Live (Nearly) Nude Girls

Dance Naked: A Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Hottie
by Jessica Kayla Conrad

There's good news and there's good news. The first is that just about every gorgeous stripper out there has some cellulite. The second is that every woman, no matter what shape, size, color, or age, has the potential for that seemingly effortless swagger that strippers pull off so beautifully.

In this joyful, funny, down-to-earth guide, professional stripper Jessica "Kayla" Conrad demystifies that je ne sais quoi that makes strippers so outrageously hot. It's all about creatively sidestepping your insecurities. From the magic of self-tanner to the all-important naming of the new you, this one-of-a-kind sourcebook arms you with a repertoire of easy, effective tricks for becoming bootylicious.

Whether you're getting your groove on alone in your living room, trying to kick your love life up a notch, or just wondering what it's like to feel as sexy as Britney Spears, Dance Naked is the only book you'll need.

Chapter 1

Most people think that strippers are hot because they have perfect, surgically created cookie-cutter bodies. The fact is that dancers, like “real” women, come in all shapes and sizes: top-heavy, bottom-heavy, top- and bottom-heavy, muscular, toned, and even doughy. Some strippers' faces are beautiful, some cute, and some have the same random noses or recessive chins that other women have. Most are tan, some are pale. Some have long hair, some short. All but the smallest minority have cellulite and stretch marks somewhere on their bodies. If strippers are so much like ordinary women, then, why does everyone think they're so hot?

The truth is, what really makes a stripper hot is simply her willingness to get naked for you. It's that spark, that moment of utter abandon when a stripper begins her dance, that makes her absolutely, smoking hot. Contained within that spark, that instant, is a sense of complete self-confidence and self-possession. A total owning of her sexuality and power that says, Sit back, Sparky, Mama's taking you for a ride.

So why is it that some women, like strippers, are totally okay letting complete strangers see them nearly naked, while the rest of us cringe at the thought? Where does a stripper's self-confidence come from?

This one's easy: A dancer's self-confidence comes from having a deep level of comfort with her body that ordinary women don't have. The real question is, why don't ordinary women have the same deep level of comfort with their bodies that dancers do?

To really understand how some stripping experience boosts your self-confidence, you really have to understand that strippers are strictly a product of their environment. Dancers are made, not born. No woman has ever decided to dance because she was so painfully hot that she felt duty-bound to show it to any man willing to pay a small fee. No woman has ever become a dancer because she was just too sexy or smokin' to do anything else. Dancers are comfortable being seen naked because for us it's the norm. We're a product of our culture, just like you.

Culture Club

In a way it's a good thing that most of us don't like to be seen naked, because in the United States, public nudity is not only frowned upon, it's (usually) downright illegal. You can get fined or even arrested for nude sunbathing in your own backyard. If the law is this hard on your behavior on your own private property, you can well imagine how much more strict it is if you attempt to get naked anywhere else—the sidewalk or the grocery store, for instance. Actually, a few years ago a group of women sued New York State after being arrested for walking around topless at a festival in Rochester. The women, who called themselves the Topfree Seven, argued that men walk around topless all the time without getting thrown in jail, and that women ought to be given the same rights. The court agreed, and now, just so you know, in case you want to, it is perfectly legal for a woman to sunbathe in Central Park, eat at an outdoor cafe, and stroll the city streets wearing nothing on top but a whole lot of sunscreen. As of this writing, no one has taken New York City up on its timely recognition of gender equality by actually doing any of this. Why? Well, it's just weird. Can you imagine being the only woman in a city of eight million people walking around with your boobs just out there for anyone to see? You window-shopping, while others politely pretend not to look at you? It's kind of horrible—a lot like those omigod-I'm-giving-a-presentation-and-I-don't-have-any-pants-on dreams that plague all of us from time to time.

Now imagine that, for some reason, walking around topless in New York City became all the rage, and that instead of spending thousands of dollars on knockoffs of what Carrie from Sex and the City wore last season, all the annoying fashionistas decided that nothing was quite as chic as nothing at all. Big boobs, little boobs, perky boobs, saggy boobs, pretty boobs, ugly boobs, all just swinging around. At first it'd be a complete shock. Then, after a while, it'd become the norm. Just like you'd expect to see topless women on the beaches of Saint-Tropez and South America, you'd come to expect to see topless women on the subway in New York City. No one would think twice about it.

As strange as it sounds, this is what a strip club is like. It's an alternate universe. Not quite Bizarro World, but something like it. And actually this bizarre parallel universe does exist. It's called . . . Europe.

Nothing drives home the acute differences between American women's and European women's attitudes toward nudity more than working at a strip club. Most clubs have women from all over the world who work as dancers—Armenian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, Georgian, Israeli, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, and Russian, to name just a few. Of course, every woman comes to dancing for her own individual reasons, but it's interesting to note that most European women have no complex nudity issues or internal debates about right/wrong, good/bad, or sinner/saint. Regardless of their religious beliefs or upbringing, European women tend to have fewer issues with public nudity or, more importantly, their own. They just come in, work hard, and go home. The point I'm making here is that our attitudes about nudity are largely influenced by our culture, and that a strip club has its own unique culture that enables even the most prudish women to open up and feel comfortable nekkid.

When you break it down, there are five important ways the strip club makes the stripper:

Excerpted from Dance Naked by Jessica "Kayla" Conrad Copyright © 2004 by Jessica. Excerpted by permission of Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Jessica Conrad has danced as "Kayla" at the New York gentlemen's club Scores since 1999. She is currently a full-time wife, mother, and psychology student at Fordham University.