Nude Dancing: Scenes of Sexual Celebration in a Contested Culture

In the long cultural war against a puritan and patriarchal establishment, nude dance clubs are outposts on the frontier of the current conflict. At first glance, the spectacle constitutes an anomaly in allowing anonymous men to have a series of close but public encounters with the most intimate and normally concealed parts of a woman's body. The legalization and commercialization of nude dancing arguably represents a new social ethos that did not exist even after the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Nude dancing illustrates the oppositional nature of the unstable neo-puritan legacy. Eric Widmer, Judith Treas, and Robert Newcomb characterize the United States as one of the four most sexually conservative Western industrialized nations. Americans strongly disapprove of all types of nonmarital sex, according to the 1994 International Social Survey Program, which sampled the opinions of 33,590 respondents from 24 countries. Americans are among the least permissive about extramarital, teenage, and homosexual sex, and their opinions about premarital sex are more divided than in other countries. The "sexual regime" in the United States is most like that in Poland, Ireland, and Northern Ireland, where public opinion supports conservative Catholic norms, said the authors. For example, the Irish and the Americans are polarized between strong approval and strong disapproval of premarital sex. Among industrialized countries, the survey evidence seems to suggest a distinctive and conservative sexual regime with a degree of unresolved conflict. Indeed, the United States seems to be in a transitional period of cultural conflict, demonstrated in part by the appearance, rise, and commercialization of nude dancing in public places. Live sex exhibitions are a significant extension of explicit portrayals in pornographic magazines, film, and video that have been legalized and popularized since the 1960s. Volkmar Sigusch uses the term "neosexual revolution" to characterize the radical but gradual sexual recoding of the 1980s and 1990s. He uses the prefix "neo" to suggest both the creative and innovative as well as the dying and retrospective changes that differentiate the contemporary sexual ethos from the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and from the repressive sexuality of the 1950s. Sigusch distinguishes between the old sexuality "based primarily upon sexual instinct, orgasm, and the heterosexual couple" (331) from the contemporary period when sexuality revolves predominantly around gender difference, spectacle, self-gratification, and prosthetic substitution. Sex is no longer mystified positively as the potential for human pleasure and happiness. Sex has a diminished and negative significance as the source and scene of oppression, inequality, violence, abuse, and deadly infection. Rather than the promise of paradisiacal sexual communion and an imagined universal of oceanic good will, Sigusch describes three empirical tendencies that epitomize the current period: (1) The sexual sphere of life has been radically separated from reproduction and from experiential response. He lists his evidence as matters of common knowledge: Pregnancy can be prevented or induced. The fetus can be autonomous and viable apart from the female body. Mothers are not biologically or economically dependent on fathers. Prostheses and stimulants allow sexual performance without sexual desire. Personal want ads, telephone sex, faked climaxes, and cybersex are considered adequate substitutes for closeness, joy, tenderness, excitement, pleasure, affection, and comfort. (2) Sex is fragmented, packaged, and commercialized. Rather than one primary sexual urge, there are a range of gender choices and identities. Again, Sigusch argues by enumerating the products and services of commercial culture. Sexual experiences and lifestyle paraphernalia like labia piercing, dolphin-shaped clitoral vibrators, surgically implanted penis pumps, and sex toys are all saleable commodities. …