancers in full stride. The photos' rich, warm colors feel at times like Toulouse Lautrec's memories as seen by Nan Goldin. Luckily, the photographers never get so artsy that the personalities of their subjects don't show through: Dancers dress and undress, chatting and laughing like some NC-17 pajama party. We see them in hallways gowned like contestants in a rather smutty pageant. We see them returning to the dressing area, costumes wadded in their hands, pleased with a good show. Most often we see them in mid performance, caught up in the music, the crowd, the sex and command of the moment. Page after page, the images and words of the women reveal them as artists, entertainers, and most of all women we know and wish we knew...Which they were all along.

Before all that conventional wisdom got in the way.

Rating:
Summary: (un) conventional wisdom
Review: Of all erotic art forms, striptease is at once the most accessible and the least acceptable. One just doesn't recount their last trip to the nudie bar over sushi or cappuccino as one would a visit to a gallery showing of paintings, sculptures or even photographs. When conventional media (eg: anything other than HBO's "Real Sex") addresses stripping, it opts for the social reform angle, depicting the dancers as victims, tramps and thieves, forced to strip out of circumstance, addiction or ignorance. Feminist doctrine and conventional wisdom have long established that no woman would willingly choose, let alone enjoy being a sex object for a living, right?

Right?

While this book isn't conventional, it is quite feminist...or maybe female-positive. A dancer herself, editor Lara Clifton employs the voices of the women (and men) who work the East Side strip pubs to tell the tale. Easily breeching any wariness her co-workers may have, she concocts a thoughtful pastiche of the London pubs. With heir words reproduced in their own handwriting, dancers, club owners, bouncers and a few patrons tell their stories in entries peppered among the images like snippets of conversation one might hear in and around a club any given night. Sometimes fanciful, sometimes funny, sometimes quite erotic and always thoughtful, each passage further dispels the pity/slut/bimbo concepts commonly held. Most of the entries are signed with first names only, a few not at all, the kind of notes that friends and co-workers leave for each other. One submission, printed to include the butterfly-shaped paper it was written on, tells how much the pubs are nicer to work at rather than table dance clubs: "The girls in the pubs are working together, not competing," she writes. "Ruby's" contribution tells a frank, funny and deliciously nasty tale of a girl getting her period right before going onstage. There's lots of discussion of relationships and how the dancing affects them:
( "how did she meet him?" "at work." "was he a punter?" "yes.") The women offer poems, song lyrics, fiction, confessions; each entry as varied and colorful as the routines the women perform onstage.

Photographers Sara Ainsliee and Julie Cook combine their image styles into a single, luxurious kind of ero-journalism. Their photographs are edgy, impressionistic, occasionally reverent and often beautiful. Ainsliee and Cook mix scenes of backstage life with kinetic, flickering visions of dancers in full stride. The photos' rich, warm colors feel at times like Toulouse Lautrec's memories as seen by Nan Goldin. Luckily, the photographers never get so artsy that the personalities of their subjects don't show through: Dancers dress and undress, chatting and laughing like some NC-17 pajama party. We see them in hallways gowned like contestants in a rather smutty pageant. We see them returning to the dressing area, costumes wadded in their hands, pleased with a good show. Most often we see them in mid performance, caught up in the music, the crowd, the sex and command of the moment. Page after page, the images and words of the women reveal them as artists, entertainers, and most of all women we know and wish we knew...Which they were all along.

Before all that conventional wisdom got in the way.