 Declothing the dynamic between strippers and their student clientele.
By Rachel Ensign
Spring 2007
“I really love my job. I just like to perform,” said Diana, a tiny tattooed brunette stripper who was wearing a bright turquoise bra, a white garter, and little else. Her and her co-workers’ “dances,” in their varied forms, play an influential role in the recruitment processes of fraternities at Cornell. Most houses incorporate strippers into at least one spring Rush Week event.
“We see a lot of frat boys. They usually come in for birthdays,” said Diana. The boys usually purchase a “Kumanation” package, where the birthday boy gets on stage and dances with the girls while they put shaving cream on him and playfully hit him with paddles. “They’re actually really funny,” she said.
“Most of the guys are very nice, very polite, and very good about tipping dancers,” Diana said. Aurora, another dancer at the club who was wearing a silky black and white kimono-like dress, didn’t see the students as quite so docile. “In a nutshell, they’re pretty rowdy. Some of them do get out of hand,” she said. To prevent rowdy boys from violating the dancers’ privacy, the club employs a “five second rule” in which the girls call out for help after five seconds of inappropriate touching. The club also doesn’t allow men to touch breasts, although New York State law permits clubs to allow this. “This club is one of the best to work in,” Aurora added.
Kuma Charmers, the only strip club in the Ithaca area, sits on Route 49, an unlit two-lane road on a particularly flat stretch of upstate New York characterized by its modest ranch houses with vinyl siding and very occasional, almost alien, fluorescent gas stations. Route 49 is intersected by endless country roads with names like “salt” and “cemetery,” which lead to the vast quarter of New York State that is farmland. At 9:30 on a Tuesday night, it feels like everyone for miles around has long since gone to sleep.
Although its monopoly on the Ithaca market makes it the only strip club for groups of college-age boys to go to, much of Kuma’s clientele is comprised of older men. According to the dancers, the two age groups interact very differently with the dancers.
“I get more nervous dancing for people my own age. There are more expectations, ones that they get from TV. The body image thing is stronger,” said Diana.
Lola, a bleached blonde with a tall Mohawk, was wearing a blue camouflage string bikini top with matching see through platform shoes, and said she liked dancing for guys her own age. “It’s fun. Generally, they smell better. For the most part, they’re really in awe because they’ve never really been around naked women before. They’re a little more nervous and awkward,” she said. She also felt that the younger men were more appreciative of their performances. “I went out there, and I was doing crazy pole tricks, and they were clapping. They also play along great,” she said, in reference to the more interactive features of the performance.
Male students who encountered dancers in the recruitment process had mixed feelings about them. Chris, a freshman currently pledging an (unnamed) fraternity, saw dancers twice during recruitment events, although he says that “most houses had one stripper night.”
He explained, “You feel sorry for them because they’re your age, and they’re obviously taking a very different path than we do at Cornell. From the stories I’ve heard from brothers, they’ll take shots and smoke weed with them before the show to deal with the humiliation.”
Fraternities aim for the opposite effect, hiring women from far and wide for private parties at their houses. Most of the events involving strippers lack the controlled environment and established boundaries of the club, with its stage, pole, and managers to ensure safety and order.
One fraternity recently hired dancers from “Tops in Bottoms,” an outfit located three hours from Ithaca. Their website has a special section for college parties, proudly exclaiming that they “have performed more college parties since 1991 than ALL other companies put together! We include a HOT GIRL-GIRL show without charging you extra, we discipline the person/people that you choose.” The possible shows range from a PG-rated “Bikinigram” to an “Oil Wrestling Show.” In all capital letters, Tops in Bottoms tells potential customers, “There is a difference!”, and then, in a wording indicative of the large number of fraternity parties they book, says “Ask your brothers and alumni!”
The interactions between college-age males and exotic dancers have come under much scrutiny since a dancer accused three members of the Duke lacrosse team of raping her after a private performance, leading to the cancellation of their season and igniting a nationwide scandal. The rape charges against the three players have recently been dropped.
A similar incident occurring at Cornell would likely occur in a slightly different setting. “If something like the Duke lacrosse [scandal] happened at Cornell, it would be a fraternity, not a sports team,” said Leo, a senior and a rush chair for a fraternity, citing the greater number of males in fraternities than on sports teams.
After the Duke incident, Kuma stopped sending girls to private parties. However, two of the girls who work at the club still do private performances, some of which are fraternity recruitment events. As a pair, Nevaeh (“heaven” backwards) and Ella have done “five or six” private parties at Cornell fraternities so far this academic year. Older fraternity brothers, usually seniors, come to the club, pick them out, and ask them to perform at an event. They are usually paid $300 for an hour plus $100 prepaid in tips. The two almost always hire someone to serve as their bouncer. Sometimes the boys will be so ambivalent about the cost that they’ll pay up to $450 an hour, because, according to Nevaeh, “It’s their parents’ money.”
“They’re always really drunk,” said Nevaeh, a pretty, tan, buxom girl wearing a black ensemble. “We’ll put them in the middle and we’ll parade them around. They’ll get naked. At every single frat, there are always three to five guys they want us to focus on. It’s usually like the quiet Asian ones.”
Nevaeh and Ella do a variety of things during their performances. “The guy will lay down, and we’ll get them into 69 position and someone will pour beer down my crack and into their mouths,” said Nevaeh. Other activities include pie-eating contests where two boys compete to see who can eat a Hostess cake out of a dancer’s crotch the fastest. They also take shots of alcohol from the girls’ belly buttons and race to see who can take off the dancers’ underwear fastest.
“We used to whip them till they’d have welts on their ass,” said Neaveh, but recently they’ve been asked by the older brothers not to do so.
Evan, a freshman currently pledging a fraternity, went to two recruitment events involving dancers. “I had really bad experiences with strippers. One of them bit my nipple. It was kind of my fault. I was really drunk, and I kept putting dollar bills into her g-string and taking it out, and she got really pissed and pretended to be sexy and then bit my nipple really hard.”
He also commented that they didn’t live up to the media image he had been expecting: “A lot of times they’re subpar. They’re not what you expected strippers to look like.” He expected them to look like “the ones in the movies. Really hot, like the ones from American Wedding. Skinny, big boobs, nice butt, a clean vagina would be nice. No piercings. I hate piercings on strippers.” He had previously been to a strip club in New York City and said that the girls there were much better looking.
When he saw the strippers perform, there were numerous girl-on-girl stunts like kissing, oral sex, and dildo use. The guys, however, “never touch the girls.” He also witnessed the infamous “anal butt chug” that Neveah described.
Sometimes fraternities request themed parties. A strange request came this year, when one house asked Neveah and Ella to “reenact Thanksgiving dinner.” They wore Native American-inspired paper hats that the fraternity’s little sisters had made for them and brought out one of the holiday’s staples, pumpkin pie.
 Strippers play a large role in the fraternity recruitment process, but the similarites in age between them and the students they serve creates a certain tension. (art by Kristie Andersen)
Other informal fraternity recruitment events occur prior to Thanksgiving throughout the fall, when brothers invite potential new members to formals, open parties, and smaller gatherings at the house.
“First semester, we’re throwing open parties and stuff. Mid-November, we’ll go around the house and find out guys they like. We compile a list and invite the guys to our ‘New Years in November’ party. Then we’ll invite them to Thanksgiving,” said Leo.
These events all culminate in Rush Week, when hopeful pledges spend a week going from house to house, eating food, drinking beer, and meeting brothers in the houses. This week is one of Nevaeh’s busiest of the year. For Rush Week, “Guys come down for the smokers, which are completely dry. We have great food. On Thursday this year, we had a trip to Hooters and we got strippers for when we got back,” Leo said.
“Apparently, if the freshmen know there are dancers, they’ll be much more likely to show up,” said Nevaeh.
Leo, however, said that they hired strippers on a whim. “We just couldn’t think of anything else to do. But there are guys out there who love using strippers. It helps with some guys. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
Chris also didn’t see the dancers as an influential part of the process: “Strippers didn’t influence my decision at all. I knew going into rush week that frats did certain things to recruit us that don’t occur in everyday frat life. But some guys probably can’t make that distinction.”
Diana only dances at the club and has heard that fraternity events are “a big drunk mess. I would definitely be nervous. I would feel like a lot was expected of me, because there’s no real dancing. It’s just more provocative.”
“We’ve had bad experiences; they try and get us drunk. You have to be careful, there’s a chance that something could happen. But it’s a dancer’s responsibility to keep herself safe,” said Nevaeh. She usually hires a bouncer, whom she gives $50 for the one hour long performance.
Drunk boys often make rude comments, she added. “They’ll ask one of us, ‘Why can’t you look like her?’ Guys that are younger are a lot pickier. They’ll complain about a little bit of cellulite on your ass.”
Nevaeh and Ella have closer ties to university life than most dancers: Nevaeh is a student at Tompkins County Community College and has taken classes at Ithaca College, while Ella has a boyfriend who attends Cornell. “I notice that guys feel safer if a girl’s in school,” said Nevaeh.
“For strippers, it’s a very mixed bag because you see women who look like strippers, and you see women who look like normal people you’d see at a party,” said Chris, who preferred the girls who looked like ones he would normally see out at night.
Leo said that part of the reason he and his co-rush chairs hired strippers was because of the lack of females during rush week’s evening events. For formal sorority rush, girls have to wake up extremely early and walk from house to house all day in the cold on a strict schedule. Freshmen are warned not to go out at night and not to speak to older girls they meet during the process outside of formal rush events. “Considering how strict the sorority recruitment process is, it’s almost like replacing girls for a night,” he said.
According to Leo, when he rushed as a freshman in 2004, events with dancers were very prevalent. Over the next few years, they became less so. However, this year, he said he saw both a rise in the number of events in which dancers were involved and a lax attitude by Interfraternity Council (IFC) authorities involving the events. In a pre-Rush Week meeting for Rush Chairs, they were told that it was okay to have exotic dancers as long as they told the IFC about it.
“The official IFC stance on strippers as a part of recruitment is that first of all its not condoned, and in fact, it’s discouraged,” said IFC Vice President of Recruitment Greg Schvey. “It’s an obvious liability issue, as the nation has seen. But the IFC is a governing body made up of individual houses. The individual chapters have the right as adults to choose to [hire dancers] if they want.”
He went on to explain the rules governing fraternity social life: “First of all, to have a social event at a fraternity, they have to be registered with the IFC, and there is a series of event management guidelines. In addition, it costs $20 an event. That pays for a security guard to go around to events. All the parties have to fall under strict rules. And if they don’t follow them, it’s strict probation. We take our judicial action very, very seriously.”
Does the combination of nude women performing lesbian stunts for blackout drunk, sexually-inexperienced adolescent boys turn into something like what the president of Duke told a reporter “linked the word ‘Duke’ with ‘lacrosse’ and ‘scandal’ in a very insistent way, even after people lost faith the original charge was going to be born out”? Schvey doesn’t think so: “There’s always potential for an accident in any situation, especially involving alcohol. But overall, as a Greek System, we are incredibly responsible.”
When asked about the dangers involved in the private parties, Neveah wasn’t at all fazed, “It’s a dancer’s responsibility to protect herself,” she reiterated, her highlighted light brown hair and fake nails illuminated by the singular lamp shining on the table in the corner of the club. “I love my job, it pays for school, its good money, and it’s under the table. Plus, you meet a lot of cool people.”
The women standing behind the bar called her name; it was her turn to perform. She went off to do a dance on the dark stage in the other room, removing her black spandex ensemble for the couple of men who weren’t playing pool. |
