Bodhidharma & the Courtesan

There's a genre of Japanese Zen painting that always depicts the same scene: Daruma succumbing to charms of a courtesan. Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, the Indian Buddhist who came to China and founded the Chan school of Buddhism, which the Japanese call Zen. In the paintings, Bodhidharma represents Zen liberation, capable of playing with the fire of sexual pleasure represented by the courtesan without getting burned by delusion. That's how everyone reads the symbolism, and of course everyone wants to be the great Bodhidharma. No one wants to be the anonymous whore.

The whore symbolism is two-edged. At the time that the Daruma/Courtesan paintings were being painted, there was a saying among the Japanese lower classes that prostitutes were guaranteed to go to one or another of the Buddhist heavens when they died, because their life on earth was hell. They were typically daughters of poor families sold into prostitution at a young age. They were indentured to the businesses that bought them. They had no control over which clients they saw, or how much time they spent with them. The lucky ones were bought out of servitude by wealthy patrons. I'm not sure what happened to the remainder; possibly they worked until they were no longer attractive, and then eked out a meager living as servants.

So the whore symbol represents both pleasure and suffering, not merely the ordinary suffering of sickness and disappointment in life that everyone experiences, but the suffering of being other people's toy, of being despised and low status, of being worth only what you can earn for someone else. Anyone who has experienced contempt knows that there's nothing ennobling about it. It warps both the people giving it and the people receiving it. Bodhidharma represents, not the enlightenment that guards against the delusions of pleasure and glamour, but the enlightenment that protects from the poison of bitterness and hardship.

But there's a further problem. Bodhidharma is a separate figure from the courtesan; enlightenment is separate from suffering. And that makes Bodhidharma an empty, pointless, religious figure. Unless enlightenment is united with suffering and contempt, it isn't going to help anyone.

Zen teachers are certified. They literally have a piece of paper that says, in effect, "I am a Zen master." The abbots of Japanese Renzai Zen monasteries earn small fortunes performing funeral services for wealthy Japanese. Bodhidharma is the guy who books a whore and then spends the first half hour talking about how important he is and how much money he makes.

The real symbol of enlightenment is the anonymous whore. Abandoned as a child, growing up despised and used, owning nothing except the immediate use of her body, she's hired to give a Zen master a blow job. Undressing her client, facing yet another turkey-neck penis hanging below a monk's pot belly, and asking herself how she's going to bring herself to do this, she suddenly realizes that she has everything she needs. No certification, no important job titles, no worshipful Zen students hanging on her every word, no special Zen philosophy or spiritual abilities, just this mind and this body at this moment.

Mixed Signals

I went into Boobie Bar's archives and read a series of posts. The blog is basically a place to put stories about misbehaving customers for the Customers Suck discussion board. After you've read a few posts, you've got the plot of just about every story:

Customer: sexual desire + booze + naked boobs = jerk
Dancer: applies psychological smackdown

What was interesting to me was the effect the stories had on me. I started viewing everyone in the stories as one dimensional characters. The ill behaved customers were conflated into a single jerk character, and the dancer administering the smackdown was the Bitch Goddess of Stripper Revenge. (Almost every story involved the same dancer.) At some point, after I had made the gradual shift away from viewing the people involved as human beings, I had a sudden shift back; it suddenly occurred to me that the dancer was a girl whose feelings had been hurt. Underneath the anger at having someone stick his hand down her thong or try to grab her tits or stick his finger up her ass, there's the pain of being treated inconsiderately. In her own blog, the dancer Casey writes

...that the feel of someone touching me somewhere I DON'T want to be touched, is the sickest, most bitter, nauseating feeling I know.

However, Casey writes this in the context of telling how she met her current boyfriend. He came into the bar where she was dancing, they went back to a room for a private dance, and he performed cunnilingus on her until she had three orgasms.

Does anyone have trouble seeing how guys might be confused?

Strippers tell customers that they don't date customers, but I've known a couple of guys that dated strippers they met in the strippers' clubs. Strippers tell the customers that they can't touch, but then many strippers allow it, and some actually enjoy it, if it's the right customer touching them. Guys go into a strip club, see naked girls, come into very close contact with them, and know from their own past experience or the experience of someone they know that what they're seeing is available, but for some reason it's not available to them right now. The result is your typical ill behaved customer; drunk, confused, and sexually frustrated.

In fairness to Boobie Bar, there's no hint in her stories that she's ever allowed a customer to cross the line with her. And that may be true for the majority of strippers. But the customers don't know that.

Behavioral psychologists have done research on how people respond to success and failure. If someone tries something, and it never works, the person gives up quickly. If they try something and it always works, but then suddenly stops working, they'll give up quickly. But if something usually doesn't work, but works sometimes, people will keep trying even in the face of repeated failure, because they know that it works sometimes. So ill behaved customers will keep acting badly because every once in a while they get to feel a dancer's crotch or tit, or someone they know got a blow job or a date.

My sympathy is with the dancers. It's a lot worse to have people repeatedly grabbing your body than to have your sexual advances repeatedly rejected. But there's a reason guys act the way we do. We may be drunken idiots, but we're drunken human idiots.

Only do what feels good

Hobo Stripper writes one of my favorite blogs. She's so wholesome and sensible and upbeat, she makes being a lesbian stripper living in her van in the middle of winter in Alaska seem like the most natural thing a girl could do. In Stripping: Eliminating Bad Experiences by Rejecting Bad Customers, she makes the point that

It’s not healthy to do things that make you feel bad. It is healthy to set boundaries and express your anger right away instead of stuffing it or letting it build up.

This is sensible (and wholesome and upbeat). We're social animals and a lot of our self-view comes from other people. If, to use one of her examples, people keep trying to lick your nipple when you've made it clear the nipple is off limits, after a while you start to get the message that your boundaries aren't important, and you don't deserve to be treated better. And when you feel this way about yourself, you start to feel that way about everyone else, along with feeling a boatload of resentment. And if you feel resentful towards the world, and feel that other people's boundaries aren't important, it starts becoming OK to cross your own moral boundaries in dealing with other people. By "moral", I don't mean the sort of conventional morality that would close down all the titty bars. I mean your own morality that you have inside yourself, the things that you know for yourself are right. Things like not lying and not stealing. If the world is populated by assholes, then lying to them and stealing from them doesn't seem like such a bad thing.

One sentence summary: Emotional abuse corrupts morals.

But let's suppose that you're a single mom who's stripping because it's the only way you can support the kids and have time to be a mom for them. It's the end of the month, the kid's medical bills have emptied the bank account, and the rent's due. A customer lets you know that women over thirty are too old. Female value is inversely proportional to age. Do you do what HS did, walk away from the customer, and thereby walk away from the rent money? Or do you let him corrode your mind so you can keep a roof over your kids' heads?

The traditional feminist critique of sex work is that it is inherently corrosive. But in the case of stripping, I think the problem lies in the way strippers are paid. Barring fraud, porn performers and prostitutes will always get paid for working. But in theory, a stripper can dance all night and not get paid. Strippers are essentially sales people. Most sales professionals get some combination of salary plus commissions. As long as they can hold their jobs, they're guaranteed their salary. Strippers get tips instead of salaries. In many cases, they also get commissions on specialized dances with set prices. If they can sell a fixed price lap dance or couch dance, they are guaranteed a large commission for their work. Otherwise, they get tips, which are entirely at the customer's discretion.

A successful stripper with a large bank account can walk away from an abusive customer without regret. A stripper who has minimal living expenses can do the same. But strippers who aren't as skilled in separating customers from their money, strippers who for one reason or another don't have a cash cushion, and strippers who support other people are in a different position. If you need cash immediately, and your earnings are entirely determined by your customers' whims rather than the amount of work you do, then you are at the mercy of your customers.

Grace Undressed describes the effects of a bad night with abusive customers in a post titled Mcdonald's Money.

Giving Thanks

College Callgirl, who claims to have exited the hooking business, has posted a Thanksgiving list of things that she's thankful for. One of the items is "nasty porn". The image accompanying the list item in her post is a Bang Bus graphic. Bang Bus is nasty porn indeed.

I used to date an ex-prostitute who liked nasty porn. She was, truthfully, one of the sweetest girls I've ever known. She was also a firecracker in bed. It was a long distance relationship and we weren't able to get together very often, but when we did, she would keep me erect for hours while she had organsm after orgasm.

So, this Thanksgiving I am giving thanks for all you ex-prostitutes who like nasty porn. In my extremely limited experience, you are sweet, loving, considerate, giving, and very, very nasty in a wonderful way that causes ex-boyfriends to remember you with longing and gratitude.

Happy Thanksgiving.