Parts of this article are fascinating: Context really is everything and it gets played with so often and with so many different purposes. This kind of reminds me of Small Dog Syndrome (I'm not calling strippers bitches), where a small dog does something and it's seen as cute, while if a large dog did the same thing, it might be viewed as annoying or intrusive. This passage makes it a lot easier to see why Buddhists strive not to have attachments. There's a whole lot of potential suffering (and joy) to be found navigating those concepts.The clubs are so stratified — ranging from high-end gentleman’s clubs to smaller neighborhood bars or red-light district venues — and the men choose where they go because of the meanings that those differences already had for them. Men came in with so many preexisting beliefs about what women were like in each club that I didn’t feel like I had control. Even if you tried to dress like a biker chick in an upper-tier club, the guys would think, Isn’t that cute, this nice girl is pretending she’s a biker chick. Or a really thin girl: In the upper-tier club they’d say, “Oh, look, a ballet dancer.” The same girl in the lower-tier club they’d be like, “She must be a heroin addict.”
For the men who said that they were in love with their wives and wanted to stay married, what happened in the clubs was transgressive and real enough to be exciting, but was still a fantasy. In the chapter “The Crowded Bedroom,” I really wanted to question the whole idea of true intimacy. What does that even mean? Lots of couples hide things from each other, from negative everyday thoughts to really serious sexual or emotional entanglements with other people. My current research project is actually looking into this more in depth — the whole relationship between secrecy, intimacy, sexual exclusivity and marriage.