Striptease

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Salome, by Gustave Moreau

Striptease is an art some people practice. Striptease is about undressing in an erotic way. This is usually done before an audience. Very often it is done in night clubs. The art of it is the teasing. It is about sexually arousing the audience. The teasing is usually done by delaying to take something off. It can also be done by hiding certain parts of the body with hands or pieces of clothing. While undressing, the person doing the striptease also dances around. Sometimes, plays are arranged, the strippers are disguised as Arabic dancers, Salome, Lolita or other well-known people. The spectator sometimes identifies with the stripper. Erotic dreams and exhibitionist fantasies are projected into the striptease. A naked body can never fulfill these projections.

Today, most striptease dancers are women.

[edit] History

There are different possibilities how striptease could have started. One of them is that the erotic dance, Salome did for Herodes was in fact a striptease. But neither Salome, nor her dancing are mentioned in the Bible. Therefore this can only be seen as a try to give striptease a history.

Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes were the first to no longer use long robes, but rather tight stockings and skirts. In 1868 they showed what had been hidden until then: The legs of a woman. Another sensation came from Paris at that time. A dance, called Cancan. This dance was seen as very wild, even as an obscenity.

The first professionally done striptease dance was done in 1894, in Paris. It resulted in a fine for the dancer.

Starting in 1905, a lady calling herself Mata Hari entered the scene. On the invitation of Emile Guimet she danced before a carefully chosen audience. The scene at the end of the show, where she was nakedbecame a sensation. Similar performances, at the requests of Baron von Rothschild, Cécile Sorel, Gaston Menier and Natalie Clifford Barney followed. Mata Hari had never learned how to dance, and had never studied Indian and oriental dancing. Her dances were a product of her imagination. In 1917, Mata Hari was charged with espionage and sentenced to death. She was shot, on October 15,1917, in Vincennes, near Paris.

Many women danced as Salome, at the end of the 19th century. Salome was taken as a pretext to be able to show off the female body. Many of these dancers undresssed, but some kept their clothes on.

In the 1920s, Anita Berber became known in Berlin because of her dances. Anita Berber was a dancer, and performing artist. Most of her dances she did in the nude. Many of her performances provoked tumultous scenes. In practically no time, she was well-known, but already had an image laden with scandal.

After the war, in the 1950s striptease became the motor of an emerging sex industry (mainly focused on publications, like Playboy). Paris saw the opening of the high-society strip clubs, like the Alcazar or the Crazy Horse.

In modern times, the art of it gets lost more and more. In the 1990s, a German private TV channel (called RTL) made a strip show called Tutti Frutti. Since then, durting the night, many private TV stations have women, who try to get rid of their clothes (without even dancing), while they advertise some phone sex numbers (or other prime-rate numbers).

There is also a film called Striptease. It plays in US strip clubs, without giving much background information.

Originally, striptease was only done by women. They wanted to seduce male voyeurs. Today, a very small number of male strippers are there. Among thw most notable of them are the Chippendales.