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A dozen or so middle-aged men are sprinkled around the stage, drinking beer and watching a tall redhead dance. Sequins flash off her G-string as she thrusts her hips next to the metal pole. She approaches a man at one end of the stage and squats down to talk to him, bending her long, tanned legs and balancing on her stiletto heels. I can't hear their conversation over the din of thumping techno music, but I see her smile as he slides a bill into the black garter around her thigh.

She glances my way and studies me with no expression. I understand her curiosity. Women are rare in the audience of clubs like this. After another moment, she pivots on her high heels and turns away, moving on to the next man and the next dollar.

Like a magician watching a colleague perform, I know where the rabbit comes from. I've been on that stage and it's hard for me to watch without imagining her thoughts.

It's been almost four years since I worked my last late shift as a stripper, and I've come back, this time as an observer, to see if things have changed, to take a closer look at the strip scene, and gain a better understanding of what drew me, a "good" girl from a solid, middle-class family, a college grad, a feminist and veteran of several women's studies classes, to go onstage and take my clothes off for money.

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I wasn't the only one. Just as I began dancing in 1993, a wave of media coverage discovered a new brand of exotic dancer, coeds like me, who were stripping their way through college. Articles ran in magazines like Glamour, Swing, Mademoiselle and Cosmopolitan. Books appeared, including one titled "Ivy League Stripper" by Brown University student Heidi Mattson, who began topless dancing when her financial aid was pulled in 1990. Celebrities such as Courtney Love and members of the band Bikini Kill confessed to former lives as strippers.

The new wave of dancers borrowed heavily from riot grrrl ideology, a manifestation of feminism that grew out of the Seattle grunge movement in the last decade. So-called riot grrrls encouraged women to break stereotypes and support each other regardless of what they choose to do -- including working in the sex industry. Spin magazine even listed strippers alongside witches and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" as manifestations of Girl Culture.

Today's strippers justify dancing topless as a validation of their bodies and their sexuality, a way to turn the tables on a sexist society and get paid handsomely for it. Spin wrote that, by "turning men into human ATM machines," stripping had become the ultimate act of feminism.

Such theoretical musings about the motivation of the modern stripper fade quickly in the smoke and dim light of Vision's, the Madison area's only strip club. Men in Green Bay Packers T-shirts sit at the bar, checking the TV sets for the latest score, or at the stage feeding singles (this is Wisconsin, after all) to their favorite dancers. The dancers stroll around the club in sequined bikinis or lacy dresses so short that the top of their lace stockings peek out under them. It is shockingly politically incorrect to the uninitiated, and yet so routine, it quickly becomes mundane.

Downstairs, the dressing room is a teenage male's fantasy movie. Women lounge in various states of undress, talking, laughing and smoking the occasional cigarette. Except for the bare skin, there is a leisurely sense of sorority that's broken only when a dancer loses track of time and rushes into her costume, exclaiming, "Shit, I'm late."

The dancers at Visions are healthy, small-town girls. The stereotype of drug-addled, emotionally crippled women making money for their next fix doesn't apply here. There is "Amber," a girl-next-door blond who attends college in northern Wisconsin; "Monique," a stunning African-American who tells me she has a day job but works here on weekends to support her son; and "Sara," the redhead from onstage. No dancer gives me her real name; they don't even want me to use their stage names, but they are candid and likable. When Sara tells me she recently received her master's degree in art, I'm not surprised; she is smart, articulate and funny.

Next page | "Exploitative? What does that mean?"