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2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
A good startFeb 14, 2008
By sunjoy
"sunjoy"
I would have liked to see a more nuanced analysis of the "regulars". At times Egan seemed to take their words at face value (that, for example they were "in love with" her or another dancer): to what extent was that part of a mutual fantasy constructed during the dance by the dancer and the client, and to what extent was it sincere infatuation on the part of the client?
I would also caution the reader from generalizing from Egan's experiences in the two clubs she worked at to the way things are in other clubs. Egan's book is a sort of ethnography of a certain club at a certain time, and we have no way of knowing how typical of the industry as a whole it is.
In any case, the book is quite readable and level-headed. There's a lot more to be said, I'd guess, about the diversity of attitudes among dancers and clients in the industry, but Egan's book is an honest attempt to document a particular set of dancers and clients' experiences.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 A Perfect TriadAug 04, 2009
By Genevieve Allure
"xoxoxoxox"
A perfect triad:
Dancing for Dollars, Enveloped by Venus, G-Strings and Sympathy
Hey, I'm smart, educated, beautiful, enjoy my work, for the most part, and love the rewards. Love pink, shopping and am unabashedly a `girly girl'. Any problem with that?
Yes, I dance. Love to dance especially when dancing to entertain YOU in my most sensual manner, building your desire& fantasy. I offer: interaction, variety, spice, authenticity...well, there it is, I said it. Those are some of the core motivators shared by consumers of erotic dance as illuminated in the compelling book by Katherine Frank. I urge you to read: G-Strings and Sympathy.
Curiosity has brought you to this erotic dance topic. The questions and incites are nuanced and layered, if you want a `kiss and tell' book, look elsewhere, but if you are willing to triangulate the topic then please read what two smart, educated, beautiful women have to say about their work and research. Both Egan and Frank speak in depth through their academic disciplines while never forgetting their personal voice which speaks candidly and disarmingly about the experiential and nuanced side of erotic dance. They both realize that much has been revealed to them by their `regulars' and it was for them, at times as surprising as it was profound.
A triad? Yes, the last piece. Happily, a regular named George Albright, Esq., who happens to be classy, handsome, complex, smart, curious, thoughtful and even cute, is one of MY regulars. George has written an evocative, touching, soulful, and analytical account of his experiences in the mysterious world of envelopment. [Well what? He put my name on the front cover and my photo on the back cover.!]
Here then is the triad: A. Dancing for Dollars, Paying for Love, by Danielle Egan
B. Enveloped by Venus by George Albright, Esq. C. G-Strings and Sympathy by Katherine Frank. All are available on www.amazon.com
Still curious? Check out my website at:[...] and read
My Secret. Oh, and stop in sometime babe, I'll knock your socks off with Love and Sympathy. I'll be your Venus! Just bring some Dollars. Xoxoxox Genevieve Allure
1 of 3 found the following review helpful:
George as a regular, read with interest.Apr 02, 2008
By George Albright, Esq
Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love, an inspired title in both its simplicity and its illumination of a larger truth. This book is concerned with the relationships between exotic dancers and their regulars.
As a guy who at times has woven casual relationships around the idea of being `a regular' and always working toward becoming more than `just a customer' I devoured this book with both great curiosity as to the truths that would be revealed and with a certain reluctance to have those truths iconoclastically shatter my treasured fantasies.
Danielle Egan, undertook to write the book as both scholar and dancer. The organization of the volume is one that brings into focus five basic aspects of club dynamics from the `kaleidoscopic vision of the interactions between dancers and regulars'. The foci are space, subjectivity, feminism, the psyche and affect. Egan lists in excess of 140 references to support her own observation, experience and original thinking.
I must admit, not being a scholar and being unfamiliar with some of the `intersections of gender, sexuality, class, and capitalism' in academic thinking, that I resorted to reading the book twice.
Professor Egan hastens to add that the lens of academic constructs can only take one so far in needed analysis and that the previous factors `are always more complex than they originally seem'.
If a student of any topic brought to life in this remarkable book, then this is a must read. If a general reader, especially if a `regular' take heart and read this book. It not only explores the ethnographic and the theoretical but is powerfully autobiographical.
R. Danielle Egan had the curiosity, drive, intentionally and above intelligence and courage to put her mind and body in the same place, that place being the exotic dance club. A place at once erotic, emotional, and above all complexly human. A space where men and women negotiate their roles in overt and subtle ways to get what they want, at least some of the time!!
George Albright, Esq. Please check out my book: Enveloped by Venus
2 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 DANCING FOR DIDDLYDec 03, 2009
By T.R. Catanzarite
DANCING FOR DIDDLY
Review: Egan, R. Danielle. Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.
The book is the worse I have ever picked up in my hands, to say nothing of reading. It is such a filthy book that I have to wash every time I touch it.
R. Danielle Egan has written a four D book. The first D is for Dishonesty. The premise of the book that is stated in the subtitle is the relationship between exotic dancers and their regulars. There is no relationship possible between R. Danielle Egan and the male regulars that visit exotic dancing bars because she is lesbian. If you doubt it, then you missed it, and perhaps by intent of the author. She sneaked it in. The last sentence of page xiii of the Preface ending on page xiv is, and I quote: "My internal confusion continued when Tina, my lover during my last year in college, had a friend invite us to `see her show'." Nor does R. Danielle ever state that she is bisexual, which might provide a possibility of sexual relationship with regulars. They assumed that she was heterosexual and approached her that way. Further, since Ms Egan is not interested in men and so is not really dancing for them, she is a virtual stripper that makes her deceit complete and despicable. (There is always friendship as a relationship between exotic dancing women and their clients, but I doubt that I have to tell you that men do not go into "Gentlemen's Clubs," so-called, for friendship. If R. Danielle wanted friendship with men, she could rather go to a coffee shop or student union or workplace or bookstore.)
I have no complaint with R. Danielle Egan's sexual orientation. I have not the slightest objection to it or interest in it. I hope that she is happy. I know she did not choose her sexual orientation, but that does not mean she has to accept the worst implications of it in her life. My objection is to the dishonesty in the basic premise of the text.
I suspect Ms Professor Egan is a radical feminist and wishes to do ugly things to men, and perhaps to practice surgical and chemical restructuring of them. The hope of radical feminists is to make men androgynous and sexually passive (physically or emotionally) and therefore leave the heterosexual women to the aggressive lesbian radicals. It would be a thorough revenge on the view of men held by radical feminists. Egan's precise feminist views are not stated. Marxism is one factor in radical feminism, though not all Marxists are feminists of any description, ---and in fact the opposite. Psychoanalysis is another facet of radical feminism, and so Egan uses Lacan's work. (Radical feminists discarded Freud and Jung because too many of their opinions do not fit the feminist critique.) She obviously does not respect men, despite a civil relationship (I would assume) with her male colleagues. In fact, from internal evidence in the structure of the book, I would say that Egan hates men, not obviously, of course, but contextually. Feminism, further, has refracted into so many and various factionalisms that it would take a lengthy discussion to determine the exact beliefs of an advocate. I do not find her in the seminal book, The Nature of Women, An Encyclopedia & Guide to the Literature, edited by Mary Anne Warren, but she is too young to have been included in it. Nor will I read her complete oeuvre to discover her feminist orientation.
The second D is for Disorganization. The narrative jumps between brief episodes of some sort of funky conversation with a few men in the dancing clubs followed by gobs of god-awful intellectual analysis of the those encounters using Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as mentioned above. It is horrible puke. Dialectical Materialism has been refuted, and is obsolete, as obsolete as is phrenology, another pseudo-science. Nothing Marx's dialectical science predicted has come to pass. It is difficult to comprehend anyone prating of Marxism these days. (I do know a man who is a revolutionary or idealistic communist, but he turns people off with it worse than if he had bad breath, or bad religion, which Marxism is). Professor Egan has combined her sexual orientation and her Catholic upbringing far better than she comprehends. She became both a stripper and a nun in fantasy (since she does not let the men in the clubs love her, or even touch her), a case of not having your cake and not eating it. She thus has a confused and pathetic psychology and might want to take advantage of therapy. (Either that or she is a repressed closet heterosexual and needs therapy quite thoroughly.) As for Lacanianism, the dear Jacques is the only person who understood his psychoanalytical theory, and now that he is dead the only one who ever will.
The third D is for Dysfunctional. As a result of the dishonesty of the book and the undigested intellectualism, the book functions neither as narrative, as sociological analysis nor as philosophy. It cannot validate its premise. The two gobs of it, the faux sexuality and the pretentious analysis are like a peanut butter and onion sandwich. They do not go together. (My son made himself and ate such a sandwich once, and only once and still suffers heartburn when he remembers it.)
I suppose the book is the result of a Ph.D. thesis or other academic dissertation palmed off with some sort of misguided sexuality to help it attempt to find a mass audience for MacMillan, the publisher. It fails on all counts. It is gibberish, the speech of rogues, ignoramuses and barbarians.
I have visited exotic dancing bars, so-called, or "titty bars," colloquially. But I was never as misguided as to attempt to become a "regular," as denoted in Egan's book: a man who becomes attached to a dancer and fools himself into believing that he has a special relationship with her. That is a money-soaking game. (The men who attempt to find a girlfriend in this manner are losers before they go into dancing clubs.) I did find, though, contrary to Egan's expectations of dancing girls that now and then one wanted to have a relationship with me outside the club. Dancing bars can be another way to meet men, and the dancers are human, after all, ---and want something more than the dancing life that after a few weeks becomes a deadly bore. This is especially true after the dancers have a child because then the young men who frequent such places want nothing more to do with them, as children are a hindrance to the fast life. (Of course, there are women who dance though they practice alternate sexualities, and of gay guys who dance on occasion cross-dressed.)
Men who want a relationship with a dancer do not even go about it as do Egan's subjects, by becoming pathetic regulars and throwing money at them. Egan did not pick up how it is done, even though she spent time in dancing clubs, and perhaps even some of the clubs I used to frequent in the past,---since it appears that she did graduate study in Boston, where she danced, I presume, and I live in Rhode Island. (If you want to know how it is done, you will have to read a book I have planned, once it is completed and published. Egan might wish to appeal to me for an explanation.)
I notice the women pictured on the paperback cover of Egan's book. I doubt that it is Egan. Whether it is or not, the women pictured on the book would not make much money in a dancing club, unless they are outright whores giving oral sex in the parking lot. The butt is too big on one, and the tits are too small on the other. Men who pay to go into titty bars want perfection, and the women pictured are not close to it.
My assertion is cruel, and as cruel as Egan's behavior to the men in the clubs. Their only fault was loneliness, losers or not. They turned to what they thought was a woman for solace, and were cruelly deceived. And they were generous with their money that Egan took from them. The men did not get solace from Egan who did not even give honest work for the money she took, but got it under false pretenses. She betrayed them as a sexual shill, since she did not return the money they gave her. She did not even identify herself as a researcher, and I believe it to be unethical and unprofessional. (She was not merely an observer, I will note, for which she would not have to announce her status, but a participant as dancer, and interacted with the men in the clubs.)
The fourth D is for Disgraceful. The book is a disgrace both to the exotic dancing community and the academic community. (St. Lawrence University, where Egan is an assistant professor, might want to reevaluate her works.) It is also a disgrace to Macmillan, the publisher. Greed makes whores of us all, even publishers, as strippers are hookers one dollar at a time and publishers can be whores one page at a time.
Now that I consider it, there is a fifth D and for Degenerate. The book is a ploy to exploit a subject thought to be prurient and defines the meaning of the word meretricious. The book is disgusting and evil because done deliberately. It is putrid. (A whore is defined as a woman who wants to get the most out of men while giving the least in return, and it explains Egan and her book.) To be degenerate means to be corrupt, wicked and perverted. Egan plays everyone for a fool, except possibly her editor at Macmillan, equally a reprobate if she encouraged the deception. Nor would her colleagues challenge her book because publication is an end in itself in the academy.
Ms the Professor R. Danielle Egan turns out to be a philosopher-whore.
*
I must explain my reason for reading Egan's book. It is not the genre I normally read. Some years ago, at an emotional juncture in my life, for about a year and a-half I went to exotic dancing bars on a regular basis. I wanted to know what they were about. I gained sensual insights about the women I met, and therefore of all women. I liked most of the dancing girls I talked to. I found them to be human beings with the same hopes and fears as others, once I approached them as a humane and liberal man, and not as a macho dog consumed with sexual fantasy, (though the dancers were happy to serve the sexual fantasies of the men). I then thought that I would write a personal memoir of my experiences. Therefore, I read some of the literature in the genre of the sex worker industry. I found the books I read to be rational and truthful, sexually charged in some instances, and pedestrian in others. Some of the authors of the books I read are highly intelligent, were educated and became accomplished in future years. In this way, I happened upon Egan's book, a catastrophe in every sense of the word, a distortion even of falsehood about the dancing life. So I wrote my review in reaction to her ideological and sensual idiocies.
Now I must leave my desk and get my hand sanitizer.
(TRC / 12-03-09)
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