Can a Stripper Make Me Happy? I Mean Really, Truly, Happy?

On the one hand, I want to see them do their thing. Millions of years of primate and human evolution have left me with this purely animal curiosity.

On the other hand, it doesn't feel quite decent. Several hundred years of Protestant morailty have embedded a deep if somewhat ambivalent strain of not-feeling-quite-proper about getting a close look at the mammal reality of my fellow human beings.

These opposing forces, like gravity or magnetism, are profoundly built into my personality, deep like buried gravel but potent, like the waters that bubble forth.

I happened to be in San Francisco the other night. Experts consider San Francisco to be the birthplace of the modern strip club, so, as a journalist, I didn't think I could spend a night there without at least having a look. Just to see where things stand now, so to speak.

I didn't catch her name, but the first stripper I saw didn't really have much to strip when she started out. She had some interesting pole moves but only if you looked at it as a voyeur who had plopped down the $15 cover charge.

As a dancer, she was nothing special. Yet she overcame that by toying with her skimpy garments and tossing them playfully to the stage. The whole thing was kind of athletic and a little sexy, but I found myself wondering why people are willing to pay $15 to watch someone slide around on the floor making intimate but ultimately anonymous revelations. There could be no true dialogue between us, and so the relationship suffered and could not last.

Even though the entertainment value was almost completely a matter of being in a position to watch a naked young woman cavort in front of strangers, I found it oddly satisfying, though of dubious value to my own continuing development as a human being.

For my next experiment, I entered the "private room", after carefully evaluating the guidelines posted on the wall outside. It was actually a challenge to concentrate on the rules because a young woman in pink underwear beckoned at me through a large window, something like the reptile display at the Sacramento Zoo. To see her in private, I had only to enter the red door.

Once inside, I briefly negotiated terms with the window's occupant, who promised to make me happy for a modest fee. She herself was anything but modest. In fact her pink underwear was soon coiled on the floor while I was noticing the sign suggesting that I "clean up after myself".

It's not my style to mess up other people's furniture, so I maintained control as the girl slid around on the floor in much the same way as the stage act I had witnessed only moments before had.

Again, even in private, I found I had difficulty establishing the true give-and-take which any relationship needs.

She asked several times what it would take to make me happy. I found myself at a loss for words. What would, in fact, make me happy?

Sometimes a few quiet words and a walk on the beach can give me a fleeting sense of happiness, and other times the same combination leaves me with the ineffable sadness of a large beast of prey, who must kill to survive.

Had anyone else asked what was required to give me happiness I would have shrugged and mumbled something meaningless about a sense of worth, of doing important things. Yet at that moment there was something critically interesting about the girl who had lost her pink underwear. I must compliment her on the vivid way she could beautify a rather stark cubicle in a dingy and sordid establishment.

But make me happy? Not where so many others had failed. Not even by allowing me to inspect her most dainty secrets. There's more to it than that.