Excerpt from my book, to print this fall

"The Patriarchy has always loved enjoying the female body. But not as much as men love CONTROLLING the female body. 
When it comes to the gaze of it especially. 
Forbidden sights of skin may tantalize, but nothing is as arousing as control over female and femme presenting bodies, and it is proven time and time again through out history. Historians and literature often discuss the struggles of fashionably brave women, showgirls, & sex workers with glazed over eyes and soft voices, easily digested and forgotten. But never has it actually included sex workers voices. History loves its hushed whispers over the struggle of covering the nipple, the ankles, debatable origin of the Mirkin or pasties, the stigma of women who profit off of a bump or grind, but never was the voice of the women themselves there. Never were the infamous & scandalous women included in the conversation when villainized or romanticized by history or literature alike. But what do I know, I’m just a stripper…

From current Blue Laws to morality measurements of fabric length, the tale is as old as time; We love the female form, we love consuming it, but society loves to restrict and censor it even more. And it has proven profitable, but how dare women themselves profit off of a system of forbidden fruit created by the very patriarchy who designed the demand that we could supply. 

So are we sensually confident women born wicked? Or is wickedness thrust upon us….but by La Censurer of our flesh? This was a phrase I have repeated in my best Christen Chenoweth impersonation throughout my very undraped career of over a decade of making money naked and glitter dumped. Though the more I became more intimate with the laws around my body in the lights of various champagne splashed venues, the more my tone turned from its lightheartedness. 
 Burlesque & traditional Sex Work careers such as stripclub work share a very intimate, saucey and deeply interwoven history. These sexy creative fields & the history of policing women's bodies are all too close, like an opulently sumptuous Orgy, where onlookers can not see where one begins and the other ends. However only those who are truly in the thick of it all, really experience its truth. When the giggling ceases we can dive into the velvet wrapped, rhinestoned and leather strapped history of Policing women's bodies.

Women are not perfect myths. Women are complex. The public eyes relationship to our bodies is even more complex. That could be what makes us so dangerous. So we must be wicked, we must be perceived as wicked in press, literature, oral storytelling and generally in society, as the downfall of man if we do not fit the perfect myths. If she cannot be tamed she must be an evil beast, a villain, for the crime of having flesh and existing. 
While Aphrodite may drape in sheer dressage of moonlight freely, real women can not, may not, lest she be wicked, unless we are moldable as the avatars of male success through control of our "morality" in modesty. 

It's time to diversify the narrative. Let the history not be just a bastion of white male scholars."

-Policing Muses:
 History with Pasties & Mirkins
By Lady Mekaella