Photo by Flickr user Martin Deutsch. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Interesting thoughts waking up this morning. It started out thinking about confinement in tight spaces, then from there to that scene in the first Pirates of the Caribbean where the Elizabeth character is laced into a “all the new fashion” corset and… promptly faints and falls into the ocean. And from there I thought I remembered something about burlesque celebrity Dita von Teese and some male clothes designers showing off in corsets. And from there I started thinking about burlesque, and that reminded me of something Sex Geek brought up about “rules for stripping” from a workshop she attended in the Bay Area the other day. According to Miss Indigo Blue, the workshop leader, the rules are…

So, step one: create an object or area of desire. It can be anything; whether or not this object (in this case a body part) has any actual value is not the point. Indigo demonstrated this by covering her neck (which until then had been exposed, as she was wearing a simple t-shirt) with a boa, and using it to demonstrate her points. Step two: draw attention to it. In burlesque terms, this is done by using hands, large motions, facial expressions. This is also done by alternating between making eye contact with the audience and looking at the object itself, which creates tension between the audience’s desire to make eye contact with the performer and to see what’s being so tantalizingly hidden. Step three: withhold it. Demonstrate that effectively, you, the performer, have access to this wonderful thing, but the audience does not. Step four: remind the audience that object is there. Step five: show a bit, cover it up; show it, cover it up; repeat three or four times. This builds anxiety, anticipation, desire. Perhaps, maybe, the audience will have the chance to see. Step six: start to reveal it. Acknowledge that what’s happening in the audience is the impending release of that built-up tension, and perhaps insert a little humour to help lessen the shame because hey, if you can all laugh together it can’t be that bad, right? And step seven: reveal the object, and make a really big deal of it so they feel like they got what they were waiting for that whole time.

Sex Geek said it here.

Ok, so the point wasn’t to dwell on the actual steps but while I’m still digesting PhysioProf’s excellent post on attributions I thought I might as well track down the links instead of just hand-wave them. But once I took a look I realized that degree of complexity as outlined is pretty helpful because…

What I really wanted to say this morning is that the last thought that went through my head this morning before I hopped out of bed was…

What, exactly, makes anyone think men don’t need foreplay anyway? If men are the rough-and-always-ready, immune to nuance, reflex-think-with-your-little-head sex animals anti-feminists indoctrinate us to be, why bother with strip teases at all?