Book Riot’s Deals of the Day for October 11, 2024 include my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, which is only $3.99 for the Kindle. (The hardback is only $17.62, which is 39% off the list price.)
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The author at four
This past spring, I wrote an opinion essay about children and privacy. The essay was inspired by and informed by my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in which I detailed how being a research subject from childhood to adulthood shaped me and changed the trajectory of my life. I submitted the essay to various outlets, but no one was interested in publishing it, so I’m publishing it here for the first time.
Today’s kids grow up online. From the first sonogram image posted to a parent’s Facebook profile to providing toddler content fodder for a mommy influencer’s TikTok account, Gen Z has never known what it is to have a private life. Without their knowledge or consent the most intimate moments of these children’s lives, embarrassing meltdowns and potty training scenes alike, have been shared, scrutinized, and commented upon by people they will never meet.
I know something of what it’s like to grow up without a sense of privacy. Not long after I was born, in the spring of 1968, my parents submitted an application for my enrollment in an exclusive “laboratory preschool” run by the University of California, Berkeley, where my father was a poetry professor. When I arrived at the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center for my first day of nursery school, I became one of over 100 Berkeley children in a groundbreaking, 30-year longitudinal study of personality that sought to answer a question: If you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be?
Over three decades, my cohort and I were studied extensively. At the preschool, which had been designed for spying on children, researchers observed us from a hidden observation gallery overlooking the classroom and assessed us in testing rooms equipped with one-way mirrors and eavesdropping devices. After preschool, the cohort scattered to the winds, but our principal investigators continued following us. At Tolman Hall, a Brutalist building on the north side of campus that housed the Department of Psychology, we were evaluated at key development stages. Our school report cards were analyzed. Our parents were interviewed. We were studied at home and in an RV that had been turned into a mobile laboratory with a hidden compartment in the rear from which one researcher looked on as another researcher evaluated us.
In the early years, I didn’t know I was being studied. Eventually, I learned I was part of an important study. In the beginning, my parents consented for me. When I got older, I consented for myself. I liked being studied. At home, my English professor parents were preoccupied with work, and I spent a lot of time alone in my room entertaining myself. In an experiment room, I was the center of attention. My intellectual parents were emotionally distant. The close attention paid to me by a researcher sitting across the table from me felt a lot like love.
From its first chapter, my life was an open book. As I understood it, my private life was not my own but something to be offered up willingly to science in service of enlightening humanity. In my mind, being a human lab rat was my destiny. Over time, our lives would inform over 100 books and scientific papers. The study would shed new light on how people become who they are, report that adult political orientation can be predicted from toddlerhood, and prove that, to some degree, you can foresee who a child will grow up to be.
According to the observer effect, the act of observation changes that which is being observed. Without a doubt, being studied changed my life. It made me feel like I mattered when my parents didn’t; its researchers’ keen interest in my life story played a role in shaping me into the writer I would become. When I was in my early thirties, the study ended, and in hindsight I can see I felt a bit lost without it. Who was I without my overseers watching over me?
I think about my experiences as a research subject when I think about Gen Z, the pioneering generation that is coming of age publicly. They are unwitting research subjects in a global-scale psychological experiment, one in which they are human guinea pigs and the unanswered question is: How will growing up in the public eye shape their identities? After all, this generation’s overseers are not kindly researchers who want to understand human nature but Big Tech billionaires who have fine-tuned their algorithms to not simply study their youngest users but to guide their choices, mold their senses of self, steer their minds.
According to a 2023 Gallup survey, the average American teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg engaged in senatorial theater, suggesting the company was undertaking steps to reduce the potential for harms caused by social media on teens. In his State of the Union Address in March, President Joe Biden made a brief reference to his goal to “Pass bipartisan privacy legislation to protect our children online.”
For kids, it may be too late to save what they’ve lost already: a private life.
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My memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, which recounts my 30-year tenure as a research subject in an unprecendented University of California, Berkeley longitudinal study that sought to predict who over 100 Berkeley kids, including me, would grow up to be, is 50% off for Barnes & Noble Book Haul 2024.
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New York Times bestselling author Dani Shapiro interviewed me about my life story and my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for her widely-listened-to Family Secrets podcast. The episode is entitled “I Was 758,” and it’s available on most podcast distributing platforms. Thank you to Dani for doing this intimate interview. You can buy Data Baby from the retailer of your choice here and read more about it here.
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This is an excerpt from my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. You can order a copy here.
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I thought it would be interesting to write about the strip clubs in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. I was curious about these enigmatic clubs on Broadway that I had seen but into which I had never entered. As a kid in the back seat of my parents’ Dart, I had been driven through San Francisco and spotted The Condor (which, in 1964, had become the country’s first fully topless nightclub). Out front, a towering sign featured a supersized blonde, impossibly busty. Her name, I would find out later, was Carol Doda. She wore a black bikini with blinking red lights for nipples.
Doda was the opposite of my mother and her friends—they were feminists who viewed makeup, heavily styled hair, and revealing clothes as tools the patriarchy used to subjugate and objectify women. But Doda wasn’t anyone’s tool; she was a legend. A San Francisco Art Institute dropout, she had become America’s first topless dancer of note, her surgically enhanced breasts billed as “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco.” When I was in graduate school, I had seen an episode of HBO’s “Real Sex” about strippers, and I had been struck by the revelation that strip clubs were places where intimacy was for sale. Sure, it was transient, transactional, and most often conducted between a guy with a handful of dollar bills and a dancer in a G-string and not much else who twirled seductively around a pole on a stage, but there was something real about it, I sensed. Or was there? I wanted to find out. The strip club dancers reminded me of the girls I had hung out with in high school, whom everyone else had deemed slutty. These women were powerful, too, in control, the love object I aspired to be, or seemed like it. Intimacy, that for which I had craved as a little girl, was their hustle.
“Oh, my god, Susannah, make up your mind!” Anne laughed as we stood at the corner on a Saturday night. Broadway was teeming with drunk guys, sailors on leave, and couples on the prowl for something more interesting than what they had already. I scanned the glowing signs. Roaring 20’s. Big Al’s. The Hungry I.
“This one!”
We ducked inside.
As we moved down the black hallway toward a red velvet curtain, I worried what someone else in the club might think. I, a woman, was in a strip club. As I pulled back the curtain, it dawned on me that wasn’t going to be an issue. There was one thing to which the men scattered at the small dimly lit tables around the room were paying attention, and it wasn’t me. It was the half-naked girl on the stage.
Nonchalantly, we took a seat at a table near the back. We ordered a couple of overpriced drinks. I took a sip: it was straight orange juice. The cocktails were alcohol-free, thanks to a California law that prohibited the sale of alcohol in fully nude strip clubs. It didn’t matter, my head was buzzing from the drinks we’d had at the bar around the corner that we’d been to earlier.
In the song that was blasting, Trent Reznor was expressing a desire to violate someone. The statuesque brunette teetering on the highest heels I had ever seen peeled off her dental-floss thin neon green thong. She tossed her thong to one side, grabbed the pole, climbed up it. High above the crowd, she wrapped her thighs around the pole and bent over backwards, throwing her arms open like an inverted angel.
In that moment, everything that had happened seemed far away. The intellectual, cloistered, academic world in which I had grown up was right across the Bay, but it may as well have been a million miles from here. I looked at a solitary businessman sitting at the next table. His tie was untied. His jacket was slung across the back of his chair. His eyes were glassy. He had been hypnotized. In this alternative universe, women had all the power, and men were at their mercy. I didn’t want to be a stripper; I was too shy, too insecure, too inhibited to take off my clothes in front of strangers. But I wanted what she had: the stage, the men in awe, the audience worshipping her as a superhuman goddess. As a kid, I was starved for attention. This was an orgy of attention. As a pre-pubescent girl, I felt embarrassed by my own burgeoning sexuality, left to figure it out for myself because my mother was too depressed. Here, sex was on parade, for sale, everywhere I looked. In the Block Project, I was the object, the one on view, the child studied by researchers from across tables in Tolman Hall’s austere experiment rooms. Now I was the voyeur, the looker, the scopophiliac. It was intoxicating.
As we sped back to the East Bay in the early morning hours, I watched the city get smaller and smaller in the side view mirror. My father was dead, that was an incontrovertible fact, but for a few hours tonight I had forgotten all about that. I could write about this. I could become a gonzo journalist, like one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, and immerse myself in it. Sex would be my beat.
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I’m a longtime fan of Travis and Sigrid, who, if you don’t know already, are a famous duo in London. Travis is a cyclist, Sigrid is an all-white, blue-eyed, deaf Norwegian Forest cat, and together they ride around the city, bringing joy and excitement to all they encounter, including quite a few celebrities over the years. Recently, Travis wrote a nice post about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, on his Instagram feed, which was really kind. Make sure to follow Travis and Sigrid on Instagram and order their book, which I highly recommend: Sigrid Rides: The Story of an Extraordinary Friendship and An Adventure on Two Wheels.
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Yesterday, I flew up to the Bay Area, where I was doing a brown bag book talk at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. I got there early, and that gave me a chance to have breakfast, visit Pegasus Books where I was happy to see my book on a shelf, and go to my childhood home and knock on the front door (more on that in an upcoming post). After that, I went to Cal for the talk. I was interviewed by journalist and producer Cecilia Lei, who did a wonderful job asking insightful questions, turning what could have been bearing witness to a Q&A into a three-way dialogue with the audience, and prompting me to think about some of the deeper themes in and larger issues surrounding my book in new ways. Thank you to everyone who came. I’ve been doing a lot of promoting of my memoir this month, these last couple weeks in particular. After I’m done with the last event, which is this weekend, I’ll be writing a longer post about everything I learned about marketing one’s book. The photo is of the courtyard at the J-school. It was a bit overcast, but so are most days in the Bay Area in spring.
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I took this photo ahead of the panel I was on at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books before the room became full. The festival is on the University of Southern California campus, a massive undertaking, and run like a well-oiled machine. My friend and I hung out in the authors’ green room, we got marched over to the hall where the panel was along with the other panelists, and then I answered questions from the moderator and the audience. It was a really cool time and something I’ll be writing about a bit more in a future post. My book is Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. And what people are saying about it is here.
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This weekend, I’ll be a panelist at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The panel, “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology,” is on Sunday, April 21, at 3:30 pm., it’s moderated by Amy Alkon, and my fellow panelists are Dr. Jen Gunter, Cat Bohannon, and M.G. Lord. I’ll be talking about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. And, you can read more about the story behind my book here.
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I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment (read more about my book here) for a recent episode of ABC Radio National’s podcast about the human mind, “All in the Mind,” out of Australia. The episode is “Being a Human Lab Rat for 30 Years: What Happens Next.”
From the episode’s description:
“Researchers knew Susannah better than her own parents.
They may have even known her better than herself.
Today, how spending thirty years in a psychological study warped journalist Susannah Breslin's life.”
Listen to my conversation with host Sana Qadar here.
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I’m super happy that The Morbidly Curious Book Club has chosen my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment—you can read more about my book here—as the April pick! The Morbidly Curious Book Club is very cool, and I’m honored that Data Baby is in the company of their previous 2024 selections, which include Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom, Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless by Laurah Norton, and Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy. You can join TMCBC here, check out the rest of their 2024 selections and follow TMCBC on Instagram here, follow TMCBC on TikTok here, and find various other relevant links for TMCBC here, including a link to the podcast, for which I’ll be doing an interview later this month. Thank you, TMCBC!
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On Tuesday, April 23, 2024, at 1 pm, I’ll be doing a brown bag book talk in conversation with Cecilia Lei at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. (You can read more about my book here.) I’m really looking forward to this event for several reasons. I grew up in Berkeley, my father was a professor at Cal, I graduated from Cal, my memoir is about my 30-year participation in a research study conducted at U.C. Berkeley, and as part of my research for my book I was at Cal for a year as an academic fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Event info here.
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My memoir at Powell’s Books, Portland, OR | Photo credit: Kevin Sampsell
This is part 9 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir.
You wrote a book! Congratulations! That was the easy part! Ha-ha, just kidding. Oh, wait, no, I’m not. If you live under a rock, you may not have heard that these days publishing houses are very, very busy and can only do so much when it comes to promoting the book you wrote. That’s where you come in! If you want anyone to read your book, you better figure out how to promote it. Not good at promoting stuff? Too bad. Don’t like to promote your work? Tough shit. Would rather hire an independent publicist to promote your book for you? Good luck finding a good one for less than five figures to push your book properly and well to all the appropriate media outlets with no return on investment guaranteed. Luck for me, I was a book publicist a long time ago, so that helped when my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, came out last fall. (Read more about my book here.) Here are a few ways that your book can get visibility in a crowded marketplace and some strategies and non-strategies that worked for me. Will these avenues and strategies and non-strategies work for you and your book? Who the fuck knows!
The Publisher Did It My memoir was published by one of the big publishers. This has its upsides and downsides, some of which I’ve written about in previous editions of Fuck You, Pay Me. I was paired with a publicist at my imprint. One of the single most important things your publisher should do for you is get galleys of your book to Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. These trade reviews come out before other reviews and probably before your book comes out. They’re important because everyone in the book business reads them and also because they’re the first thing you can use in your own book promotions. My book got a starred Publishers Weekly review and a Kirkus Reviews review, and I used quotes from those reviews to promote my book on my website and across my social media platforms. If you find sharing positive reviews of your book challenging, pretend You the Author is a consulting client you’re working with and you’re promoting their book for them.
Publishers Weekly: “Unpicking thorny questions about determinism and the ethics of human experimentation, Breslin attacks her subject with verve and wit, resisting woe-is-me solipsism without defanging her critiques of the study that rocked her life. It’s gripping stuff.”
Kirkus Reviews: “An intelligently provocative memoir and investigation.”
Networking Did It Because I have been a writer a long time, I know a lot of writers. That came in handy when my book came out, and my publisher sent out review copies of my book to people I know who are journalists. In one instance, that led to a two-page spread in The New York Post. This feature came out about a month after my book did and generated a sales spike. It also involved a photo shoot, which was fun to do. If you don’t have any writer friends, you should think about making some. They will be of use when your book is published. If you don’t have any writer friends or the writers you attempt to befriend spurn your efforts, you can send fan letters to writers about their work and see if they’re interested in checking out your book because it aligns with their professional interests. Please bear in mind that writers are busy, so if they don’t write about your book, it’s nothing personal.
The New York Post: “Breslin had long been aware she was a ‘human lab rat,’ in her words, but it wasn’t until adulthood that she started to wonder what it was all about.”
The Agent Did It That same month, my memoir was selected to be the December pick for actress Emma Roberts’ Belletrist book club. This opportunity came through my agent at CAA, who is amazing. Belletrist is a celebrity book club, they promote your book throughout the month, and they have you do various things on their platform, like create a video of your personal library and write about your favorite literary things for their newsletter and also do an Instagram Live interview. It was such a cool experience. I got the chance to connect with readers who had spent a lot of their developing years online and since my book is about, among other things, not having a private life, it was very relatable for them. By this point in the promoting one’s own book process, I was getting a bit more in the flow of things, and I had reached a certain point of resetting the bar, which is to say not everything you do to promote your book may be up to your perfectionist standards, but at least you are out there doing it, dammit.
Belletrist: Here’s the interview with me and Emma and Belletrist co-founder Karah.
A Book in Motion Did It According to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion: “A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force.” One thing you may discover while promoting your book is that while promoting it may or may not get easier over time, the book may develop a motion of its own. The Belletrist stuff happened in December, and in early January my memoir got a great review in The Globe and Mail, which is basically The New York Times of Canada. A couple weeks later, I got an interview request from CBC Radio’s “The Current,” which is, like, let’s say, the NPR of Canada. The interview I did with “The Current”’s host Matt Galloway was fantastic, and they had me record it at the NPR West studio so the audio quality was excellent. When this interview aired, it led to a sales bump, which was nice. I definitely felt like this was Newton’s first law at work, with the book club leading to the review leading to the interview. If I told you that you can feel when something is generating its own momentum, would you believe me? I ain’t lyin’.
The Globe and Mail: “If, as Socrates contended, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ then Breslin is living hers to the fullest. Lucky for us, she’s written a thought-provoking, ridiculously propulsive book about it.”
The Current with Matt Galloway: Here’s the interview with me and Matt.
Serendipity Did It The amount of stuff I’m leaving out of this process is sort of ridiculous because I spent a huge amount of time pitching my book to many media outlets which led to various other things, but I’m just trying to highlight a few of them here. One thing I did myself was pitch my book to The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is in the city where I live and the biggest book festival in the country. By happenstance, someone at the festival shared my book with a woman who was to be moderating a festival panel that would be a fit for my book. That woman and I were on a TV show together years ago, so thanks to serendipity I’ll be on that panel at the Festival of Books later this month. I’m really excited about that. All of which is to say, pitch, pitch, pitch away, because you just never know.
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: “These writers share thought-provoking research and personal experience on everything from the role of female bodies in human evolution, to the gaps in medical knowledge about female reproductive systems and a 30+ year lab experiment about human personalities, and finally how all of this plays into the dolls we make to represent women. Though their stories differ, these writers are all experts in one extremely difficult field: being a woman.”
The other thing I would like to add is that—well, a few other things. I wrote my own press release for my book, and I could probably write a whole other post about that. Also, there was a lot of struggle over not having full control over this promotions process that involved the publisher that was very challenging that maybe I’ll talk more about at a later date. Additionally, I would highly recommend that you create a page on your website—if you don’t have a website for yourself, I don’t know what to tell you other than get one—that’s about your book or books and all the reviews and promotions and speaking engagements and such. I created mine here. If you let things sit here and there on the web, no one is going to see that. If you put it on one page and update it regularly, more will come from that. For example, my memoir was published five months ago, and I have more speaking engagements and interviews this month than any other previous month. Keep flogging it or nurturing it or pushing it, and it will start to spin forward of its own volition.
In closing, I guess I didn’t really directly tackle the how to do all this without going crazy part, but I should talk about that in a future post. All I know is that for me it’s all about control, and if you don’t believe you have control, you are controlling one thing: your own wrongheaded delusions about control.
If you liked this post, buy my book. If you liked my book, write a review of it on Amazon or Goodreads or the social media platform of your choice. If you’re interested in interviewing me or having me speak at your next event or querying me about promoting your book or other creative project, contact me.
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Last Wednesday, I did a reading and talk for my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, at the North Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. I had such a nice time, especially because this was the library I went to when I was a kid, and I was reading from my book about growing up in Berkeley. It was a bit like time travel with a literary twist. Thank you to the library for having me and for all those who came out to listen and ask questions. If you’re interested in attending an event, I’m going to be doing several events during April for the book, which are listed here, and which include the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books; the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; and Book Passage in Corte Madera.
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On Wednesday, March 27, 2024, I’m reading from and discussing my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, at Berkeley Public Library’s North Branch at 6:30 pm. You can read more about what people are saying about Data Baby here. More event information is here. Hope to see you!
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I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for a recent episode of WHYY’s The Pulse, which is part of the NPR Network. The episode is “Discovering Your True Identity,” and the interview I did with host Maiken Scott starts at the 34 minute mark. (Read more about Data Baby here.)
From the episode’s description:
“Identity's a complicated thing — a mixture of nurture and nature, ethnicity, gender, culture, conscious decisions, coincidences, and more. In many ways, though, who we think we are boils down to the stories we tell ourselves; stories based on our origins, our families, and how we came to be. But what happens when those stories change? When we discover that the narrative of our lives is completely different from what we've always believed?”
Listen to the episode here.
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On Sunday, April 21, at 3:30 p.m., I’ll be on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The panel is “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology,” and tickets are required. My fellow panelists are Dr. Jen Gunter, Cat Bohannan, and M.G. Lord, and the moderator is Amy Alkon. I’ll be talking about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment; you can read more about my book here.
The panel description:
“It seems almost impossible that, in a year where a movie about an iconic doll broke nearly every record for success and female vocalists almost single-handedly boosted the economy with concert tours, there is still so much mystery, debate, contention, and law-making about women’s bodies. These writers share thought-provoking research and personal experience on everything from the role of female bodies in human evolution, to the gaps in medical knowledge about female reproductive systems and a 30+ year lab experiment about human personalities, and finally how all of this plays into the dolls we make to represent women. Though their stories differ, these writers are all experts in one extremely difficult field: being a woman.”
See you there!
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Love this Instagram post from @bookswithbrady featuring my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Buy my book here, order a signed copy here, and read what people are saying about it here.
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Porn star, Las Vegas, NV | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This week in my newsletter I share an excerpt from my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. This episode takes place early on in the book. I believe it was 1997 or thereabouts. At the time I was living in the Bay Area, where I grew up. On this particular night, I ventured out to the strip clubs in North Beach in San Francisco. It would prove to be a fateful series of events.
I thought it would be interesting to write about the strip clubs in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. I was curious about these enigmatic clubs on Broadway that I had seen but never entered. As a kid in the back seat of my parents’ Dart, I had been driven through San Francisco and spotted The Condor (which, in 1964, became one of the country’s first topless bars). Out front, a towering sign featured a supersized blonde, impossibly busty. Her name, I would find out later, was Carol Doda. On the sign, she wore a black bikini with blinking red lights for nipples.
Doda was the opposite of my mother and her friends, who considered makeup, heavily styled hair, and revealing clothes tools the patriarchy used to subjugate and objectify women. But Doda wasn’t anyone’s tool; she was a legend. She was America’s first topless dancer of note, and her surgically enhanced breasts were billed as “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco.” When I was in graduate school, I had seen an episode of HBO’s Real Sex about strippers, and I was struck by the revelation that strip clubs were places where intimacy was for sale. Sure, it was transient, transactional, and most often conducted between a guy with a handful of dollar bills and a dancer in a G-string and not much else who twirled seductively around a pole on a stage, but there was something real about it. The strippers reminded me of the girls I had hung out with in high school, whom everyone else had deemed slutty.
“Oh my god, Susannah, make up your mind!” Anne laughed as we stood at the corner on a Saturday night. Broadway was teeming with drunk guys, sailors on leave, and couples on the prowl for something more interesting than what they had already. I scanned the glowing signs. Roaring 20’s. Big Al’s. The Hungry I.
“This one!” We ducked inside. As we moved down the black hallway toward a red velvet curtain, I worried what someone else in the club might think. I, a woman, was in a strip club. As I pulled back the curtain, it dawned on me that wasn’t going to be an issue. There was one thing the men scattered at the small, dimly lit tables around the room were paying attention to, and it wasn’t me. It was the half-naked girl on the stage.
Nonchalantly, we took a seat at a table near the back. We ordered a couple of overpriced drinks. I took a sip: It was straight orange juice. The cocktails were alcohol-free, thanks to a California law that prohibited the sale of alcohol in fully nude strip clubs. It didn’t matter; my head was buzzing from the drinks we’d had at the bar around the corner.
In one smooth movement, the statuesque brunette dancer teetering on the highest heels I had ever seen peeled off her dental-floss-thin neon-green thong. She tossed the thong to one side, grabbed the pole, climbed up it. High above the crowd, she wrapped her thighs around the pole and bent over backward, throwing her arms open like an inverted angel.
The academic world in which I had grown up was right across the Bay, but it may as well have been a million miles from where I was. I studied a solitary businessman sitting at the next table. His tie was untied. His jacket was slung across the back of his chair. His eyes were glassy. He had been hypnotized. In this world, women had all the power, and men were at their mercy. I didn’t want to be a stripper; I was too shy, too insecure, too inhibited to take off my clothes in front of strangers. But I wanted what she had: the stage, the audience in awe, the men gawking at her. As a kid, I had longed for attention. This was an orgy of attention. As a pubescent teen, I was left to figure out my sexuality for myself because my mother was so unhappy. Here, sex was on parade, for sale, everywhere I looked. In the Block Project, I was the object, the one on view, the child studied by researchers from across tables in Tolman Hall’s austere experiment rooms. Now I was the voyeur, the looker, the scopophiliac. It was intoxicating.
As we sped back to the East Bay in the early-morning hours, I watched the city get smaller in the side-view mirror. My father was dead, but for a few hours I had forgotten about that. I could write about this. I could be a gonzo journalist, like one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, and immerse myself in it. Sex would be my beat.
Buy Data Baby here. Read more about my book here. Listen to an interview with me here.
(This post originally appeared in my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl: “What Carol Doda Taught Me.”)
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The Bay | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
I have a few upcoming readings for my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in the San Francisco Bay Area. On March 27, 2024, at 6:30 pm, I’ll be reading at Berkeley Public Library’s North Branch, in Berkeley, CA: “Author Talk with Susannah Breslin.” And, on April 27, 2024, at 11 am, I’ll be reading at Book Passage, in Corte Madera, CA: “Susannah Breslin - Data Baby : My Life in a Psychological Experiment (Corte Madera Store).” Buy my book here, read more about it here, and listen to me talk about it here.
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