An evening with the Chippendales
The auditorium is dark. On the stage, gold spotlights shaped like stars dance across the black boards and velvet curtains, while around me hundreds of women are stamping, whistling and shouting at the prospect of naked male flesh. When the curtain finally goes up at Zirkus Krone, eight muscle-bound Chippendales dressed all in black, huge Stetsons pulled low over their eyes, fan out across the stage, stomping and grinding to a throbbing techno soundtrack. The whistling and shouting reaches a crescendo as the men start to undress. After perhaps five minutes they are stripped down to their G-strings. The noise from the audience has reached an ear-splitting pitch and the atmosphere is electric. Why then, with all this frenetic excitement around me, am I sitting here as if turned to stone, watching with dismal detachment while a group of undeniably attractive men take their clothes off for us? I take a careful look around at my fellow, female voyeurs and, though the bottle blonde, bleached denim and leopard skin brigade are out in force, so is the plainer, duller middle management/mother fraternity of which I am one. Clearly, I am sitting here among my peers. So that can’t be the problem.In the meantime we have been treated to a raunchy monologue (in English) by a long-haired Californian, and now Greg or Clark or one of his friends is writhing around on top of a big white box that could be a washing machine—certainly the shirt laid across his abdomen is whiter than white. Hmm… washing machine plus sexy, nearly naked man…no, definitely not a turn on for me. Deafening applause, however, from the other ladies, followed by another group dance routine and (almost) striptease. Now I’m starting to feel grouchy. The boys on stage can’t seem to manage a properly synchronized dance routine. I doubt whether any are even professional dancers as I watch them lumber about the stage between numbers. If this were The Full Monty with a lot of hapless amateurs, it would be cute, but here the attitude is one of don’t-give-a-damn—pretty steep considering that the cheapest seats cost around € 40.
The next number involves a member of the audience. A tall blonde Heidi in a modern dirndl is hauled, half willingly, onto the stage and made to sit on a chair while the Chippendales disrobe before her, stopping now and again to sit on her lap in case she hasn’t noticed what is going on. She grins and giggles, definitely a good sport. I shift around on the hard wooden bench that passes for a seat and wonder how soon I can leave without feeling embarassed.
The problem, of course, is that a male stripper is strutting his stuff with no cultural references or tradition to give him support. The British essayist and novelist Angela Carter recording her thoughts on male pornography in the mid-1970s wrote, “There is a specific vocabulary of gestures and attitudes of sexual expression available for women in relation to men that does not exist for men in relation to women.” The naked female, whether she is a model for a painting, a stripper or a porn star, has centuries of previous examples to fall back on. A woman offering her body either implicitly or explicitly can, whether we like it or not, be certain to find approval. A naked man presenting himself for a woman to enjoy has no such advantages. In the history of art the male nude generally has one of two functions: either to show off the fine physique of a conquering hero such as Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa, or as the object of homosexual desire, as with Donatello’s David.
Sitting up with the Gods, looking down at 12 shiny, shaved bodies prancing around the stage, I think of Angela Carter and wonder if, almost 30 years on, a tradition is gradually being established which would explain why this show is a sell-out and everybody is having a good time (except me). Certainly the boys are getting into their stride now; there is plenty of lewd movement and crotch grabbing going on out there and again it’s probably just me who thinks it all looks a bit artificial. I do manage four minutes of fun, however, when Gerri Halliwell belts out her version of “It’s Raining Men” via the sound-system and the urge to get up and bop with the others overcomes even diehard skeptics like me.
After the interval and another couple of mindless strip numbers, plus a romantic crooner singing a very loud but dreary love song, I decide to leave. Squeezing past a woman to reach the aisle, she asks me, without taking her eyes off the stage, whether I’m not enjoying myself. “Look,” she says gesturing at the men “they’re having such a good time. You can really see it.” No new tradition then, just women happy to see men having fun, except that now we’re paying money for it.
