Strip-Tease in Literature

There are many examples of slight mentions here and there throughout the literature of many nations of the act of the strip-tease. The first strip tease in a book could even be in the bible. It is alluded to in the New Testament when Salome danced for her step-father King Herod. The dance of Salome is supposed to refer to the legend of the Goddess Inanna’s journey into the Underworld where she was forced to remove an article of clothing at each one of the seven gates of Hell.

In later centuries, 1681, Thomas Otway wrote a comedic play and the strip tease got a mention of sorts in “The Soldier’s Fortune” when a character referred to the “lewd, drunken, stripping whores”. It wasn't very flattering. In the French La Guerre D’Espagne, dated 1707, author Pierre Martaeau writes of the party he calls ‘galant’. “The dancers, to please their lovers the more, dropped their clothes and danced totally naked the nicest entrees and ballets…” The French at least knew how to discuss the strip-tease in their literature.

Aside from mentions both negative and positive, the only strip-tease in literature references are concerning the famous and infamous strippers in history. Mata Hari, executed for being a spy, Germaine Aymos dressed only in three small sea shells was an early dancer at the Moulin Rouge, Josephine Baker, one of the few black strippers to achieve world fame for her art. She was called the “Black Pearl”. Her fame led to her appearance in a major motion picture entitled Zouzou. It was Baker who was so instrumental in the early Civil Rights struggle in America who was offered the leadership role in the movement after Martin Luther King was assassinated. She turned it down.