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My friend Bubbles Burbujas, also known as the amazing StripperTweets on Twitter, wrote a post about my joining the My Name Is Me campaign for her communal blog No, really, what’s your real name?” Welcome to our world, online handle users! Choosing a work name is one of the first things nearly every sex worker does when entering the business. My name isn’t really Bubbles, Kat’s driver’s license says something else, and Charlotte wasn’t given that name at birth. We all have different reasons for using other identities online from the frivolous (to bitch about work without trouble) to the very serious (malevolent stalkers).

As a former stripper, I'm fascinated with identity--the ones we choose for ourselves, the ones we find society pastes upon us like so many adverts for Mila Kunis rom-coms, the ones that chafe, the ones towards which we aspire. A rose by any other name may still be a rose, but I'm fairly certain that the Society of American Florists would rebrand it if its name were stinkweed. Stripping for six years, I saw many dancers change their names when they realized that no one wanted to get a dance from Suede.

I've written often about identity; it's not just an idle concept for me. There was this post about navigating the choppy waters between my strip self and being in grad school. There was this post about choosing the strip name CeeCee, and this post about what it meant. And then there's the pice that I wrote for Tits and Sass on the weirdness of being a sex writer. I don't know if I became interested interested in the smoke and mirrors of identity because I was a stripper or if I became a stripper in part because identity was always smoke and mirrors.

"I am my mane, my mane is me," my friend Rita would say every night she geared up to swivel another shift at FlashDancers. And, really, it's as good a strip mantra as any I've heard. Flattening your self into glossy swinging strands can seem to work well in the ever-plastic world of a strip club. It's way more snarled in the world of the real, which if you're a stripper includes the plastic playland of silky Lycra, Lucite shoes and fake names. 

Real, fake, digital, analog, call it what you will, it's always complicated.

 

 

I'm a friend of Bubbles, one of the unstoppable forces of seduction and intelligence behind the sexworker blog site, Tits and Sass. I'm half in awe and half in love and more than a little scared by Bubbles, particularly her hipster cred and music nerd chops. An added bonus to our relationship is the ability to drop phrases like "as my friend Bubbles said" into conversation; however piquant that may be, the actual friendship is far more meaningful and rewarding.

Bubbles asked me to contribute a piece or two to Tits and Sass, and my first one, "Shaking Tail and Spinning Tales, From Shaking It to Spinning Them," is up today. The piece explores the intersection of stripping and writing erotica. Here's an excerpt:

Strippers and erotica writers choose to write under names not only because they fear personal and professional reprisals—sex is a dangerous business, even if you’re just depicting it in words; you don’t even need to airfuck for cash to make sex dangerous; never mind the zip code, just living in the Congressional district of sex is dangerous and implicating—but because the fantasy of being someone else isn’t just for the audience. In some way, it’s there for you as the stripper or the writer too. I call this “The Sasha Fierce Effect.”

Beyoncé created her alternate wild-girl persona Sasha Fierce in order to do the stuff on stage that she as Beyoncé wasn’t entirely comfortable doing. If, like a person with multiple personality disorder, you fracture your self into discrete (and ideally discreet) units, you might find you can deal with the perceived dangers of that freakish enterprise. 

Go here to read the rest. It's free. While you're at it, take some time to read the site's coverage of the Ashton Kutcher/Village Voice sex-trafficking "Real Men Don't Pay for Sex" kerfuffle. Both sides could gain from reading what Tits and Sass have posted, frankly. 

In my post, I namedrop a series of posts that I've written here (as well as a couple of Penthouse articles, stories for anthologies and the like). For those readers who might like to read those posts, I thought I'd give some links. Here they are, in order:

The one about the time my boyfriend bound me, blindfolded me, and made me come like a yowling banshee. 

The one about the time I had the world's fasted threesome.

The one about the time I was the girlmeat in the boy sandwich.

The one about the time I fucked a clown.

The one about the times I gave head. Really, there's a lot of head giving.

The one about the time I first squirted.

The one about the time I admitted my ambivalence over nipple clamps.

And if that's not enough, here's the whole smut enchilada, and here are the oral parts and the anal parts. It's like Freud's stages, but without the shaming or the cigars. And finally, here are all my strip tales, starting at the beginning. Because as long as we're talking about tits and sass, we might as well go full circle.

 Ps. I also write about a lot of stuff that has little if anything to do with sex. Because there's also rock 'n roll, zombies and Buffy.

 Last November, I stood dressed in my tattered skivvies for Two of these illustrations are now available on t-shirts. You can buy them at Fred Segal, if you live in LA; you can buy them at Atrium starting in mid-June, if you live in Gotham; and if you live otherwhere, you can buy them online. I have bought one of each of the t-shirts myself so that I can wear myself in stereo. I can, from time to time, endorse my own narcissism, a quality I like to rebrand á la Gala Darling as a tepid flavor of radical self-love. (I can’t quite call my self-love radical; it remains timid as weasels and twice as unpredictable.)

 Molly’s drawing of me called “Strut” by Dirtee Hollywood is at the framing shop. Soon it’ll sit bright and shiny and new on one of my old and dingy walls. It’s art, and I love it, and I know few people who can say that they have adorned Fival Stewart’s chest. I have, or an image of me has, anyway. I am one degree of separation away from Twilight franchise teen-tart tit. Che Guevara and I now have something in common, presumably.

Make no mistake about it: posing for an artist is gratifying in profound ways. It’s fantastic to stand for five or ten minutes, to take pride in holding a pose, to feel your muscles quiver tight as a racehorse, to keep your chin tilted just so, to hold tight and hold tighter, and to see at the end yourself represented through someone else’s gifted eyes and talented hand. I’ve modeled for artists only a few times in my life, and I’ve never felt anything but a rarified form of aerie elation. It’s a bit high-making, in all honesty. It beats drugs because rather than a hangover and a headache, you inevitably get a lovely two-dimensional parting gift rolled in your hand.

Which is to say, in short, that there is joy in being an object. I have loved the slipping feeling of turning into a thing and losing my being. I spent so many years as a stripper in a happy vague state of bland awareness, and I enjoyed much of that time. Consciousness is a curse, I’ve often felt, and felt keenly, bright and sharp and shiny as an expensive German knife. My consciousness has often been unkind; it has lit my life in the unforgiving gaze of overhead fluorescent lighting. I have been grateful for the Lethean waters of objectification.

Though I’ve not known why until recently. At the beginning of March, a team of researchers from the New School for Social Research released their findings from a study of objectification of women. The study, as reported widely on the web, suggested that women are objectified, their cognitive abilities falter. The researchers suggest that this decrease in cognitive function is due to a splitting of self—an awareness both of oneself as viewed and as viewing one’s self being viewed—and that this splitting of consciousness makes it, well, hard to think.

Objectification is hard, let’s go shopping.

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