Las Vegas  Spectacles:
Organization Power over the Body

By

David M. Boje

New Mexico State University
Boje - Home page

The value of studying sex industry texts is to expose the narratively constructed body of its workers. According to Benjamin (1997), Las Vegas strippers of Cheetah's Lounge, Crazy Horse Too, Crazy Horse Saloon, What's Up Lounge, Olympic Gardens, Little Darlings of Las Vegas and the Girls of Glitter Gulch have filed class action lawsuits. The women's labor claim is the clubs where they work violate Nevada law by refusing to pay them minimum wage and forcing them to share their tip-earnings with club owners. At the Tally-Ho Club, a dancer reports "Aside from the outrageous fees the dancers get charged, the club is falling apart. With all the money the club takes from the girls you'd think they'd add some features to the club to make it more enticing for the customers as well as the dancers... Take it from a 22 year old dancer who knows!!!" (press here). Workers are also not being allowed to leave the club during their shifts, which violates their status as independent contractors. "Topless dancers, the lawsuit states, have the same job requirements and employer demands as a normal employee, yet work for tips only, and those must be shared with the management" (Gang, 1997). And there is more going on than wage cheating.

My research question is within competing texts of striptease dancer (called lap dancers in the trade) and showgirl body and spectacle. How are narrative claims formulated, legitimated, and performed? There is a rags-to-riches story told by big business to attract labor, the same one told in the movie Show Girls, and before that Gypsy. This rags-to-riches story is also retold in books written by former strippers (Dragu, 1989; Futterman, 1992; Lewin, out of print; Mattson, 1996; Shepard, 1996). The books, in particular, run counter to stereotypes of sex industry work as inherently degrading and exploitative. The myth of easy money is a lure to attract women into the sex industry. Mattson (1996) for example, wrote about paying her Brown University $22,000 per year tuition by doing work as a part-time topless stripper. Other strippers have written reviews of books about stripping and argue that little of the bitter truth of the stripper's profession comes out and the years of being paraded as objects have leached strippers lives of any glamorous identity or subjectivity. As one dancer-reviewer points out, Heidi Mattson may be the one in a million exception that proves the rule:

Mine is a deconstructive feminist reading of Strip and Show Spectacles, tracing the disempowering aspects of careers of marginalized young women (you don't strip much after 30) in a sex industry reproducing male power in control of the female body. The National Organization of Women (NOW) held their 1997 national convention at Bally's. NOW according to Minor (1997) staged protests or letter writing campaigns targeting violence against women on the strip, billboards for a major hotel that show women in g-strings, billboards for a beeper vendor that show a woman straddling a beeper and a hotel show that had a gratuitous rape scene. NOW passed resolutions calling for union organizing and health and other protections for sex workers (Minor, 1996). Brents, a UNLV Sociology Professor says hotel owners benefit from Las Vegas' image of "sex being freely available" at the same time they attempt publicly to distance themselves from the sex industries (as cited in Patton, 1997). Brents and Hausbeck (also a sociology professor) taught "Sociology of the Sex Industry" in 1997 but had to deal with what males found inappropriate about researching and teaching the unglamorous side of spectacle. "We're always asked, `So are you doing this research because you used to work in the industry?' "Hausbeck said. "There's this real voyeuristic need to associate us there."

Table One: Barthes and Debord on Spectacle
 

Barthes		Debord
We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration (p. 84).		The spectacle exists in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports. In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery (#60).
It is only the time taken in shedding clothes which makes voyeurs of the public; but here, as in any mystifying spectacle, the decor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insignificance: evil is advertised the better to impede and exorcise it (p. 84).	The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society (#18).
Not only does it give to the show the alibi of Art (the dances in strip-shows are always 'artistic'), but above all it constitutes the last barrier, and the most efficient of all: the dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have been seen a thousand times, acts on movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity, and smothers the spectacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures, for the act of becoming bare is here relegated to the rank of parasitical operations carried out in an improbable background (p. 85-86).	Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible (#10).
All this, this meticulous exorcism of sex, can be verified a contrario in the 'popular contests' (sic) of amateur striptease: there, 'beginners' undress in front of a few hundred spectators without resorting or resorting very clumsily to magic, which unquestionably restores to the spectacle its erotic power (p. 86).	The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and world by crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence of the world... One who passively accepts his alien daily fate is thus pushed toward a madness that reacts in an illusory way to this fate by resorting to magical techniques (#219).
Striptease here is made to rejoin the world of the public, is made familiar and bourgeois, as if the French, unlike the American public (at least according to what one hears), following an irresistible tendency of their social status, could not conceive eroticism except as a household property, sanctioned by the alibi of weekly sport much more than by that of a magical spectacle: and this is how, in France, striptease is nationalized (p. 87).	When its vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies of the dialogue and the gift, incite a surplus of economic expenditure, they lead only to deception always compensated by the promise of a new deception. In the spectacle, the lower the use value of modern survival-time, the more highly it is exalted. The reality of time has been replaced by the advertisement of time (# 154).

Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1972/1957) describes striptease as a spectacle. I seek to relate Barthes' use of spectacle to Guy Debord's (1967) Society of the spectacle. The point of Table One is that Barthes and Debord write about spectacle in similar ways. Barthes and Debord's spectacle overlap. Both view spectacles as based in fear on a stage covering misery. Barthes (1972/1957) uses the word "spectacle" five times in his 3 and half page essay. I have reproduced the complete sentence of each and matched it with comparable uses by Debord (See Table One). Barthes' (p. 84) first reference to the spectacle of striptease points out a contradiction "Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked." There are routines in strip clubs and nude gentlemen's clubs that mystify the rituals and games. The ritual of disrobing is part of the game of "tease." And tease moves from tipping the performers, paying for their drinks, requests for lap dances and private booth performances and deposits on dates later in the evening. This is part of the hustle.

Each spectacle performance repeats moves and steps that have been done a thousand times before. The strip clubs offer amateur competitions that for Barthes return the event to pre-spectacle form, a less ritualized and mystified performance or as Debord puts it, fewer magical techniques are available to amateurs. Striptease in the clubs and casino shows is sanctioned as weekly sport, as the performance of spectacle. The casino show has the alibi of art, a directed and rehearsed spectacular performance of great cost. It is sport and art in a male world, a phallo-logocentric world, in which women are objects.

Most of the Casinos do not include striptease or showgirls as part of their entertainment offerings and narrate to distance themselves from the news that Las Vegas is built not only on gambling but sex industries. However, others narrate to overlay sex and entertainment. The Topicana offers "The Best of the Folies Bergere" which they advertise as "sexier than ever." Riviera advertises "Crazy Girls" as Las Vegas' "Sexiest Topless Revue" and as "a sexy, fun-loving adventure through the world of beauty, music, dance and comedy, featuring the most stunning show girls in Las Vegas." (press here). And "Splash" at the Riviera is "An All-New Kind of Cool!"

Cheetah Club, for example, is one of countless seedy strip joints that dot the side streets just off the higher-rent, higher-class Las Vegas Strip. Cheetah's Topless Lounge is "where the infamous Paul Verhoeven film "Showgirls" was shot, but don't expect quite the full-contact lap dance presented by Hollywood. Rules are rules, and the rule here is 12 inches - that's as in minimum distance from the customer." (press here for source). Crazy Horse Too is located in the industrial section of town and is one of the oldest striptease establishments in Las Vegas while Topless Girls of Glitter Gulch is located in the middle of the high-voltage shopping mall that Fremont Street is trying to become. In the movie Show Girls:

References