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ETA: NOTE TO POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS AND MY PARENTS: No, I was not participating! Read the footnotes, geeze. It just HAPPENED TO BE amateur night.

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I have mentioned before that African American women love my hair. Just yesterday I was walking down the Infinite Corridor and was informed by a young black woman (she looked about junior high age): “Man, that makes you HOT.” Something along those lines, anyway. I remember thinking that I don’t understand how the kids talk these days, although it seemed generally positive.

At any rate, I have identified another group with a special appreciation for my hair: exotic dancers.*

Proportionally, exotic dancers seem to love my hair even more than African American women. I see a lot of the latter in any given day and only a small number of them say anything about my hair. Of course, I recognize that dancers are working for tips. They also got to see my hair under a black light, a condition in which it is particularly striking.** Unfortunately, I suspect I will never be able to conduct a truly controlled study to determine, for good and all, who likes my hair BEST. But I will say, over half the professional dancers I encountered last week were very enthusiastic about it.

The amateurs, not so much. An interesting difference between professional dancers and the women who participate in amateur night is that the former see a group of women and make a beeline for them, whereas the latter LITERALLY cannot be paid to come close.

Another thing that dancers like (in addition to my hair, the nominal topic of this post in case you lost track) is $2 bills. Another member of my party knew this and came prepared. I realize that $2 bills are worth twice as much as $1 bills, so they’ve got that going for them, but dancers seem to love them far out of proportion to their doubled economic value. One woman told us that they are lucky, which I of course found subculturally fascinating.*** Another woman told us that she gives them to her daughter, a fact that I suspect she would never have disclosed to a group of men–that’s not what they’re buying.

At one point, I was in the bathroom and heard two women discussing how “there’s nothing like a strip club to make you feel bad about your body, god, I need to do some crunches!”

Huh, I thought. You’d think amateur night would be more of a consolation than that.

I mean, no, I do not think I am as hot as the PROFESSIONAL dancers,**** especially not the one who was double-jointed and could cross her ankles behind her head. But this is kind of like acknowledging that I could not take an Army Ranger in a fight. They’re PROFESSIONALS and they’ve dedicated way more time to their pursuit of choice (being smoking hot, killing people with spoons) than I am willing to put in, so it’s not like there’s any SHAME in it.

Anyway, I have my hair. Even the dancers are impressed.

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*My information from a friend of mine who worked for several years in the profession, as well as what I gleaned from that Lerum 2001 article I read for the social psych prelim, suggests that dancers do not like being referred to as “strippers.” I have to agree that the term eclipses a truly impressive degree of athletic skill, not to mention various other professional competencies that most people probably don’t think of when they hear “stripper.”

****But I am totally as hot as the amateurs. The main difference between us, I would venture, is that I recognize the fact that I lack the necessary social skills for success in exotic dancing. Nudity? No problem. Making nice to strangers? Not so much. Also, I saw one of the amateurs almost fall off the pole while hanging upside down. I try to avoid any job that entails the risk of cracking my skull open, naked or clothed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 11:03 pm and is filed under hair, gender, sociology, musings, experimental hair, academia, ethnomethodology, mundane happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.