... Matt Jarrett takes off his clothes for a living. He has a girlfriend, but he spends most of his professional hours watching other women watch him as he dances and strips down to a blue-and-white thong at bachelorette and birthday parties. He has a favorite move quite popular with audiences -- "I like to call it my patented Matt Jarrett move," he says -- in which, with the guest of honor seated on a straight-back chair, he performs a handstand on the front edge of the chair, his
exposed buttocks facing all of the female partyers except the honoree, who receives the closest view of the inverted Matt Jarrett and the front of his thong, which would be about six inches from her face. He is the rare male stripper who
then breaks into handstand pushups, up and down, up and down, all that motion prompting ecstatic screams. "They get pretty wild for that one," he says.
One recent night found him at a crowded club in Cherry Hill, N.J., scheduled to work two bachelorette parties, beginning at 10 o'clock. The first was for a bachelorette who had no idea her friends had hired a stripper. Jarrett appeared out of nowhere in a tuxedo, just staring for a moment at the woman, who had been led by her friends to a straight-back chair in the center of the club's dance floor. Then he began slowly shedding and flinging clothes to a mix of recorded disco and hip-hop. The woman grinned and covered her mouth with her hands as he rubbed up against her.
"Oh, gosh, oh, gosh," she exclaimed, shock fusing with pleasure. Jarrett performed his handstand while at least 50 diners and bar patrons, mostly women, rushed from the other side of the club to have a look. A cacophony of squeals followed. A few upstaged males insolently shook heads or feigned indifference by staring at a baseball game on club TVs. A second bachelorette, whose friends had not thought of hiring a stripper, dared to rush onto the dance floor, wearing a veil on her head and a glow of happy lust on her face, patting Jarrett on his bottom, doing it again, and again, finally turning to grin in satisfaction at her friends. This unanticipated bachelorette, raven hair askew and carrying a drink wherever she went, periodically accosted him for the next hour, until her friends, recognizing her hunger, finally huddled and hired Jarrett on the spot. Near the end of the private shows he invited the partyers to demonstrate their pleasure by placing tips in his thong and most of the women eagerly did this, though with an unmistakable restraint in nearly every case, tucking in the bills the way somebody puts an item into a shredder, quickly and carefully, so as not to get fingers caught in anything dangerous. He thought that moment told the story of his appeal: Hiring him is a chance for a woman to feel like she is being daring,
a little naughty, in an atmosphere where no one can stop her. Maybe she just needs to feel she has experienced the forbidden by staring at a nearly naked man not her husband or boyfriend. Among everything else, he sells illusion with
his body.
At 29, having been a male stripper for seven years now, he has seen so many women ogling him that he has come to believe that men and women react differently to the sight of strippers. His company, Amazingdancers.com, employs
female strippers, too, and he has watched enough of his girlfriend's shows to know that male spectators have a different attitude and manner than most of the women watching him. Men tend to be quiet, even a little grim, watching a
performance, hollering "Yeah" sometimes, but mostly just wanting her to get on with it, the difference between a slow, artistic striptease and a swiftly crude one meaning nothing to them. "Actually, they'd have a woman come out of the
dressing room completely naked if they had their way," he says.
The vast majority of women have no interest in seeing everything. Sometimes, floating on their happiness and alcohol, a couple of women in a group will cry, "Take it off, take it all off," and he will answer agreeably, "Really? Everything off?" But, in the same second, they will answer with alarm, "No, no, no, no . . ."
It makes him think that the marketing of nudity over the last century has so concentrated on the female form and so linked it with sex, that men going into strip clubs like these want only full nudity -- while women still are conflicted
over the propriety of checking out the male body. This means something else for him and his girlfriend, he thinks. "Male strippers are kind of put on a pedestal," he says, meaning men are regarded by a fair amount of women and even some men not just as eye candy, but as fit performers with an exotic skill. "Women strippers are just strippers; they're just people who take off their clothes for men. They don't get nearly the same respect." He had finished his Cherry Hill performances and now he sat after midnight in a nearby diner, eating a slice of pizza, before heading off to his last show of the night. His cell phone rang. It was his girlfriend saying hi, checking on his schedule. "Got one more, got one more," he said. She said something on the other end, and he laughed knowingly, mumbling, "Yeah, always one more." The calls from those who dream of a flirtation with the forbidden never stop coming.
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http://www.scribd.com/doc/11324196/I-See-Naked-People
