Op-Ed: Barely tolerated

Last week I got another invitation to a burlesque show, this one at the New York cabaret Le Poisson Rouge. That I found this unremarkable underlines how mainstream burlesque has become. Since first flashing its pasties in the ’90s, so-called neo-burlesque has grown so respectable that NPR — NPR! — has covered its “revival” at least twice, and a recent Planned Parenthood fundraiser featured a burlesque performance by one Calamity Chang, who bills herself as “the Asian Sexsation.”

Plain old strip club stripping, on the other hand, in which women also take off their clothes to music in front of a hooting audience, hasn’t made any such leap. It remains the pariah of performance arts. In politically correct, feminist-friendly circles, you wouldn’t just email all your friends and invite them to a strip club.

Why the different treatment? Why does polite society consider one form of bumping and grinding exploitative and the other acceptable entertainment?
Burlesque has become so mainstream that they do it in Boise and Des Moines. Cities like New York and Montreal have annual burlesque festivals.

Burlesque has its own celebrity practitioners (Dita Von Teese), its own Hollywood homage (last year’s “Burlesque”) and its own conventions (the unfortunately named BurlyCon begins this week in Seattle). On a practical level, you can invite your friends out for a night of tassel twirling without fear of being shunned.

Many burlesque fans will protest that strip club stripping and burlesque are fundamentally different. And they do differ in look, location and perhaps most importantly, intent — to simplify greatly, one claims to put art ahead of arousal, while the other does it the other way around. But a wide sampling of the two genres reveals more similarities than differences.

They’re often equal in raunch: Burlesque shows can be coy or full frontal, while in some high-end strip clubs the performances are practically prim, with dancers dropping evening gowns and keeping their G-strings on.

Nor is there a difference in aggregate talent. I’ve seen spectacularly gifted dancers who do burlesque, but the genre also attracts mediocrities who embrace nudity as a substitute for talent. And I’ve seen strip club strippers whose routines rival circus acts. (You try hanging upside down on a pole by your shins.)

There are, though, two crucial dissimilarities, which account for the yuppie acceptance of one but not the other. Both differences come down to socioeconomic class.

The first is aesthetic. People from middle-class backgrounds favor the burlesque show over the strip club as a matter of taste, the same way they favor Restoration Hardware over Target. Burlesque costumes display fine stitching and retro glamour; they are visibly part of a historical spectrum. They are time-consuming to create and maintain, like teak furniture and craft beer. Stripper gear, on the other hand, is shiny and cheap. It’s tacky. Trashy. Low class.

The second is financial. With few exceptions, performing fan dances and other burlesque favorites is no more a way to make a living than, say, sculpting. Stripping in a strip club, on the other hand, can pay the bills. And so it’s no great surprise that stripping attracts more poor women, while burlesque attracts more women from the middle class who have the luxury of treating it as a creative pursuit.

The fact that burlesque is non-remunerative, of course, doesn’t actually make it art. But it does make audiences more able to see it as art, which makes everyone more comfortable. Patrons needn’t admit that they’re there for the naked breasts. And performers don’t have to admit that part of the allure of the craft is being the center of sexual attention.

Neo-burlesque performers and scholars of burlesque — yes, there are many — call it empowering, a celebration of women’s sexuality, even a form of social commentary. They say that it’s ironic, a mockery of the thing rather than the thing itself — a mockery, that is to say, of stripping for the purpose of making money.

But whatever else burlesque is, it’s stripping. In the public consciousness it’s been cordoned off from its scandalous cousin, sanitized into something you can talk about in progressive mixed company. You can go to a burlesque show for the feather boas and the witty emcee as surely as you can read Playboy for the articles. But there’s still a naked woman at the end.