Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping

by Elisabeth Eaves

Her curiosity began as a teenager, with an awareness of her body and the reaction other people had to it. It continued with the realization that women’s bodies often gave them a strange power over men. As an adult, it became a fascination with professional sex workers, leading to a plunge into their world. Bare follows the author and her fellow dancers through Seattle strip clubs and bachelor parties, exploring in riveting detail Eaves’s own motivations and behavior, as well as those of her coworkers, as they make their way through the sometimes exhilarating, often disturbing world of stripping. This compelling, revealing memoir exposes the reader to that world behind the flashing lights and offers illuminating insights into the reasons women take up this work—and how it affects their identities and lives off the job.
In its unstinting honesty, Bare demands that we take a closer look at the way sexuality is viewed in our culture; what, if anything, constitutes "normal" desire; the ethics of swapping money—or anything else—for sex; and how women and men navigate the perilous contradictions and double standards that make up today’s socio-sexual conversation.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Feminism, Sexuality, Biography Memoir, Sex Work, Biography

344 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2002

About the author

I'm a writer and editor, born in Vancouver and living in New York City. My first book, "Bare," was about stripping, and my second book, "Wanderlust," came out of a lifelong love of travel and trying to figure out why I felt so compelled to keep moving on. My travel writing has also appeared in "Best American Travel Writing 2009," "Best Women's Travel Writing 2010," and Lonely Planet's "A Moveable Feast." One of the things I love about my work is that it's an excuse to talk to anyone about anything. Before finding my way to journalism, I worked as a waitress, a bartender, a deck hand, a landscaper, an office temp, and a peep show girl. To read some of my stories, please visit www.elisabetheaves.com.

Reviews

[Caty · Rating 1 out of 5]

Edit--reading the last few pages, the sound you hear is my jaw dropping and the rating dropping to one star:
"To some the term feminist stripper is ironic, but it's not an oxymoron--it's just that one has to be a very extreme feminist to remain a stripper. When men don't matter at all, stripping makes perfect sense. It's the natural result of combining sexual freedom with a hostile, anti-male feminism. This is why there are so many lesbian strippers--men are simply less relevant to a lesbian's personal and sexual world than they are to a straight woman's. A stripper can be a feminist, if she is one who wants either revenge on men or their total exclusion from her life....
[Okay, just, WTF?:]
Stripping reinforces the stereotype of women that came to bother me the most--that they can be bought [um, renting sex is not buying someone, and if sex equates buying a soul, sex is much overrated.:] For a price, a stripper will pretend to be a kind of woman that doesn't exist outside the imagination--the naked,adoring, one dimensional sex object. [Objectification isn't wrong in every context, nor does the fact that it occurs in some consensual contexts lead all to believe it must always be the way one views a group of people.:] She creates the idea that a woman's appearance, behavior, and sexuality are for sale. [No, she creates the idea that a lap sale is for sale for 2o bucks. God. Does laying brick mean that a man's body is for sale at all times for physical labor--outside the context of all capitalism and labor being wrong in general?:]
**
Earlier review:
Judgmental. Elitist. Yay for the girls who get out, boo for the skanks that stay in. A dim view of heteromale sexuality, but then again, strippers do have to deal with them in packs. I get the sense this girl prides herself on some of the boundaries she won't break, seeing herself as some higher, chaste being rather than just recognizing those are the boundaries that work for her. Also, she gives more credence to the words of the girl she profiles who hates the business than the girl who says she is empowered by it. I also have problems relating to her sexual feelings, and to her hypocritical assertion that she doesn't want to date a man who buys sexual services. But, I must admit the characterization is rich and developed, and the observations are made well, if the writing is a bit pretentious.
**

[Chelsea · Rating 1 out of 5]

Obnoxiously self-indulgent. Eh, pumps. Eh, jerking off. Eh, power. Eh, lesbians. Actual stripping at an actual strip club, deemed icky.

It's like Paris Hilton writing a commentary on the entirety of prison system by being in it for an hour.

[Nicole Rea]

Really wanted to like this book, especially since the two older guys at the used bookstore I bought it at giggled like school children and called it, "That stripper's book," when I brought it up to check out, which made me mad.

I just can't stomach the protagonist long enough to get through more than a paragraph at a time, which means it's taking way too long to read it and I'm not enjoying it enough to care. I really want to like her, and I'm still into the message behind the book and am hoping to pick it up again at some point to hear what she has to say about her experiences farther on in the book, but when more than 100 pgs. in she's still stuck telling me, in detail, about how painfully attractive she was growing up and how much of a burden that was to bear . . . I'm sorry, I just don't . . . care. It's at least mildly annoying and alienating, or at least it is to me.

Actually haven't been reading this one for awhile now, but I read this article earlier and liked it: http://bust.com/blog/2010/03/09/the-e..., and it reminded me of how much I was disliking reading Bare. Anyway: tabled for now.

[Lilith Noir · Rating 1 out of 5]

Misleading title alert!
This book does not offer "The naked truth about stripping" as it's more of a glorified magazine article. The back cover copy made it sound as if the author used her academic skills to survey her coworkers and present an in-depth look at stripping, but she didn't.
For one thing, she spent nearly all her time in the field working at the Lusty Lady, which was a peep show - big difference from a strip club! (as a side note, I HIGHLY recommend Erka Langley's book The Lusty Lady. I feel it had a much more balanced and insightful feel.)
Another huge problem is that the author ends up at the conclusion that sex work in general is a terrible thing and when she discusses other dancers she knows she projects this all over them. For example, she mentions one friend whose boundaries at work changed and takes that as evidence of her work ruining her ability to say no. Which is ridiculous, since everyone's boundaries change all the time, both at work and in their personal lives, and that is not necessarily a negative thing at all.

Early on in the book, the author talks about being aware of her own beauty and using it to seduce men she doesn't really care about just on a lark. At no point does she figure out that this is unethical. So, being paid to show your body is somehow bad, but using your body to deliberately mislead someone is okay if you're pretty?

I know lots of people end up in erotic jobs for the wrong reasons, and lots of people come away from it feeling badly about their experiences. That is clearly what the author went through, and I don't begrudge her the chance to tell her story. What I do have a problem with is her taking her own negative feelings and deciding that all sex workers must conform to her ideas. Toward the end of the book she even talks about how anyone who says they are happy and working by choice must actually be deluding themselves.

If you are curious about stripping, skip this book. It's just another privileged white woman making money off her "scandalous" memoir. There are a ton of blogs and websites run by actual for-real strippers out there, and if you want to spend some money you could always go to your local club and tip well.

[Jennifer Sakash · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is a family friend, which makes this a little uncomfortable to read knowing her in real life. She recently published her newest book (The Outlier). I had read Wanderlust when it came out, so figured I would check out her first novel too. While I might not be able to relate to revealing so much of myself (literally and figuratively), EE is a good writer.

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

mostly well-written and entertaining, but not at all what i was expecting -- certainly a description of one woman's experience in a peep show, and she relates those of a few others (but mostly how they relate to her), but it's quite clearly not the typical experience. peep shows are very different than regular strip clubs, it's clear, and most of the women she knew were college grads, just doing it for the money. not that most strippers are stupid - clearly, they're not - but the lusty lady has a transgressive reputation and attracts a certain type of woman.

what's more, eaves looks down so much on other kids of sex workers, it's really upsetting -- on one hand, she says she got into stripping to express her sexuality brazenly, but is constantly disgusted by aspects that aren't all behind glass. a human response, sure, but a distressing one. i wouldn't mind if she examined that response, but she doesn't. at all.

all in all, the proto diablo cody -- a upper-middle class white girl "slumming it" for reasons other than necessity. just as irritating as cody a lot of times, too. an interesting memoir, but not the cultural/sociological study it pretends to be.

[Lani · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty bland memoir of time spent primarily in a peep show.

I expected this to be a broader spectrum of stripping. Instead it's a somewhat confusing account of the author's time spent working at a peep show in the Northwest. I don't think the well-educated feministas depicted in this book are really a very good representation of most workers in the sex-industry (sadly).

The author has a difficult time separating her own life from the life of a stripper. I wanted less gossip and more analysis or a wider range of contributors. She does briefly follow a friend's career as a party dancer, but it's not very revealing. (haha)

There are better written and more entertaining books about stripping out there. I'd put this one at the bottom of the list. If you're looking for something more academic or analytical, there are plenty of those as well.

[Liralen · Rating 3 out of 5]

With Wanderlust, I wasn't sure how I felt about the author (or much of the story), but the book appealed to the part of me that idealises rootlessness. With Bare...well, partly it was engrossing and partly it was frustrating and my three stars are fairly tepid.

He thought emotional frigidity was admirable. That, at root, is why I think I chose [him]. He wanted the smoke and mirrors that I had to give (206).

Eaves's foray into stripping was partly boundary-pushing and partly defiance, I think. The title refers to stripping, of course—to being bared physically/literally—but could easily also refer to her style of writing: that she is stripping herself bare, no holds barred. And yet I think that, just as stripping involves smoke and mirrors, so does Eaves's storytelling.

I'm not sure she knew, writing this book, just what conclusions to draw. Early on, she talks of stripping as something representing a great deal of freedom: My natural inclination had been to wear sex on my sleeve. To an extent, thorough high school and college, I did—I had sex, talked about sex, sometimes wore sexy clothes, and tried to seduce people I didn't even want to have sex with, just to see if I could. But I was always aware of the stifling pressure to conform that I had felt from my parents, my peers, and my sorority's rules. The only women who seemed to be free of the rules were prostitutes and strippers (32).

As time goes on, though, she starts to be more conscious of the judgement strippers face; she also starts to draw a distinction between those women who are in the business for a finite, usually short, period of time and those women who are in it for years and years, or who have fewer or less defined boundaries. She starts to feel disdain for the men who choose to frequent strip clubs (e.g., 202). She starts to resent men in general, to focus on their roles in her dissatisfactions. I had never thought of myself as someone who hated men. I had spent much of my adult life with one boyfriend or another, and my relationships often looked, at least superficially, as though they were happy, stable, or both. But I remembered how with Erik I had chafed, almost from the beginning, against a feeling of being trapped. By agreeing to get married and by buying a house, I had accepted being tied down, but at the same time I hated him, as though he had forced me. When I finally left, I felt as though I had escaped a prison (208).

And...then she draws some odd conclusions, like this: To some the term "feminist stripper" is ironic, but it's not an oxymoron—it's just that one has to become a very extreme feminist to remain a stripper. When men don't matter at all, stripping makes perfect sense. It's the natural result of combining sexual freedom with a hostile, anti-male feminism. If men are seen as something to control or ignore, what they think of women is beside the point. This is why there are so many lesbian strippers—men are simply less relevant to a lesbian's personal and sexual world than they are to a straight woman's. A stripper can be a feminist, if she is one who wants either revenge on men or their total exclusion from her life (288). She seems, also, to conclude that only strippers (and only those strippers who 'get out' sooner rather than later), are really in control of their sexuality. This is based in part on the experiences of other women she knew (more on that in a moment), but mostly, it seems, on Eaves's own experience, and...it seems like she makes some pretty big leaps. It reads to me as though Eaves didn't really know what to make of her experience and was still trying to work through some of her feelings/conclusions about it and...hadn't quite found the right level of nuance yet. (It struck me, the closer I got to the end, that for all the navel-gazing she was doing, I wasn't convinced of her self-awareness. Smoke and mirrors?)

The first chunk of the book is really her story, but midway in she starts including big chunks of other women's stories. Perhaps this is in part because they gave her a broader range of experiences to work with (i.e., her sample size grew to greater than one), but I wished she'd been able to work those parts in more gradually; at one point I had to check myself with a reminder that this was a memoir, not an attempt at journalistic nonfiction. It also felt, by the end, that she simply hadn't spent enough time working as a stripper to write a full book based solely on her experience.

Interesting and dissatisfying. I do think she grew as a writer between this and Wanderlust, and I'd pretty readily pick up a new book by Eaves, should she write one...although perhaps with tempered expectations.

[Stevi Costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm really put off by the publisher's decision to vamp up the book by changing the subtitle and cover art to read like a sensationalist insider's memoir instead of what the book largely is: personal journalism. Eaves blends her own experience as a stripper with the stories of several women whom she befriended in her career in a compelling and thoughtful way. She finds subjects who are seemingly full of contradiction, allowing the reader to see the questions and tensions that arise without forcing the point (as memoirists tend to do). I was particularly interested in her portrait of Abby, whose narrative called into question the tensions between fine art and pornography and the artistic justification of the female body on display.

[kelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is tough to put down. it is the behind the scenes real life story of strippers and sex workers... the goods, the bads, the ups, the downs, it takes you on an emotional and social journey into the minds of sex workers, while simultaneously helping to form opinions of sex work in general... it poses such questions as "does sex work help reinforce society's views of women as objects?" or "does it help women gain control over their own bodies, and enable them to do what they want, the way they want, and say no when they want?". very thought provoking.

[Eliza]

It is interesting to see an empowered/intelligent woman write about her take on the industry and yet I am very curious to see if she does much of a breakdown on the statistics of the other dancers she encounters. I believe a large portion of dancers are incredibly disturbed, unstable, addicted, trapped, or any combination of those. With this in mind, I believe that those in the entertainment industry who lead healthy, balanced lives, and are in the occupation FOR ANY DURATION of time by choice are not the norm.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

In therapy language we would call this book a "war story", glorifying the experience at the same time that is says stripping and objectifying is harmful to women. You can definitely tell that the author enjoyed some parts of being a stripper, especially in a uniquely protective and empowering workplace - not the book for your 13-year-old daughter to read. She eventually experiences more common types of stripping and realizes it damages her emotions, relationships, etc. No shit.

[donkeymolar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why am I always drawn into shit about strippers? This book was fun to read at first and, of course, made me want to be a stripper. (much like the after school specials about anorexia made me secretly want to be anorexic) But it was hard to get through the last 100 pages. The author drones on and on about uninteresting stories of other strippers lives and after awhile I was bored and irritated by all the pseudo intellectualizing on showing your snatch to strangers.

[Sara Parker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is mostly autobiographical, with bits about other strippers. It started out great at first, but got a bit monotonous. Overall it was good, but having read Candy Girl, not nearly as exciting and "raw," I suppose, as I thought it would be. Informative and good, but not great.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could have been a good book, but I found the writer's condescending tone incredibly off putting.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contemplative study on the relationship between sex, money, power, self-image, and self-worth.

[Jen King · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall I’m glad this book exists, but there’s a lot to criticize. My first criticism is that the author exists in the bubble of being a white, middle class, college educated, naturally conventionally attractive, stripper who manages to go her entire stripping career without working in a contact club, and advertises her memoir from this experience as “the naked truth about stripping.” She also only tells the stories of other fairly privileged dancers. This is forgivable, though not above critique, because that’s genuinely her experience and, after all, it’s a memoir. There are a ton of college educated strippers out there and it’s important to challenge the stereotype that there’s not. My biggest complaint about this book is that she can’t contain her judgement of the girls who don’t “get out” and who engage in full service sex work. When her friend starts thinking about taking a regular up on his offer of paid sex, she portrays this as a sad look at how far she’s fallen. This is a common example of someone at the top of the whorearchy looking down on girls with different boundaries than hers. She works a few shifts at a contact club, manages to make all of her money without contact, and quits because she’s grossed out by the reality of what a contact club entails. She’s allowed to not like it, whatever, but I was angry at how judgmental she is. Contact clubs are much of what this thing she’s writing “the naked truth about” involve. I’m glad I read this book but I’m glad it’s not the only one out there.

[Eileen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Taken from the free swap box as a break from children's lit. It's mostly set in a familiar part of downtown Seattle and centers on the peep show at a club called The Lusty Lady in the late 1990s. A conventionally pretty, blonde, green-eyed, upper middle class Canadian ballet dance enthusiast alternates between long-form magazine-style journalistic descriptions and simplistic pronouncements about sexuality, feminism and society at large.

I think I'd retitle this one Peeped: Addicted to the Male Gaze. It reminded me a bit of the way the author of Nickled and Dimed seemed to think it groundbreaking to report that low income workers had other talents and aspirations. Some women commodify their bodies. Dancers range on a spectrum of willingness to perform certain acts. Male-female interactions are often but not always unpleasant and these experiences color one's personal life. The inclusion of being escorted between locked rooms for safety adds tension to the narrative, but no one is raped or murdered in this book. I was unsurprised to see a number of reviewers call it elitist and/or boring.

[ace · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eaves started off by detailing why stripping empowered her, but concluded by judging women who strip long-term, assuming they haven’t managed to “get out” yet, by succeeding in other careers. She states that it becomes a money game, judging good and bad days at work based on the amount made, not the enjoyment of the work; a night could be “good” based on dollar amount made, despite broken boundaries. Her conclusion that stripping is therefore “bad” rings hollow. Didn’t she just state that stripping empowered her? Isn’t it the money that corrupts? She notes that many women get into stripping because it’s more lucrative than other entry-level positions available to young, able-bodied students — but does that mean sex work is at fault, or that other jobs should be paying more than they do? I’ve never thought about any of this before, but it seems like she could have pushed her analysis a little further than “okay for young girls to do for a little while if they can’t find anything better, but emotionally damaging long-term”.

[Anthony Pignataro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though it’s a few years old, I only bought this book recently, and read it very quickly. It’s thoughtful and so well-written. I’ve been reading a lot lately on men’s behavior towards women, both in terms of understanding why there’s so much sexual harassment and assault in society and how my own behavior can contribute to it, and I found much to think about here. Yes, it’s a great, wonderful look at what it was like to be a stripper in Seattle (her portraits of other dancers, especially Kim, are really compelling), but I also saw it as a rich source of perspective on how all men (including me) can cause harm towards women.

[Marielle Kleynjan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elisabeth Eaves ging van school af, samenwonen en droomde van studeren maar had geldschulden. Ze besloot te gaan strippen. Waarom niet? Lange tijd heeft ze dit gedaan en besloot toen weer te gaan studeren. Eenmaal afgestudeerd is ze tijdelijk teruggegaan om opnieuw te voelen hoe dat leventje is en om erover te schrijven. Ze stripte in "the Lusty Lady" een striptent gerund door vrouwen. Vriendelijker dan veel andere obscure clubs. Toch krijg je een goed gevoel hoe het leven is voor de vrouwen die strippen en wat het werk doet met hen.

[B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was neither good nor bad. It was decidedly okay. Working at a peep show is different from working as a stripper, so the book is somewhat of a misnomer to start with. And then the fact that most of her analysis is not based on self-reflection of her own work, but the self-reflection of third parties who also worked at peep shows instead of strip clubs - it just doesn't deliver what it promises.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually it's one of the core books for studying the Mafia

---

The Seattle Crime Family

a. Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping - Elisabeth Eaves
b. Seattle Vice: Strippers, Prostitution, Dirty Money, and Crooked Cops in the Emerald City - Rick Anderson
c. Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland - Robert C. Donnelly
d. Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Rose City - Phil Stanford

[Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the most sensual books I've read, yet it wasn't scandalizing and rather humanizing.
That is talent.

Otherwise, Part II dragged and was too detail oriented to keep me hooked.
Part III picks up, but it was a dry read in the middle.
Really, the book would've been better without the Maya section and skipping straight to the third act.

[Tonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Somewhere behind my desire to be both a reporter and a stripper lay an impulse to conceal. Stripping - in competition with acting and espionage - is the ultimate job for someone who's instinct is to present different facades of who she might be. There is nothing more illusory than a woman pretending to be a sexual fantasy for money." - p. 5

This book was on the wrong shelf when I entered a university library about a year ago. It has been reminding me it is there waiting to be read for many months and I decided to pick it up over the holiday season. It was on the apartment shelf as a classmate, during my first year of my Master's degree, announced in class one day that she was completing a PhD about women, their bodies and stripping because she stripped to pay her way through her bachelor's degree several years earlier. I work hard to be an open person and I easily delight in meeting people whose lives are vastly different than mine and who are willing to share their stories of their life experience. This book was perfect after I had spent several hours talking with my classmate to begin to build a healthier and more realistic perspective of stripping, the why, who, for what reasons, etc.

"I learned that no one is neutral about female bodies. If they aren't sex objects used to sell every conceivable good, they are political objects, causing bitter debate on how to manage their fecundity. And where not sexual or political, they are imbued with society's ideals with fears, turned into Miss Liberties, Virgin Mary's, and Wicked Witches. Everyone had an opinion on what to do about female bodies, and sometimes it feels as if the only people who get in trouble for holding such opinions are young women themselves. Some of us, though, have to live in them, and we each get by in our own way." - p. 6-7

Eaves explains how she first became involved in stripping and we meet several of her colleagues, who become friends, and their work as strippers, what purpose is serves in various lives, for some the cycle of dependence that is created in this industry, and the rules of safety that are continuously broken by purchasers and strippers alike. Eaves teaches the reader that every woman had a line that she has drawn about the sexual work she is willing to perform, and sees many women move and bend this line under pressure from others and due to economic circumstances.

"And I was tempted to see sex work as more of a symptom of social illness than a cause. The sex biz was nothing more that a sophisticated arbitrage operation, dealing in morals rather than financial instruments...At some point women had become artificially divided into two types - the good and the childbearing ones, carefully trained to disdain sex so that they wouldn't stray, and a separate, pro-sex class. The second group were despised and disparaged so that the good women wouldn't want to join them. One group of women ended up with respect but no freedom, and the other with freedom but no respect. But economics abhors a vacuum, and the whore class...rushed in to fill the chasm between men's actual desires and the social structure that they, with women, had built. I don't think the divide between the two types of women would go away until all the girls were raised to be free, responsible and unashamed of sex. And until society had bridged the sex-ed gap - porn for boys and religion and romance for girls - there would always be Lusty Ladies [the stripper club Eaves worked at]." -. p. 138-139

A book that was telling and a strong mixture of social and political commentary shaken together with the lives of women and how their work infiltrates all aspects of their lives. Give it a read!

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

So basically, "the naked truth about stripping" as Eaves tells it, is that most strippers are insecure about how they relate to men, so they become strippers so they can have power over men. They also strip because they have bad spending habits and need all the money they get from stripping to pay for wild trips and designer handbags.

Interesting...

It all sounds pretty stupid to me.

But I'm not going to talk about that.

Instead, I'm going to talk about the issues I have with Eaves' book:

1. The language seems a bit pretensious. But it might just be because she was raised in Canada and they have a different way of speaking. Either way, the language should have been adapted for American readers.

2. There's a lot of reflection about Eaves' feelings about stripping - a little too much. Perhaps she is the kind of person who is naturally prone to that sort of self-examination. But I doubt it.

3. Eaves worked in a peep show. That means she worked on a stage with mirrored walls, sections of which were actually windows through which the customers could see her though she couldn't see them. There were some two-way windows. So it was a lot like dancing naked in front of your bedroom mirror - something EVERY girl has done at least once or twice in her life (if not once or twice weekly). That's VERY different from working as an actual stripper at a strip club and doing lap dances. And when she did go back and attempt to work as a real stripper, she couldn't hack it.

4. The book - especially "Leila part 3" - reads like she became a stripper just so she would have something to write about. (One reviewr already pointed this out.) I'm sure putting it on her resume helped her get the job at Reuters that is mentioned in her bio. blurb.

5. The book is marketed as a sociological look at stripping - a look at real strippers, who they are, why they strip, etc. It's more memoir with a quick dash of those things thrown in. Eaves said she stripped for the same reason most people work their jobs - the money. And then she doesn't look at it any more. She doesn't really delve into the reasons the other women do it and how they feel about doing it. And she quickly dismisses anyone who has different opinions from hers.

I would have preferred a lot more reportage and a little less memoir. And I would have preferred that she have a legitimate stripping experience, i.e. one where she's on a stage with a pole and has to interact with customers.

But the book was still interesting. And worth a read if you're into that kind of thing.

[Alexis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd definitely give the story and content 3 stars, but the organization deserved a 2.

This book was definitely interesting- I tore through. Elisabeth Eaves, who wrote Wanderlust, also worked as a stripper for a few years. She also tried a bit of table dancing.

I found Eaves' recounting of her experiences working at the Lusty Lady in Seattle to be really interesting. I liked the feminist analysis of some of the stories, and her honesty. I can understand why some women are attracted to sex work because of the feeling of power, but that this same work can also be degrading and jading.

One of the problems of this book is that Eaves throws in stories from other strippers and sex workers (not prostitutes) and decided to share their stories. Their stories are interesting too, but it's jarring to go from her story to these other women and then back.

There was one chapter where two women did a girl on girl show at a bachelor party that was particularly disturbing and gross for me.

There were a few interesting facts sprinkled throughout the book. Many women fall into this kind of work because the money can be pretty good, and that many women get out of stripping by 30 as it is a young woman's gig. Eaves said she also encountered a lot of lesbian strippers, and went into the reasons behind that. All in all, there was a lot of interesting stuff in here but the book really needed a good editor.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the idea of this book very intriguing. I have academically explored at some length the battles and varying viewpoints on pornography, stripping, and other sexual business operations. I have read compelling arguments on both sides of this debate, but I have never come across a text that went into this much depth with specific people in the industry. In this case, the stories are primarily about strippers at a particular club in Seattle in the early 90's. There were many times when I was completely engaged and appreciative of the complex issues that are represented in the book. However, there were times when I found the author a bit too self-focused to take seriously. She spends a great deal of the book talking about her own experiences as a stripper, which is fine, but she seems not to know if she wants to use this text as an exploration of her past, an argument for or against the adult entertainment industry, or a non-biased exploration of many individuals in the industry. Perhaps because she is too close to the topic, she is not completely successful in any of these things. Instead, in the end, she comes across a bit preachy. It feels like she really wants to be the hero in a book that doesn't need or want a hero (or a villain, for that matter).

[Aviva · Rating 3 out of 5]

A memoir by a woman who spent several years as a stripper, primarily at Seattle's legendary Lusty Lady peep show. Eaves writes not only her own personal story, but the stories of her friends and fellow strippers.

Books about being a stripper seem to fall in two categories: Either they glorify the experience as a way for women to take power and control over their lives and bodies, or they are sanctimonious about having escaped that lifestyle.

Eaves, who has some journalism experience, wrote fairly well about her friends' lives and choices as sex workers. But in telling her own story and, ultimately in her conclusions about the choices her friends made, she makes it clear that by getting out of the business, she is somehow on higher moral ground than those who were doing it without a solid escape plan and timeline.

And those judgements about her friends rubbed me the wrong way.

The writing was good enough to keep me interested enough to finish it, and I would love for a friend to read it so I would have someone to discuss it with, but I can't exactly say I liked it or that I consider it a GOOD book.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

When people asked me what I was reading and I said a book about stripping, I got some raised eyebrows and some jokes about whether it was a how-to manual, but in the end, this was a pretty interesting read. The author stripped until she left to go to grad school and became a journalist / writer. I liked that she approached the job and industry with a sense of practicality that I think most people forget exists. She could earn more stripping than temping and she's always been curious about utilizing her body in that way, so why not? (I think she found herself forced to ask herself more questions than that, but that's how it started). I thought it treated the subject in a normalized, smart way which I found refreshing.