Many feminists will tell you stripping is empowering, but it in my experience, it is not. It fills me with anger when the men ask me to turn around so they can see the body that comes naturally to me and sneer when I say I don’t work out or eat sweets. It makes me sick when they touch my face when I smile, and breathe my perfume deeply when I toss my hair in their face. I touch them gently in a way I only want to touch my husband, late into the night when everything has gone quiet. I have endured harassment, embarrassment, lewd comments and gestures. I have put my back to my bathroom door, and slid down in defeat, rage-filled hot tears pouring down my cheeks, trying to drag myself to put up with it one more night. I have looked at my beauty and been repulsed by it, gagged on the humiliation I feel when I shed my dress for the twenty dollar bill that will feed my family for just one more day. I hug my husband so tight and plead for him to tell me I look stunning, only to tell him he’s obligated when he sincerely complies.
Dancing isn’t love, it isn’t power, it isn’t beating the system. It’s a sticky delicious trap of easy money and drunken vanity that I wish I had never entered in due to greed and insatiable curiosity. I see girls, rather women, ten years my senior with despair in their eyes, with no marketable skills to get out. They are the unlucky ones, lost and drowned in the system.
As everyone who reads this blog knows, I am a diagnosed sociopath. If you’re familiar with what this diagnosis means, it is a very large part of my identity. It is as much a part of my identity as being straight, gay, or bisexual. It has the same magnitude as being black, white, or even fucking first generation Chinese-American. However just like coming out of the closet, I have to evaluate whom I can tell and in what context.
People misconstrue sociopathy because of factory produced assembly line Hollywood bullshit. Fact of the matter is, most sociopaths are undetected by anyone, even the legal system, and are not the serial killer next door. We are not murderous, blood thirsty butchers; we’re more likely to be a little more Ocean’s Eleven than American Psycho. Like other psychiatric affects, there are different subtypes, severities- but I feel it only pertinent to explain my personal blend of sociopathy before I explain why it is relevant.
Socialized sociopaths such as myself haven’t interest in slaughtering, or truthfully most other criminal activity. My whole life I have been described as charming, likeable, intelligent, disarming, beautiful, charismatic. Dancers at every single club I have worked, without exception, come up to me and spill their guts even if it’s the first time they’ve ever spoken to me. Baffled, they can never convey why they felt so compelled, sometimes they are embarrassed.
“You just seem so open.”
“You’re so sweet and friendly.”
Customers add to the nightly, multiple echoes of
“You’re just so easy to talk to!”
Despite being easily the most frequent target of these often drunken confessions and misplaced friend requests (which I can’t ignore at the click of a button like Facebook or the now defunct MySpace), I felt and still feel increasingly frustrated at these wholehearted gestures.
“I don’t fucking get it,” I say to my husband after nearly every shift, “I don’t care. I don’t know these girls. Until tonight, I’ve never even spoken to Raven or Honey or Cheyenne or Precious. I’m serious. I go in, I sit down, I do my makeup and my hair. I don’t talk to anyone. I don’t get it sweetheart, I truly don’t. You know I’m not there to make friends. Why do these bitches want to tell me their life fucking story?”
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Small emotional characteristics seem commonplace confounding and wondrous because not only do I not understand them, I don’t experience them. Emotional feelings for myself (as well as certainly almost always someone else with the same mental affect as myself) are mostly superficial, momentary apparitions except with a handful; Anger, capital “A” intended, for example. Prolific in nature and mostly kept carefully under chains and padlocks, I, like my outwardly easy going father once admitted to my sister and I (to our shock), have an earth shattering temper. True manifestations of my temper to me are equally difficult to produce as they are for the target of the outburst to receive. The visceral taste of the words that spew out are the only evidence to me I am the one saying them, not just listening aghast. Without fail, I experience a phenomenon that causes my vision to vibrate, sometimes change colours (on average white or red, momentarily), hot flashes are the norm. Rage blackouts, as horrific as I have been told they are to witness, are something I openly admit to. Real anger is a long, slow, smoldering burn before detonation with me. I jokingly call these events Total Psychotic Meltdowns with my husband. Fortunately, detonation is infrequent, limited to two or three times a year. On average, true nonchalance swirled with ambivalence make up the majority of my emotional state. A true, clear, pure sense of simply not caring is my natural state. I’ve never felt a deep, warm fuzzy sisterly bond with anyone but my own sister, or missed someone other than herself or my husband, my father if I’m in a certain mood. I hesitate to say that I like someone, more often than not it can be easily described as I’m “cool” with the person in question. There’s no toleration, disdain, disgust or feelings of being burdened with unwelcome company. Simply a clean, crisp sense of disinterest, which isn’t negative though many people would interpret it as such. Disinterest is more like an average glass of water; doesn’t taste good, doesn’t taste bad, you’re not opposed to it. The is liquid drinkable, quenches your thirst (or in this case, social thirst), but has no positive or negative characteristics. It just simply is.
Emotions, to me, especially allowing other people to influence your personal emotions, is not very pragmatic.
