G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire Paperback – December 5, 2002

Dr. Kate Frank sheds light on a much mis-understood subculture and and economy. More college text book than exciting prose, it should be (and probably is) required reading for anyone studying sexology or sex workers. Very interesting.

If you are buying this book to be aroused, you will be dissapointed. If you are buying it like a novel, you will be dissapointed. What this book really is, is a repackaging of a doctoral dissertation for the curious masses. What are you curious about? Well, how the "customer" of the gentlemen's club thinks, why he thinks it, and what it means. This book is not about the dancers or what they think, it is about the customers. It is a very well researched, fully annotated and footnoted and referenced. This is a research paper, a long one. The author took the subject matter seriously and spent a few years working the clubs she wrote about. Mind you, this was not homoerotic fantasy she was living. This was serious research. She did not hide the fact she was doing scientific research, taking notes, doing structured and semistructured interviews etc. This is a dense piece, full of interesting information and written more like a research dissertation than a book. So expect rather monotone, dense, bland reading, but expect lots of interesting intelligence on the world of its subject matter, with solid reference support.Final words. Now that I have warned you that this is not novel or erotic book (so look elswhere if that is what you are looking for, it was NOT what I was looking for), you may then put on your PhD psychologist/sociologist hat on and find some fault with the research methods employed. And well you should. There is bias and quasi-experimental method design and variant sample selection including straight up convenience sampling (which is just fine when used properly). But the thing is that is, it is still a book and not dissertation so I can't really get carried away can I?This book is notable most for the perspective it takes. It asks about the customer not the performer. That makes it more of an anthropological exploration, a social psychology expose as well as a sociology experiment.It is an interesting read, informative, and investigative. The cover picture is unfortunate for many potential readers I am afraid, cuz this aint a marital aid.

I've read a number of books dealing with this genre, but this was (by far) the most dry. It is extremely clinical, and reads more like a doctoral dissertation than a book. That's not to say that there weren't some interesting points made in the book, but you REALLY had to dig through the anthro jargon.Franks cites other source a lot -- more than any other book I've read. Nearly every paragrah refers to an exterior source. I found this a little distracting.Overall, I'm not sorry I read the book, but be prepared -- it does not wisk you along -- you really have to fight to glean Frank's points.

As a post-grad psych student who also works in clubs, I really had high hopes for this. The gist of this research is very interesting but the writing is absolutely horrendous, to the point where it takes away from the content. I wish I could’ve gotten through it but I had to stop after the first chapter, it really is repetitive. Almost 300 pages that could have been under 100 with better editing. 2 stars because there’s a solid analysis of types of customers, but none of this information will be new to you if you’re a dancer. It’s important to note that the author limits her research to clubs that do not offer lapdances. With this considered, I’m still not sure how she managed to write almost 300 pages on one extremely specific topic. A lot of time was spent referencing literature that just wasn’t relevant to her topic.

Good read. I enjoyed it thoroughly even though there was a lot of repeating...but it helped me gain insight on the industry.

Beneath the academic jargon and obfuscation in this book, there's a lot to like. The problem, however, is that jargon and obfuscation compose most of the book, making it hard to understand the many interesting insights that emerge from Frank's first person accounts.Take this as an example: Frank cites David Harvey saying that "Spatial and temporal practices can thus 'appear as "realized myth" and so become an essential ideological ingredient to social reproduction'" (58–59), which essentially means that the things people do and when people do them form culture. But that would be too easy to understand to be a valid academic formulation, when we can use words like "practices" and "ideological" in place of "culture" and "cultural." Frank also seems surprised, or faux surprised, that different strip clubs specialize in different things.The obvious gets its due: "All of the men I interviewed noted that the interactive nature of the encounters they had at strip clubs was a significant pleasurable part of the experience." If it wasn't pleasurable they presumably wouldn't go. Each problem on its own is minor. Taken together, they make the book not really worth reading—or, to use its own language, "interrogating."