G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire.(Book Review)

G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Katherine Frank. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Katherine Frank, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the College of the Atlantic, has produced an intriguing book on an unusual topic: strip clubs and their visitors. Frank's ethnography is based on her experiences working as a table dancer at various strip clubs in a Southern city she calls Laurelton. She investigates why men return even when they know they cannot have, or do not desire, sexual relations with the dancers.

Frank includes material from interviews with thirty club regulars and grounds her work in the theories of the "touristic" cultivated by sociologist John Urry. She suggests that visits to strip clubs are a kind of "touristic practice." For patrons, strip clubs are a less pressurized "intermediate space"--respites from home and work where they can explore aspects of their masculinity in a "safe" environment.

In particular, Frank argues, strip clubs allow men to activate what she calls "fantasized identities" to envision themselves and their bodies in roles that their significant others, and society in general, would not approve. The visits to "strip clubs offered men the opportunities to think of their body not as a prison house or working machine," Frank asserts, "but as a source of desire and freedom" (134). As one example, she cites the case of "Ross," who, because of a botched surgery, suffered permanent sexual dysfunction. Ross's visits allowed him "to access the body he remembered from his youth, a fantasy body that could respond and perform when bidden, that needed not to be explained in a new sexual encounter" (145).

However, Frank suggests that strip club visits are more than merely compensatory. They can actually sustain traditional marriage by giving men creative ways of satisfying certain needs for intimacy not met in their current relationships. Frank recognizes that the sex industry offers unrealistic scenarios as a means to ...