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Marcel Danesi is nursing his Stella Artois as a young woman slowly descends the stairs that lead to the stage, the one with the gleaming brass poles. She's wearing skyscraping stilettos, black nylons, a garter belt, panties and a shimmering camisole.
Back in the 1960s, when Danesi was putting himself through graduate school by playing piano at the old Victory Burlesque on Spadina Ave., the young woman's current state of undress would have been just about the end of the show. Now it's merely the beginning.
She dances on stage to one song, then starts undressing during a second, more languorous tune, and by the end of the third song, she's completely naked – which is, curiously, the least interesting part of the performance.
All mystery, fantasy and anticipation have disappeared, leaving only, as Danesi remarks, "the denouement."
Danesi – a semiotics professor at the University of Toronto whose books include Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence – has come to this downtown strip club with a mix of reluctance and curiosity, a natural dilemma for someone who considers himself a moral man but decidedly not a moralistic one, judging, dictating, full of disdain.
Yet the visit seems a fitting punctuation mark, both for Danesi's personal narrative and the topic of his forthcoming book, X-Rated!: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture.
His father was a comic doing Italian vaudeville in Toronto, and Danesi the boy often joined the act, playing accordion. A pretty straight line runs from vaudeville through burlesque to strip clubs.
The new book, meanwhile, is Danesi's attempt to answer a question once posed by a student, a query he vividly remembers precisely because he didn't have a prefabricated response.
The question was this: "If pop culture is so crass and vulgar, why hasn't it disappeared? Is it because we secretly love vulgarity?"
DANESI'S EVENTUAL REPLY, in book form, is a delightful romp through the turning points of popular culture and the enduring symbols that still inform it, often with roots in Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible and the occult.
To Danesi's way of thinking, people have always had a desire, perhaps even a psychic need, to pursue bodily pleasures, from laughter to sex. You see it in everything from the phallus-wearing clowns who cavorted obscenely during the Roman Saturnalia to the rogue comedians who used to perform at country fairs in the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
And in the late Middle Ages, the Italian commedia dell'arte was a riot of mockery and laughter, with stock characters who were rogues, cowardly villains, hunchbacks and nasty bachelors chasing after pretty girls.
These are all, Danesi argues, just carnival expressions of the profane – ritualized, theatrical transgressions of the sacred.
The ancient Greeks and Romans certainly understood that the sacred (i.e. any sense of the spiritual) and the profane (our bodies and instincts) are both essential life forces, that each was necessary to balance and illuminate the other.
Subsequent civilizations, however, haven't always been so comfortable with that connection. Think of the Catholic compartmentalizing of the two – Carnival followed by Lent – or the Puritan urge to suppress the profane entirely, a legacy that continues to inform a lot of debate in the United States.
But profanity stubbornly persists because of its cathartic value. As Danesi writes: "Pop culture today is really nothing more than a mass communal form of profane theatre – a contemporary form of ancient and medieval carnivals that cannot be easily repressed or suppressed."
Nor are the lines between the sacred and profane constant over time. What was once considered profane can end up as classical art, which is what happened to the comic operas of Mozart and Rossini. Or consider jazz, which began life as a staple in southern brothels. Today? "It has become part of the sacred in American culture," says Danesi.
WHAT WE NOW recognize as "popular culture" has its roots in the mid-19th century, when industrialization first began forging a mass society. Even then, such cultural critics as Matthew Arnold were railing against the emerging "low culture."
But Danesi maintains it wasn't until 1923 that pop culture really came into its own. That's when a Broadway musical, Runnin' Wild, turned the sexually suggestive Charleston into a national dance craze.
Civic elders were suitably alarmed. Yet Danesi insists that such moral panics confuse what is essentially a safety valve – a way for "profane energies to escape harmlessly" – with a tectonic shift in the moral landscape.
That was certainly the case with Deep Throat, the hardcore 1972 movie that Danesi uses to launch into his probe of pop culture. The movie, famously rated X, was not only incredibly explicit but also seen by people from all walks of life in mainstream cinemas, not just by "dirty old men" in dingy rooms.
U.S. President Richard Nixon, no stranger to criminal predilections, famously vowed, "So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life."
Which pretty much sealed the deal. Ever since, the symbol X – really a cross, rotated 45 degrees – has held a special place in pop culture precisely because it conjures images of excitement that are, as Danesi puts it, "just beyond the realm of decency and righteousness."
Hence the flood of products that now carry the symbol, from Xtreme sports and the Xbox to the BMW X3 and Nissan Xterra. Danesi calls it "X-Power," one of the pillars of pop culture, and part of a taxonomy that includes the likes of "I-Power" (the sweeping changes and promise of technology) and "N-Power" (numerology and the occult).
But it's the symbolism around femininity that's key, the unceasing fascination that men have with women. As Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One's Own: "Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
It's also an ancient, complicated obsession: why men have always seen femininity and the female form as objects of both veneration and fear. (Think Eve and Lilith.)
Danesi calls it "V-Power," after Venus, Virgo, vases and vessels, all traditional symbols of femininity. There's a reason that the ears of the Playboy bunny form a V, or that Thomas Pynchon called his elusive female character V in his novel of the same name.
And the V for victory sign once flashed by Winston Churchill? It's now morphed from that, through its 1960s incarnation as a peace symbol, into a sign for "girl power," thanks to the Spice Girls in the 1990s.
That V is now pervasive, from products like Vonage, Verizon and Vantage, to the set of the women's television talk show, The View, where a giant V looms behind the seated cast and guests.
And no, you don't necessarily need to make a mental connection between V and Venus. At some point it just becomes sub-conscious, a seemingly natural association.
In the case of profane culture, it's also a fitting one.
"Pop culture is a feminine-based culture," says Danesi. "Without women, not only would the show not go on, it wouldn't make any sense at all."
In Jean Luc Godard's 1961 movie, Une femme est une femme, for instance, two male characters are obsessed with a stunning beauty who works as a stripper. At one point, the first male asks: "Is this a tragedy or a comedy?" To which the other male replies: "With women, you never know."
So who's in control?
Danesi concedes that women haven't always had much say over how they've been portrayed in pop culture. But he thinks that has changed dramatically of late. Tellingly, any debates about femininity and the portrayal of women are now dominated by female voices, not male.
As Danesi puts it: "The post-feminists would say it's the woman on stage who is always in charge, and men, stupid men, pay for it, not just financially but emotionally as well."
And that would include, presumably, the young woman with the stilettos and black garter.
