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Yesterday I met with my tattoo artist, to consult about my new tattoos. Stephanie is a tiny, quick person with the affect of a highly tattooed sparrow, if sparrows were themselves tattooed and rather than more often being tattoos themselves. I walked into the studio with a general feeling of befuddlement tinged with resentment that I had to have a consult at all, but Stephanie, it turns out, is a much wiser woman than I when it comes to the decoration of dermis. She quickly talked me out of my initial concept and she, being both an artiste and a merchant, convinced me to get a completely new design around my existing, raw, and kind of ugly tribute tattoo and to put the two textual tattoos elsewhere.

So I've now an appointment on 4 May for the work around the existing tattoo, a frame that will take the form of some Victorian filigree, which will be, according to the infinitely more expert Stephanie, both "organic" and "visual." I'm on stand-by for the two textual tattoos. The Addams Family quote will go on the inside of my forearm right under my inner elbow so that it is balanced against my Joyce quote on the inside of my wrist. The Buffy quote will be placed between the already existing Joyce quote and the to-be-added Addams Family quote so that it wraps around my forearm, more or less bisecting my forearm horizontally, and such that the phrase "love's bitch" features on my forearm. If you can picture that, which I can because I spent a good forty-five minutes taping paper to my arm, you're doing better than I suspect. Pictured below are the graphics of the two textual tattoos. I'll post pictures when I get them done.

Who doesn't love new skin art? No one I want to have lunch with. I'll make an exception for my parents because, you know, they raised me and all.

For no reason that I can think of, the Addams Family quote (it translates to "we gladly feed on those who would subdue us," not just pretty words) is the actual size, but the Buffy isn't. I guess you can click to embiggen it.

Sadly, the book deal for the book that was to be my first book, although not my book but a book written by me, has gone south. Suffice to say that it was no one’s fault; I wanted more money; they wanted to give me less; we couldn’t agree on numbers; life goes on.

Though I can’t spill the whole pot of bubbling beans, the book in question was a collection of erotica written centered on the employees of a business this particular corporation would like to be known as “an upscale gentleman’s club,” but which I would term simply a strip club or, were I in a sassier frame of mind, a “titty bar.” It was, essentially, a book that splayed its fictionally tanned, toned thighs across the Venn diagram of erotica, journalism and corporate branding. The book’s agent, the corporation in question and I all agreed that I, being both a former “entertainer,” a writer of erotic fiction and an occasional journalist, would be perfect for the project.

As it turned out, the project wasn’t perfect for me, or I should say that the money offered for the project was much less than perfect, and so I chose to walk. I wish the corporation, the agent, and all involved the best.

I’m sad about this loss, but this post is less about the travails of my first Book That Wasn’t and more abut how bone-vibratingly surreal it was for me to go to the club of corporation in question, meet with the club’s P.R. guy and the book’s agent, and talk with the various employees of the establishment/gentleman’s club/strip club. Because what I found when I stepped through those double doors and into the inescapable shuk-shuk-shuk bass-thrumming atmo of every titty bar between Bangor and Beijing, was that you can take the woman out of the strip club, but you can never take the stripper out of the girl.

Last week on Halloween, I wrote a post that questioned the recent trend of fetish-wear inspired  Halloween costumes for women, and in doing so I introduced my notion of Strip Nation. Not surprisingly given the intense media hype surrounding “Slutoween,” the post garnered some attention, both critical and laudatory.

To be honest, I’m a lot less interested in what women wear to Halloween parties than I am interested in what their choices are, how media interprets these choices and what these choices mean in terms of culture at large. In my mind, the proliferation of “Naughty” and “Sexy” Halloween costumes is neither something to chastise and wag my finger at nor to celebrate and raise the big foam finger to; rather, it’s an opportunity to look at our culture in general, and our attitudes toward sex in specific. We may not be what we wear on Halloween, but what we wear gives us something not just to look at but also to think about.

Strip Nation, as I suggested in my earlier ramblings, is the dissemination of the go-go world of gentlemen’s clubs, strip bars, and burlesque into dominant culture. From the rather innocuous pleasure of body piercing to the unquestionably dangerous pursuit of perfectly pink and perfectly sculpted labia, from the pursuit of pole-dancing to the wearing of Lucite platform shoes, from the girl-next-door to the Girls Next Door, we are a country permeated by a new strip aesthetic. It’s everywhere you look, and as I suggested previously it’s problematic.

But it’s not all bad.

There’s a lot about Strip Nation that looks pretty rosy. Empowering. Celebratory. Even, and I hate this term for its near-emptiness, Sex-Positive.

Power comes from the choice to objectify one’s self for money, and strippers know this. From the day we are born to the day we die, we are all of us objectified, every day that we come into contact with other humans. Objectification is just something that we humans do. We look at others, we evaluate them, and we ask our selves: would we fuck them? We base these fuckability decisions based in no small part upon their looks (we often don’t, or can’t, act upon finding a person fuckable, but that doesn’t mean we don’t constantly weigh  people’s attractiveness). When you make the choice to perform this objectifying dance as your livelihood, you take control of this dynamic. In taking control, you assume power.

So the women who select the Red-Hot Devil costume for their Halloween party can temporarily appropriate this power for themselves, and when they choose a Sexy Cop or Hot Corrections Officer or other costume that erotically reinterprets an already inherently powerful cultural symbol, they’re increasing that appropriated power. Sexy Nurse may be powerful, but Hot Doctor = power(X)2. It’s almost algebraic.

It doesn’t have to be Halloween, though, for women to embody an empowering strip dynamic. Parties like Cake, hPom Spankingattractivebarefemalemanagers Dating Advices Spanking Attractive Bare Female Managers pretty dumb things: skine Spanking Attractive Bare Female Managers oPom Spankingattractivebarefemalemanagers Dating Advices Spanking Attractive Bare Female Managers pretty dumb things: skinr m w w Job Spanking Attractive Bare Female Managers Bare