Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City
By Ruth Fowler
Published by Penguin Books, 2009
ISBN 9780670019397, 9780143115656
Strip club. Gentlemen’s club. Never really understood the difference between the two. Because all that ever seemed to matter is very basic economics, as in supply and demand and the going rate for wish fulfillment. Strippers, dancers, genies in g-strings…tend to learn that faster than most first-year M.B.A.s. Twenty for the come hither look, $50 for her undivided attention, a C-note for [wait!] unconditional love. Just like milk, bread, success and one’s soul, sex, or at least the desire to engage, costs, for both the hunter and the hunted. In a strip club – oh, excuse me, gentlemen’s club – who’s who?
Ruth Fowler’s memoir, Girl, Undressed, never really answers that question. The entire dynamic of the exhibition is a game, a symbiotic relationship of sorts, and Fowler’s alter ego, Mimi, played her position well. Not just in terms of the money and the obligatory bored look, or the relative ease with which she separated the horny from their mortgage money. (Those lessons she mastered without having to read the employee handbook.) It was the detachment – mental and physical – that served Mimi well. But her downfall commenced when her two halves began to meet somewhere in the middle. Fowler as Mimi unconsciously thinking as Fowler? A guaranteed means to an end. Every businessman knows that.
Mimi Springs to Life
Before the birth of Mimi, Fowler grew up in North Wales, United Kingdom, and graduated from the prestigious Cambridge University. After graduation, she existed as somewhat of a hobo, talking her way into jobs on cruise ships that took her all over the world. Mimi was conceived on one of these adventures from, not so ironically, self-obsession, the result of peppering every conversation with “Me me me me” (10). “Life changed after that. I guess it’s like calling the devil. Find the right name, you draw him out. Although this wasn’t an exorcism. This was more of a baptism” (10). But instead of the baptismal water, Mimi imbibed the devil’s nectar to religious excess and ingested enough Ecstasy to grind a pair of dentures to dust. She danced indiscriminately between the sheets – not for love but for lust – and so her foray into pole titillation comes as a surprise to no one. Not even herself.
The Decent Into Hell
Fowler’s two-step with the stripper known as Mimi began as a means of survival in a heartless New York. Finding herself among the multitude of illegal immigrants, Mimi, shocked – shocked! – that her privileged white skin did not merit her red-carpet treatment in the United States, waved the white flag on her equally-privileged education and took a job as a waitress in a strip club. She freelanced as a writer for The Village Voice and others, but lacking a social security number meant the paychecks were slow to get cut. So what does an illegal immigrant do, post-9/11, when the bills need to be paid and no benevolent I.N.S. agent is around to pay them? She peels off her clothes, stitch by stitch, for horny men flush with cash. Even Fowler knows Mimi was always prepared for that. “You sell what you have, what you know, and however it’s packaged, you had that crack, that flaw, that ****ed-up genetic blip in you from something, from somewhere. You didn’t just turn up in this place by accident. No way” (81).
Mimi succumbed to the inevitability of mutual attraction, which grabbed her by both hands and led her down the steps of Hell. This distraction, in the form of a customer she named “Eton,” knocked her on her ass and meticulously stripped away every shred of faux bravado Fowler had constructed in order to be Mimi. Exposed, now Fowler had to deal with Fowler.
A Worthwhile Read
Once the reader gets past the Mickey Spillane/“Mike Hammer” gritty language, Girl, Undressed unfolds as a convincing account of a less-than-desirable trade. That Fowler endures so much and lives to tell about it is admirable, considering the fact that many of her cohorts – described in vivid detail – probably won’t ever get a chance to tell their story. Are we expected to feel sorry for them? Possibly. But not for Mimi. She always had Fowler.
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