Sexy is Funny

Female strippers are thought of usually as either hot, sexy, gorgeous women or skanky, slutty whores. 

Male strippers are thought of as what by the general public? Are there the same polar opposite opinions?

What about funny?

Channing Tatum’s co-star in Magic Mike XXL, Joe Manganiello said:

Male stripping is funny, it just is. You would have to work so hard to work around the comedy, the innate comedy of male stripping…

 It says a lot that we see men stripping as funnier much easier than we do women stripping.

I think that the humor for audiences comes from the awkwardness we may experience at seeing men do something that is seen as “womanly.” Being sexy has always been a female’s territory.

I think there is something inherently funny about public nakedness in general.

If I tried now to do what I did back then, I would not be able to keep a straight face. Trying to “be sexy” is quite funny.

One photo shoot I did for a foot fetish magazine was actually hysterical. The shoot took place in a real studio with photographers, lighting, and sets. I worked with two other models. We started dressed, eating grapes on a velvet couch. We ended nude, legs entwined, displaying our toes to the camera. My improvisation of feeding grapes to the others from my clenched toes was a hit. It was outrageously funny to me, but the other models really seemed into it. The blonde sucked on my toes and moaned. I did my fake head-back orgasm, but I think hers was real.

In some ways, it’s so simple as a stripper or model to put on that fake sexy face and pretend to be so hot and bothered. It was easy to make men think the look was real.

Perhaps that is also where part of the “funny” came from for me. What kept me going when the men were jerks was knowing that they were giving me money for pretending to feel and be something I wasn’t really experiencing or being.

We would laugh backstage at how easy it was to make men believe we were real.

Looking back now, I see I really was an actress playing a part most of the time.

It makes sense that I would be confused about who I really was after leaving my other life.

What was real and what was fake got all mixed up.

Arne Duncan Strips Down to Save Our Kids' Education!

It has come to this, World: Secretary Of Education Forced To Take Up Stripping To Put Nation Through School.

Even the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is Stripping Down now, but it’s in the name of paying for kids’ education, y’all!

Saying it was his only real option to earn much-needed cash, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters Tuesday he had been forced to start working as an erotic dancer at the local strip club Peaches in order to put the nation’s students through school.

Ok, yes…this article appears in The Onion. But they really got the stripper dialogue down!

“Taking off your clothes in front of strangers isn’t for everyone, but I’m confident in my body, and regardless, I need to get the money somehow,” said Duncan, who performs under the stage name Velvet. “I’m not planning on doing this forever, just until all 49.8 million kids in our public elementary and secondary schools can graduate. Then I can go back to my regular job.”

There really are strippers out there in the clubs saying this very thing with just a few slight differences.

As a former stripper I can sit here and say that yes, a lot of us strippers can justify our jobs even when we don’t especially like what we are doing. Hey! We’ve got to support the kids, right?

Of course, I would think that goes for most people who don’t like or don’t feel 100% great about their work.

This brings up a real issue when it comes to strippers and a great place for the rest of us to practice compassion—if we were to imagine strippers (or insert a person/worker who you think is doing something immoral) as moms trying to put their kids through school, feed the family and support the household, could we have more compassion and understanding for them?

Perhaps we all “Strip Down” in some way in our lives when we need to—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.