The place for live nude entrepreneurs.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA– When dancers at San Francisco’s Lusty Lady turned the exotic club into an egalitarian co-op, they found it tough to reconcile their lofty ideals with the aesthetic realities of the sex trade.

One of the first things the dancers did was to toss out rules about maintaining the same body type as the day they were hired, and ones regarding height-weight proportion. A list of acceptable hair colors was scrapped, along with a policy regulating the quantity and location of tattoos.

Now, larger dancers and those who might not be stereotypically “pretty” are welcome on the Lusty stage, but this emphasis on inclusion has brought difficulties for the 60 or so dancer-owners.

It all seemed so simple when they bought the dive.

Lilah Mayhem is pale with long dark hair and a thin frame, while Cinnamon Rose has shorter, red-streaked hair and a darker complexion. Wendy works the stage in striped pink knee socks and glasses, while another dancer wears old wedge sandals and a cheerfully curling brown wig. Many sport multiple piercings and tattoos.

After buying the club for $400,000 in 2003, the next step was to put themselves through guerilla business school.

The Lusties, as they call themselves, enlisted the help of other local co-ops such as Rainbow Grocery and Good Vibrations, a local female-run sex-toy shop.

They learned the ins and outs of running a collective business and hammered out articles of incorporation within days.

That's better.

All new proposals, from bylaw modifications down to buying new carpets, would need approval from general co-op membership and the board of directors. Every worker, whether support staff or performer, had the right to submit a proposal, and decisions would be made by majority vote via paper ballot.

But the theater’s mission statement, which seeks to break down hierarchy, made the creation and enforcement of managerial policies difficult.

“It’s hard, because we’d elect people to enforce our performance standards, but we hadn’t yet decided on what those are,” said former dancer Lili Marlene, who was involved in the transition. “Hygiene rules are easier.”

Dancers learned how to take disciplinary action against each other via new policies such as peer-based performance reviews. Each week performers evaluate their onstage colleagues, considering general appearances, customer interaction, and levels of eye contact.

The first years of self-governance were the most difficult.

“On a good day, it’s like Peter Pan,” said Lili Marlene. “On a bad day, it was like Lord of the Flies. We can do whatever we want, and there’s nobody to tell us what to do.”

Courtesy of Reuters

Angie Pontani, courtesy angiepontani.com

After her dancing, Weirdie Girl takes the jewel-box stage as a despondent beauty pageant contestant. Her sash reads “Miss Understood.” Slowly working her way out of a red ball gown, she reveals a beaded bikini and another sash across her chest, this time with the words, “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

The Slipper Room opened in the mid-1990s, amid a burlesque revival in New York that began at loft parties and underground clubs. Many dismissed it as a passing nightlife fad — another reaction to the crackdown on adult entertainment by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. But the audience for burlesque has continued to grow steadily over the past decade.

Back on stage, Weirdie Girl is finally crowned “Miss America” and pulls out a knife, smearing what looks like blood across her bare midriff. She’s practically naked, but this is social commentary.

Don’t Call It Striptease

Sara Angevine, a graduate student at Rutgers University, came to the Slipper Room for a birthday party. She says she has seen her share of drag shows and adult entertainment, but none were like this.

“I don’t think it’s the same as any type of, like, normal strip show,” Angevine says. “It’s celebrating women’s sexuality and their bodies in a way that I think gives them a lot of ownership.”

Whatever you think about the potential for female empowerment through burlesque, the context for it has changed radically since the 1940s. Back then, it was like vaudeville’s red-headed stepchild, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia unceremoniously shut down Times Square clubs.

“Most men were showing up to watch it mainly because this was their big chance to see a naked woman,” says Michael Musto, who frequently writes about burlesque for his column in the Village Voice.

“There weren’t a lot of opportunities to see naked bodies at that time, except in very covert places,” Musto says, based on his research. “Nowadays, of course, you could find some peep show — whatever’s left in New York — or just turn on your computer and you have access to all kinds of nudity. So I think the people that go to burlesque now are not just getting their ya-ya’s off. They’re enjoying it really as an entertainment.”

It Takes All Kinds

The Pontani Sisters

Angie Pontani started her career on the Coney Island boardwalk, where they still have rough-and-ready weekly burlesque shows.

“I trained in dancing from about 4 years old,” Pontani says. “Then as I got older … I studied pointe and I studied some Martha Graham and some modern, which was absolutely not for me at all.”

So today, Pontani co-produces the New York Burlesque Festival — which this weekend reclaims Times Square, where feather boas reigned decades ago. More than a hundred people will perform, some traveling from as far away as Sweden and Japan.

In New York, aspiring festival participants — women and the occasional man — can learn the craft at the New York School of Burlesque.

Jo Boobs — not her real name (that’s Jo Weldon) — is the school’s headmistress. Much of the time, her class doesn’t feel especially different from a dance or theater workshop — except for the fact that everyone is wearing 4-inch heels. But there’s more here than mascara and body glitter: a spirit typical of burlesque — acceptance.

“I get really excited,” Boobs says, “when I’m working with someone who’s been through a major trauma or is disabled. I’ve had a private class with a woman who had a double mastectomy and taught her to twirl tassels.”

As she explained to one of her classes, Boobs has learned to reconcile burlesque’s past with its more liberated present.

“What’s really radical about burlesque is taking a form that represents an era that was extremely oppressive to women and honors their art form, which was left behind,” Boobs says.

With a revival that’s been going strong for 10 years, it’s not behind them anymore. You might say it’s all up front.

Courtesy NPR.org: Radio, United States

Teese adjusts her wonderbra

The 37-year-old, who signed with Wonderbra last year, poses in a black bra and matching undies while she applies bright red lipstick in one ad for the new “Sparkle Teese” line.

And the model, actress and burlesque star fastens a bra in another while seductively staring into a mirror.

Styles include the Multi Teese Party Edition bra and thong set, which features elegant velvet straps, bow detail and sequins, according to the Daily Mail.

There’s also a red and black set that comes high on the waist and boasts suspenders, a black lace bra and knicker set, and a red and black lace cleavage-enhancing bra for ladies who aren’t as endowed as Von Teese in that area.

Courtesy NYDailyNews.com

More Dita

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Dita Von Teese Bags a Count
Dita Von Teese Upset Presidents Can’t Visit All Nude Strip Clubs Anymore
Dita Gets Back on the Horse
Dita Von Teese: I Was a Teenage Stripper
St. Dita Von Teese’s Science of Sexy
Dita Von Teese’s Naked Ambition

We know what our readers like...

She was starring in the Gentry De Paris show in the French capital and put in a typically raunchy performance.

Wearing trademark nipple tassels and not much else, Dita strutted her stuff in front of a black curtain with a pair of arms reaching out from behind.

Dita recently revealed she’s in constant fear her tassles will slip during shows.

That’s why she takes extreme measures to prevent an overload of titillation.

She explained: “I use serious waterproof glue, because I’m in a martini glass.

“Crystals are heavy and there’s a lot going on.”

Courtesy of The Sun UK

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One man’s Paradies (Mr Mosley?) might be another man’s 9th circle of Hell, but German tabloid Bild is not only here to judge.

At 3.30am:

Six young women dressed in sexy underwear strode on to the club’s stage while a compere got the male half of the audience worked up, shouting: “Welcome to the orgy in Paradies! Who wants some? Who wants to come on stage?”

Who wants some? The Germans are more like us than we’d feared.

Hands shoot up. Six men are chosen. Condoms are administered and on the command “Und Zer Off”, six Helmuts colonise a small sweaty unhygienic region of Spain.

Says one German stage diver: “I wanted to try something new, but my one bit me. It was painful rather than pleasurable…”

But the best part of the report is the challenge laid down by the German tabloid:

The orgy left the Brits – infamous for drunkenness and violence at holiday resorts across Europe – floundering in the bad behaviour stakes.

One could argue that this is a stereotypical and arcane image, perhaps one encouraged by the notion that Europeans owe the British a debt of thanks – if that means mopping up their vomit and other excretions, then so be it – and that the Germans are to be forever apologetic.

You can have the sunloungers, but the rest of the country remains free.

But looking back would be to fall into an easy trap. The Germans have moved on and no longer export their brand of officialdom to collaborating continentals:

Says a police spokesman: “The nightclub’s license does not cover sex parties, for that the owners need a pornography license. We will investigate it with our special department.”

The Mallorca police force has an orgy department. And they should do some checking because the Paradies club bills itself as: “Where anything goes – Where anything is allowed.”

Nights include: “Sex Angels Night”, “Erotica Night” and “University of Sex Night”. Pictures of the “dancers” brings to mind East European prostitutes and itching.

As they say in Germany: “If you can’t beat zer Britisher tabloids, join zem…”

Courtesy Anorak.co.uk

Satisfied after a hearty meal of pigeon

Carmen, who will be starring in the show for six nights, attracted the audience by donning high heels, stockings and suspenders while cavorting on a sofa shaped like a giant pair of lips. Her second routine, called Chain Gang, saw the Playboy pin-up caged like a wild animal and sent temperatures soaring by revealing one boob with a tassel covering her modesty.

The brunette beauty is not the only ‘Baywatch’ star to perform at the famous burlesque club. Pamela Anderson appeared at the original saloon in Paris last year, performing a steamy striptease involving a sheer black body stocking and a motorcycle. Burlesque star Dita Von Teese has also performed at the Paris club.

Courtesy OneIndia.in: India

Even we're speechless.

I’m going to leave off the sender’s name and reprint the entire email below so you can enjoy it as much as I did. Now the funny thing about this protest is that the gentleman has clearly scrutinized our website and reviewed the photo archive to draw his conclusions. Also, at the end of his tirade he uses deviant sexual terms so obscure that I had to consult wikipedia to figure out what he was saying (a “hot Carl???”). (Video of these competitions after the jump.)

My take, I think his moral high-horse veneer is hiding a secret naughty life or at least secret naughty life aspirations. When you come out of whatever closet you are in, sir, we are happy to have you as a contestant in the 2010 tour. Until then, keep on fantasizing. Fantasies are what our black-president-electing, first-amendment-thumping nation was founded upon. When the fantasies have been destroyed, then the communists truly have won. God bless America. God bless air sex.

The email, in its entirety:

Now, I’m glad my grandmother passed away a few years ago; knowing something SO stupid, like Air Sex, exists would’ve killed her anyway. Groups/events like this are one of the many reasons that America is as screwed up and politically divided as it has ever been. Thanks again for taking advantage of an exceptionally written document (The Constitution Of the United States of America) and increasing the gap. People like you have no traditional values and, with the help of many other moronic groups/ideas, continue to build a force that grinds our ‘ever shrinking’ common sense closer to nothing. You have none, that’s a fact that you can’t argue. You got caught jerking off (probably in an embarrassing way), is that how you ‘spawned’ the idea?

Where would you place your dignity, or our dignity as a Nation? A culture? A community or a race? And spare me a parrot’s response like: “well, we have our Nation’s 1st black president.” Now I know you’re struggling for the next cookie-cutter response like: “We’re only exercising our 1st Amendment right.” Well, so am I: “what a stupid idea and you suck.”

Is it a coincidence that the internally & externally ugly ‘contestants’ on your show have to have sex with air? No, they’re losers and so are you. Take your stupidity on the Letterman show loser. Why don’t you have your grandparents get up there and show how your mommy and daddy got here? What’s next, an Air Dirty Sanchez or an Air Hot Carl show? I’ve wasted too much time with your stupidity, I’m late for my Air Dutch Oven audition.

Courtesy of Air Sex Blog

“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” gets the treatment, too. But why the nurse? Well, wheelchair-bound Courtney has broken her leg skiing and needs constant looking after. But it turns out Virginia has her own thoughts of stardom and can grab a mike, apply gratuitous anaesthetic to her patient and belt out a tune of her own.

The night is full of show routines, parodies and gags. Icons Madonna and Britney come in for some strong treatment early on, with song lyrics heavily re-written to include slagging references to African babies . A tiny Sonny Bono returns from the grave to gaze up at a very substantial Cher: “So put your great big hand in mine, you’re like some great flesh mountain I can climb.”

A pair of evangelising Southern trannies-for-Jesus burst onto the stage to implore us to “pray the gay away”(of course Courtney has made a miraculous recovery from her broken leg by now). They take it even further: “Let your souls go to glory, not to the glory hole”.

But how do they make the transition from glamour queen to proselytising mayhem? The live show is broken up with parodies of a diverse range of films, including Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, Notes on a Scandal, The Devil Wears Prada, Beaches and Australia.

Bob Downe makes a guest appearance in one of these, and much of it is original and smart, for which writer Phil Scott should be congratulated.

Perhaps the best moments of the show come when the serious angle of relationships is explored and the three girls harmonise a straight version of Joe Jackson’s Real Men. “Brilliant,” said one member of the audience in perfect timing between the dying of the last vocal notes and the eruption of applause that crowned the evening.

Courtesy Independent Weekly: Australia

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For Marilyn Manson's ex... is this trading up or down?

And so it has come to pass that our heroine has completed her epic journey from the bed of the self-styled “god of f**k” (ex-husband Marilyn Manson) to the arm of the count of a castle. Or to be more specific, Count Louis Marie De Castelbajac. The dashing Frenchman, who is young and handsome and titled, was recently seen gallantly lifting the rather large suitcases belonging to Mademoiselle Von Teese into the back of his car. Not a bad bag for the girl from Michigan.

Ignoring small-minded accusations that she is robbing the cradle, Dita was later seen defiantly dining out in a Parisian patisserie with the floppy-haired aristo. He’s only 25 to her 36, but what he lacks in experience, presumably he makes up for in elegance and social standing. Not only that, he’s the son of fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. This then, must be the man who can satisfy all of Dita’s girlhood dreams in one foppish package: high society, sex and stunning couture. And perhaps, unlike Manson, this one might manage to keep his hands out of her make-up bag.

Courtesy the Independent: Ireland

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Dita Von Teese’s Naked Ambition