Many Latinas Embrace Male Stripper Craze

On a sweltering evening, the flower of Yucatan womanhood is packed into a local gymnasium, dressed in Sunday-best linen and sensible pantsuits. Schoolteachers. Fresh-scrubbed college students. Moms like Maria Esther Ortega, 45, a staunch Catholic with four children.

It is a historic moment for Merida, and they know it.

“Yes, we did it!” thunder the 2,041 women. “Yes, we did it!”

Moments later, the long-anticipated show begins. Weeks of controversy over morality and women’s rights fade away. Taking the stage are 10 hunks in black bikinis, grinding their hips to the thump of rock music.

“Ooooooh!” Ortega cries.

In a phenomenon that has turned this macho society upside-down, the show featuring male strippers is playing to sold-out crowds all over this conservative Roman Catholic country. Inspired by the 1997 British movie “The Full Monty,” it has touched off a new battle in Mexico’s culture wars.

And the craze isn’t limited to south of the border. In the Los Angeles area, Latinas, both native and foreign-born, are flocking in growing numbers to nightclubs featuring male exotic dancers.

“The women are rebelling,” says prominent Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsivais. “If men can go to table-dance joints, why can’t women do this? ‘The Full Monty’ has allowed them to enter into a debate over social rights like never before.”

In the United States, at least, the trend has translated into big business for a growing number of U.S. nightclubs and dance spots, many of which have seen their moribund weeknight business come alive. At least 25 Latino nightclubs in the Los Angeles area have discovered the formula for success: Male strippers attract the women, and the women attract the Latino men, including their boyfriends and husbands.

The beefcake craze has also found its way into Southern California baby showers, birthday parties--even Mother’s Day celebrations. Rich Davis, owner of the Chippendale’s entertainment agencies, says about 50% of his customers for private parties are Latinas.

But if the trend has won acceptance in California, it’s still about as rare as a tofu taco in Mexico. Here, debate over Mexico’s “Full Monty” show is furious. Priests have condemned it. City governments have banned it. Demonstrators have heckled fans so fiercely that the police have been called in.

“We knew we were taking on big risks,” acknowledges Sergio Mayer, the producer of the show, “For Women Only.” “No one ever did this in Mexico.”

Soap Opera Stars Instead of Klutzes

The show was conceived by several actors after they saw “The Full Monty,” which is about unemployed workers who raise money with a striptease performance. What about putting on something similar here, the actors mused--but featuring Mexico’s cultural icons, soap-opera stars, instead of the hollow-chested klutzes of the British story?

“We were lacking a space for women in Mexico,” Mayer says. “This is like a massive women’s bachelor party.”

The strippers’ popularity shows the rapid evolution in social mores and women’s roles, both in Mexico and the Latino community in Southern California. Some attribute the change to women’s growing economic independence. Others credit a young, better-educated generation.

For his part, Monsivais reaches for nothing less than the M-word.

“It’s the millennium,” the intellectual explains in a telephone interview. “The idea is not to arrive at the 21st century as submissive women.”

Millennium fever or not, women have responded to the Mexican show with gusto. Since it opened two months ago, it has sold more than 100,000 tickets in 21 cities, the producers say. In Mexico City, organizers scrambled to add performances after nearly 20,000 women packed the show in three weeks.

In Merida, tickets ran out three hours before show time, even though they cost up to $50, three or four days’ salary for many Mexicans.

What’s drawing so many women in Mexico’s Catholic, patriarchal society, where females weren’t even allowed into cantinas until recently?

Ortega, the mother, emphasizes that it’s not unbridled lust. “We were attracted because they’re famous actors,” she assures, in the tone of someone who reads Playboy for the articles.

But the TV stars appear to be only part of the attraction. Women argue that the uproar over the show is a clear example of a macho society trying to impose a double standard.

In Merida, the show prompted a brouhaha when several businessmen refused to allow it into their theaters. Mayer, the producer, said theater owners had been pressured by the local government, controlled by the pro-Catholic National Action Party, or PAN. The government denies that.

Hypocrisy Alleged in Scandal Over Show

To Ortega and her friends, the scandal reflected hypocrisy.

“There are so many clubs and vices in Merida, but they’re for men,” Ortega says.

“It’s machismo,” chimes in her friend, 34-year-old Maru Aguilar. “There are loads of places where women strip, and the government lets them.”

In fact, Mexico has a thriving industry of strip clubs, prostitution and no-tell motels. Marital infidelity is winked at--as long as it’s the man doing the cheating.

“Men can see this kind of show, but we can’t. This is why all Merida has gotten involved in this,” declares Dulce Pech, 25, an airport worker attending “For Women Only.”

In the U.S. Latina community, the shift in social attitudes has been accelerated by concerns about HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, opening the door for frank discussion about sexuality, said Los Angeles-area writer and psychologist Ana Nogales.

“It’s like a lid has been blown off from those things that were denied to Latino women in their countries,” she said.

Even dance spots featuring rural norteno or banda music--traditionally a male-dominated scene--are reaching out to the Latina audience by adding male strippers to their shows. They include La Zona Rosa in Boyle Heights and Salon Coronas in North Hollywood.

The cultural eruption has produced some previously unthinkable sights. On a recent Saturday night at Los Candiles, a Latino club in northeast Los Angeles, Mexican-born Rodolfo Oseguedas accompanied his U.S.-born Latina wife, Ilsa, to a recent performance by George, a Fabio look-alike.

As George stripped down to an orange-neon G-string and moved throughout the audience, Oseguedas motioned for the tall, muscular entertainer to approach Ilsa. She clamped her hands on the dancer’s buttocks as he gyrated.

Afterward, Oseguedas said the show was “therapy” for his wife. She agreed.

“As women, we cannot express ourselves as men [can],” she said, referring to the macho Latino immigrant culture. “But when women see an attractive man and have the liberty to admire him openly, it feels good. We feel free.”

Not everyone is impressed by such freedom.

Maria Elena Cardena, a campus minister at the University of La Verne who wrote a thesis on Latino spirituality, said she fears that club owners and stripper agencies are trying to exploit Latina women much as tobacco companies once appropriated feminist themes to sell cigarettes to women.

In Mexico, the criticism has been far harsher.

In Puebla, for example, 70 Catholic and pro-family demonstrators distributed pamphlets outside “For Women Only” reading: “Woman! You are the pillar of the family and the society.”

In Veracruz, religious and pro-family groups ran a newspaper ad pleading with the state’s first lady to block the show.

The show’s producers insist that it is daring but not depraved. The dancers only fully strip at the end--and then display just their backsides.

Like the Monty in this show, some women’s disclosure was not exactly full.

Concepcion Huchim, a 53-year-old snack-shop owner, joined friends in Merida going to see “For Women Only” out of curiosity, she says. How did her husband react?

The tiny Maya woman shrugs.

“I didn’t tell him,” she admits. “I said I was going to a bridal shower.”

*

Times staff writer Sheridan reported from Merida and correspondent Trevino from Los Angeles.