You can say a lot of eloquent things about the relationship of the human male and female, but no amount of poetic drapery can cover up the fact that sex is simply—well, funny. Not funny in the wink-wink nudge-nudge way (that's just irritating); funny in the same way that our ears are funny: those lumpy animal appendages to the streamlined human head, as if Steve Jobs had attached Victrola horns to an iPod. Sex has that same animal weirdness, to which we add our distinctly human tension between exhibitionism and shame, between the push-up bra and the hoopskirt. We flaunt what we ought to cover up while we're ashamed of things as natural as breathing. I'm sure that when Adam and Eve went looking for something to cover their nakedness, they combed the garden for the gaudiest fig leaves available.

One woman famous for not covering her nakedness was Gypsy Rose Lee, the long-legged, big-toothed burlesque star who once outpolled Eleanor Roosevelt as the most popular American female. Gypsy's striptease—down to a couple of polka dot bows and a G-string—wouldn't cause much of a stir nowadays. Our celebrities show more skin in the average PETA ad. But even during Gypsy's heyday in the late 1930s, nudity was barely the point. Her gimmick was ladylike comedy. In her most famous monologue, "Psychology of a Striptease," she feigned high-mindedness:

Have you the faintest idea of the private life of a stripteaser?
My dear, it's New York's second largest industry.
Now a stripteaser's education requires years of concentration
And for the sake of illustration, take a look at me.
I began at the age of three,
learning ballet at the Royal Imperial School in Moscow.
And how I suffered and suffered for my art
Then, of course, Sweet Briar, oh those dear college days …

Reciting those lines in the lisping tones of a spinster librarian, Gypsy removed each patch of clothing in a carefully choreographed order, stopping now and then to drop a pin into a tuba, or let a slip flutter onto the drummer's head. Sometimes she never removed her outer garments at all, but she packed the Minsky brothers' Republic Theater night after night and created a new audience for burlesque among New York intelligentsia. The papers loved to quote her, especially when she ran afoul of Fiorello LaGuardia's decency campaign: "Help, I've been draped!" "I wasn't naked, I was completely covered by a blue spotlight."

Literature on Gypsy Rose Lee has taken predictable paths, using her to comment on the American sexual journey, rating her as a feminist icon, or celebrating her intellect (she wrote several New Yorker pieces and two fairly good novels). In Gypsy, Art of the Tease, Rachel Shteir argues that Gypsy's sugar-coated account of her upbringing, her "Let me tell you about my madcap childhood!" story that started as a memoir and transmogrified into a Broadway musical, is ultimately more interesting than the bleaker story that emerges from research and family interviews. "Whether or not she is telling the truth," Shteir writes, "Gypsy … is a complex and ravishing creature whose act and life reveal self-invention, poignancy, and streets marts."

Well, maybe Shteir's chosen readers enjoy being ravished, like the audience at some postmodern burlesque show. But for those of us who like to investigate what lies behind other people's self-invention (pretty much anyone who would read a biography), Karen Abbot's American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare, is the better choice. Abbot writes like a novelist, skipping around in time, trying to capture not only the psychology of her subject but a concrete sense of the culture that produced vaudeville and burlesque. A large part of the book is a history of the Minsky brothers, wayward grandsons of a rabbi, who championed American striptease as a kind of patriotic achievement, the inevitable victory of "self-revelation" (as Shteir puts it) over Puritanism. Love them or hate them, there's no denying that history has mostly taken the Minskys' side; their story is a creepy twist on the American dream.

What makes Abbot's book worth reading, though, is the emotional content that arises from her in-depth interviews with June Havoc, Gypsy's younger sister, whom Shteir dismisses as self-righteous and vengeful. To be sure, the relationship between the two women was complex and competitive. Most of the blame lay with their mother, Rose, who, when not occupied with blackmail and outright murder, pimped her children onto the vaudeville stage and then worked them to the point of bloody toes and nervous breakdowns—all the while chanting "Look what I've done for you!"

"Baby June," who had learned to dance on her toes as a toddler, became fed up by the age of 15 and ran off with one of the boys in the act. Big sister Louise, who until that point had been the lumpish bookworm of the family (she liked to quote Voltaire and Marx), was now the only person her mother could turn to; the hitch was that she had no actual talent. One night at a burlesque theater in Kansas City, Louise decided (probably at her mother's greedy urging) that it was time to show a little skin. When she walked onstage, the manager introduced her by the name she'd made up for herself: Gypsy Rose Lee.

According to June, who turned up a few months later to see the act, Gypsy's original striptease wasn't the tame thing it became when she worked for the Minsky brothers. June was mortified as she watched her sister strip down to nothing for a bunch of heavy-breathing strangers. To Gypsy, June was a moralizing snob—forever the talented "baby," expecting the world to fall at her feet. The fact that June became a successful Hollywood actress only intensified the competition between the two, whose real affection for each other was obscured by a bitter match of egos. The musical Gypsy guaranteed that the contest would go on after their deaths; it caricatures June as their mother's bratty darling while idealizing Louise as a shy, sweet tomboy who realizes she's pretty just before she takes the stage for the first time to strip.

There's no denying that Gypsy Rose Lee was a certain kind of comic genius. Where other people saw sex, she saw irony at work—animal lust mocking human aspirations. Her world was more conservative than ours, but that only gave her endless ways to exploit the tension between exhibitionism and shame. Gypsy knew instinctively that the guiltier people feel about being naked, the more clothes they wear, and the more clothes they wear, the longer it takes to remove them. She took about seven minutes per glove; only in libertine Europe did anybody find it boring.

Abbot's book also shows what a truly wounded soul Gypsy was, and we shouldn't be so fooled by the laughtrack as to forget that. Onstage, she doled out bits of herself in carefully controlled portions, but in real life, she kept her feelings under wraps—especially the painful ones. "It wasn't hilarious and funny at all, when you got back to the dressing room," said June. "[S]he would come home and cry because she would go on an interview and all they wanted her to do was take off her gloves, slowly. They wanted to leer. It made her sick, and nobody ever knew that."

Because Gypsy Rose Lee turned the tables on her audience and made a joke out of sex, nobody (except her sister) seemed to consider her a victim of anything. But her story isn't that different from the stories of many vulnerable people who take off their clothes for money. What we now call the sex trade is one of the world's largest industries. But the vast majority of the human beings who constitute its labor force don't learn sexual politics in a feminist studies class (or at Sweet Briar); they don't take up exotic dancing as a means of self-expression, or become prostitutes in order to exercise power over weak men. For the most part, they sell their bodies because they're forced to—often by an abuser in their own families—and because they have no other way to survive. And there's nothing funny about that.

Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and essays and teaches Latin in Alabama.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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