Recent Threats Against Nude Dancing

A Cultural Anthropologist Responds to Recent Threats Against Nude Dancing
Essay by Judith Lynne Hanna

Last year "nude erotic dancing" seemed to have become an officially endangered species in the United States. The Supreme Court gave localities the authority to ban all nude dancing in a First Amendment case, Erie v. Pap's A.M.
(a nude dance club). The requirement of G-strings and pasties, the court said, is a minimal restriction that does not diminish the erotic message.

Many people believe that nudity is a form of costume and that performers should have the freedom to communicate their artistic messages through costume without state interference or police harassment. Yet after the court's decision, local governments from Arizona to Florida have been banning nude and even partial and "simulated nude" dancing. And the threat of further assaults on nude dancing looms large.

Civil libertarians and proponents of erotic dance have been fighting back. Luke Lirot, the lawyer for several clubs in the South, and Bradley Shafer, a lawyer for the 50-club Déjà Vu chain, led the First Amendment Lawyers Association in its periodic brainstorming on how to preserve clubs from locally initiated slow death. Representatives of "legitimate" dance, like Dance/USA and other performing-arts organizations, joined the litigation in the Pap's case, filing friends-of-the-court briefs against the prohibition of expressive nudity.

Also called exotic and striptease, "nude erotic dancing" is an adult theatrical art of risqué fantasy. Its immediate roots are in America's burlesque tradition of parodying social decorum and in the belly dance of the Middle East, first performed publicly in this country in 1893.

Live nudity in legitimate "high art" theater in the United States dates back to the 1840s, and since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, nudity onstage has become an accepted, even dated, element in theatrical production. In the 1990s, in several cities, nearly 50 company members and amateur performers appeared nude in Bill T. Jones's much acclaimed modern dance "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land." Vulnerability, variability, and unashamed common humanity were among the work's messages.

The Supreme Court decision would seem to challenge even this "artistic" form of nudity because the Erie ban, which the court upheld as properly "content-neutral," applies to all forms of public nudity. But "adult entertainment" is clearly a more controversial form of theatrical nudity, being an erotic dance that communicates fantasy through jazz-like movements, high-heel shoes, and stripping. The climax of the striptease has become the revealing of the nude body. Erotic dancers usually perform first onstage for the whole audience and then, for a fee, for individuals at a table or seat and in some clubs on a patron's lap. Selling body-contact dances dates to the 1920s in taxi-dance halls, where men paid women to dance with them.

Erotic dancing represents the transfiguration of sex rather than sex itself. In "The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism," the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz writes: "Eroticism is a representation that diverts or denies sex in action... a metaphor." Although not considered high art, erotic dance is dance nonetheless. It is purposeful, intentionally rhythmical, culturally patterned, nonverbal movement that communicates, in time and space, with criteria for excellence. It is a learned skill requiring imagination and expressiveness. Some erotic dancers learn their art by watching and being coached, as most people in the world learn to dance; others draw on their training in various dance genres, including ballet and gymnastics.

In the Pap's ruling, the dissenting Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the outlawing of public nudity could "silence a message and invoke censorship." But the majority thought such a prohibition was acceptable in order to "promote the health, safety, and general welfare of the people." Nude dancing, the majority said, may increase prostitution, drug use, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as cause the depreciation of property values. But the dissenting justices wrote that "to believe that the mandatory addition of pasties and a G-string will have any kind of noticeable impact on adverse secondary effects requires nothing short of a titanic surrender to the implausible." They asserted that nude dancing is entitled to as much First Amendment protection as any other form of expression.

Steven Swander, a Texan and a member of the First Amendment Lawyers Association, said, "What is new in the Pap's case is that at least the Pap's decision has advanced the rationale for anti-nudity bans beyond fostering morality as allowed in Barnes v. Glen Theater of 1991," in which the court allowed Indiana to ban nudity. Now governments have to provide evidence that nudity causes adverse secondary effects.

Yet an analysis in the April 2001 issue of Communication Law and Policy found that, with few exceptions, the studies most frequently cited to justify regulation of nude dancing were seriously flawed.
"Those studies that are scientifically credible demonstrate either no negative secondary effects—or a reversal of the presumed negative effect," the report said.

A police study in Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, showed no adverse effects of nude dancing. In fact, there were fewer problems in clubs with nude dancing as well as alcohol than in those serving alcohol but without nude dancing. Even the presence of two erotic dance clubs across the street from each other in the elite Georgetown section of Washington has not been found to cause crime or property depreciation. Indeed, for years the clubs have remained anonymous to many of their neighbors.

Recent studies of crime and property values in specific club neighborhoods by, for example, three professors—Daniel Linz of the University of California, Santa Barbara; George McCarthy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Kenneth Land of Duke University—found no adverse secondary effects associated with the clubs. In my own case study of residents and business operators within 1,000 feet of three erotic dance clubs in Charlotte, N.C., not one of 112 respondents reported that the club had had a negative impact on the neighborhood.

My education in the world of the modern variant of erotic dance clubs, or so-called "new gentlemen's clubs," began in March 1995, when Bruce McLaughlin, a planner based in Clearwater, Florida, and Gilbert Levy, a lawyer representing erotic dancers and club owners in Seattle, discovered my anthropological research on dance as nonverbal communication. They asked me to be an expert court witness in a First Amendment case, applying to erotic dance the semiotic, socio-linguistic paradigm I had used to study dance in Africa, on school playgrounds and in American theaters. Since then I have been to erotic dance clubs (95 to date), courtrooms, judges' chambers, and city and county council meetings. In these "classrooms," I have interviewed more than 500 dancers, patrons, and community members and worked on 50 erotic dance cases that have come before legislative or judicial bodies.

I discovered that nude-dance clubs display gradations of taste and propriety, just as restaurants range from hole-in-the-wall diners to four- star temples of cuisine. A well-managed club with complete nudity is no more likely to be linked with prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases or drugs than social dancing in restaurants, community centers, and municipal theaters. Drugs and violence have been found in the nation's schools, and sex crimes against children in schools and churches, but that doesn't mean the setting caused them.

Judging by the increasing number of couples going to erotic dance clubs, the college and postgraduate students performing, and the business deals sealed in the ambience of nude performances, the public has become much more accepting of the clubs. But at the same time, laws seem to be getting more restrictive. So why are many local officials, including Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in New York City, which prides itself on being the cultural capital of the world, trying to uproot the erotic dance clubs? The legend is that the clubs are gangster-run strip joints, though since the 1980s close to 3,000 well-run, often luxuriously appointed, gentlemen's clubs patronized by male and female professionals and businesspeople have appeared around the country.

What is considered risqué evolves with society's concepts of indecency, immorality, and even nudity. Ballet, perhaps the quintessential example of high-art dance, was widely considered disreputable almost until the 20th century; the sight of pantaloon-covered legs when a fully clothed dancer pirouetted was as scandalous as complete nudity is today for some people.

Many erotic dancers say that being a nude "object of the male gaze" to earn a livelihood is not degrading. What hurts is society's stigmatization of the "stripper." Interestingly, such dancers are often more esteemed when people learn that some performers can earn more than $1,000 per shift. The dancer's nude body is no more reduced to a commodity than that of Naomi Campbell, Sharon Stone, or Michael Jordan.

Certainly, many people find dancers' nude bodies to be icons of idealized beauty and female empowerment. Circular theater stages in erotic dance clubs allow patrons to move around and marvel at living sculpture, much as museumgoers observe a statue and just as countless faces look up at the promenading new Miss America. Erotic dance, female or male, celebrates the body beautiful.

Nude erotic dance communicates dangerous-seeming mes-sages to those who believe in the subservience of women and the right of the husband to the sole view of the woman's body.

Conversely, however, nude dancers mock the tenets of religiously prescribed modesty, and hence religious disapproval has helped drive the opposition to such dance during an era of seemingly relaxed opinions about sexuality and theatrical nudity. Nude erotic dance communicates dangerous-seeming messages to those who believe in the subservience of women and the right of the husband to the sole view of the woman's body.

Some would-be censors believe that men cannot control themselves in the presence of a nude female dancer in a theatrical setting, and that therefore the sight of her almost invariably serves to instigate crime. To adversaries of erotic dance, including some feminists, a nude dancer conveys humiliation, moral decay, the female as sex object, and the general oppression of women.

The Community Defense Counsel, a conservative group that describes itself as a "public interest legal organization protecting communities from the crime, health and public safety problems caused by sexually oriented businesses," provides model legislation and legal assistance to help localities ban erotic dance. Erotic dance has become a lightning rod for cultural wars and a scapegoat for a sense of helplessness against change in American society.

Given that there is no scientifically valid evidence for adverse secondary effects of erotic dance clubs, banning nudity for reasons of morality can easily open the door for the suppression of other speech on similar grounds. Who is the arbiter of morality? What are the rights of a cultural minority—or is it a silent majority? A famous man once wrote: "Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and stimulations. Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters and window displays must be cleaned of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political and cultural idea." - The man was Adolf Hitler, writing in his manifesto, Mein Kampf.

Judith Lynne Hanna is an anthropologist and a senior research scholar in the dance department at the University of Maryland, College Park.

This essay is reprinted with permission from an article originally published in the New York Times.