Jumat, 06 November 2009

All Nude, All the Time, Dance Naked

1. All Nude, All the Time

Okay. I need to make a clarification right here. While it's true that some strip clubs do feature all-nude dancers, the club where I work does not. I do not and have not ever danced completely nude. Oh, well, except when I've just gotton out of the shower and my husband and two-year-old aren't around. And in that case, yes, I do dance completely nude sometimes. Anyway, in this chapter and throughout this book, when I say nude or naked, I'm really talking about being nearly naked—that is, wearing a G-string, high heels, and a garter. Alrighty, then. Moving on.

The first and most important reason why dancers are comfortable with their bodies is that they spend forty hours a week naked. Whether it's onstage, dancing for a customer, getting ready in the dressing room, eating dinner, or just having a chat, we're pretty much all naked, all the time. Okay, we're not really naked, as I've just explained, but we're as close to it as you can possibly get without losing our liquor license. To find out exactly why spending so much naked time increases a stripper's sexiness, let's first take the sex out of it.

As I mentioned in the Introduction, one of the misconceptions about dancers is that we're nymphos, and that we only dance for a living because we're too horny all the time to work at oh, say . . . McDonald's. I then went on to say that dancing could actually be quite boring. Which is absolutely true. For strippers, giving a dance isn't about being sexual. It's about work. Shaking our hooters and smacking our asses is just part of the job description. Giving a dance is about as sexual as typing up a progress report, and every bit as monotonous, too. You see, each dancer has a choreographed dance she does every single song, for every single customer, every single time. If we are asked to give a second dance, we just do it all again, backward. (FYI: It's the basic striptease, the steps to which you'll learn for yourself at the end of this chapter.) The dance doesn't flow out of our irrational sexual exuberance—it's carefully calculated so that you get to see what you came in for before the dance is over. So just ignore what the look on a dancer's face is telling you, or what she's whispering in your ear. There are only three things strippers think about while we're giving a dance: 1) Can I get this guy into the VIP room? 2) How much money have I made so far? and 3) Have I shown him my butt yet? So, you see, even though dancers spend a lot of time naked, it's in the nonsexual context of being at work.

This just so happens to be the exact opposite of what civilian women do. In fact, most women only get naked for sex or, at least, sex-related activities. Think about it: If the only time you spend naked is in the shower shaving your legs and pits in case your man comes over, or getting dressed to look good for getting undressed for sex, then that means the only time you spend naked is time you are worrying about looking good for or pleasing your man. For most women, then, being naked comes unnecessarily weighted with a lot of anxiety and pressure. This influences even our forays into clothes shopping. If we're not trying to look good for our man, we're often trying to look good because of the judgments of other women. Either way, when you're worried about looking good for someone else, it's impossible to feel good about yourself. For dancers, once we're out on the floor working, we don't have time to obsess over whether we look okay. We just do the best we can, trust that it's good enough, let go, and get to work. By being naked so often, we become familiar with our bodies in a nonjudgmental way. This familiarity leads to a feeling of comfortableness. We feel confident taking our clothes off because we are comfortable with our naked bodies—we have nothing to hide. For you, then, the more you can remove the time you spend naked from a sexual context, or any context where you are worried about the judgments of others, the more you will feel comfortable with your body as it is. Ideally, seeing yourself au naturel should become second nature. You should be intimately familiar with your naked body, how it looks, and how it functions in all sorts of conditions and situations, not just sexual ones. Ask yourself: What do my naked thighs look like in the kitchen or in the basement? What does my belly do when I'm not sucking it in or covering it up? When we really get to know and respect our bodies is when we will stop dragging them around like the freaky friend we're too embarrassed to be seen with in public in case she does something weird. You should be so used to yourself that you become as unaware of your nakedness as a stripper is. The following exercises will help you to do it.

Exercise: Making Naked Time

1. Pick a chore you do around the house, when you are alone. Maybe it's washing the breakfast dishes after you pack the kids off to school. Maybe it's putting in a load of laundry, clipping coupons, or filing old bills. Find a chore you feel comfortable with, then take off your clothes and do it naked. It may seem ridiculous, but as I've said, strippers do boring, mundane things like eating dinner naked every day. You only need to do this exercise once to realize how different the dancer's attitude toward nudity and the average woman's is. If you're like most, the mere idea of going down to the basement naked to put in a load of laundry should be scandalous.

2. Everyone has time to sleep naked. If this is not something you ordinarily do, your man might take it as an invitation for sex, in which case you should have it, if you'd like. If it seems too abrupt a change from your ordinary full-length flannel nighties, begin slowly. For example, start with a T-shirt and jammy pants, then move on to a tank top and shorts. Gradually remove your clothing, week by week and piece by piece, until you feel comfortable falling asleep and spending a full night nude. Extra points if you include bedtime rituals you might have, such as reading a book or writing in a journal. The more naked time you spend, the more comfortable with your body you will feel.

After you've done at least one of these exercises, examine your thoughts and feelings about them. Did you feel uncomfortable or silly? Did you feel free? Or naughty? If you can, try exercise 1 a few times, until it becomes normal to do whichever chore you chose naked. This will jump-start your comfortableness with your own skin in a way that agonizing and analyzing never will.

2. Dance Naked

Now we're ready to add the sex back into it. Dancing is sexy. Dancing with unbridled abandon to a song you love is one of the most fun, freeing, joyful, and erotic experiences in the world. Even those people who claim they hate dancing secretly really love it. They're just scared to look like a total spaz in front of other people. Get them alone, in the privacy of their living room or shower or car, and they'll unleash their superfreak in less time than it takes to double-check that no one is looking. Love for dancing crosses all cultural, ethnic, financial, and generational bounds. Even churchgoing, cardigan-wearing Perry Como sang a song about getting all sweaty to the rhythms of the night in the 1950s hit song “Papa Loves Mambo.” Sample lyric: “Look at 'em sway with it / Getting' so gay with it / Shoutin' 'ole' with it, wow!”jassica kayla conrad

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