Pussycat Dolls Selling Sex In Spades
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A pink feather boa floated across the stage on unknown, slim shoulders. It cut through a ribbon of gray smoke as it made its way through the tired Viper Room on Sunset Blvd. As it slithered smoothly like a snake through the room, it caught the attention of every ounce of testosterone at the bar. "I want to be rich; I want to be famous" blared through some speakers, the bright lights spot lit the center of the Viper Room stage and the Pussycat Dolls revealed themselves.
These Pussycat Dolls are not the ones you see on TV. They are a group of dancers hand-plucked from hundreds during an audition by choreographer and Pussycat Dolls creator Robin Antin. They perform every Friday and Saturday night at the venue, strutting their scantly clad bodies for packed crowds. Last Friday, there were just enough young women in the audience for me to avoid feeling like I was watching a dirty strip club routine but too many older single men for it to feel like "just" a burlesque dance performance.


The dolls' voices were low, throaty and sultry in tone. They sang and danced to cover after cover of the popular group's greatest radio hits. As the music intensified, their hips swayed and thrust faster, appearing animalistic. The girls' bodies were mere vessels of sexual energy. Their most sensual parts, their breasts, their hips, their legs, were only accentuated further by the addition of sequins, feathers and chains fastened to their red and black bras and panties.
The dolls bent their bodies to the floor, stuck their rears in the air, then whipped their heads up creating a mess of their hair in one strong motion. One girl gripped a pole, not like the metal constrained her but allowed her to even further lift herself off the ground and into another world; one of white smoke and clouded bliss that billowed up from the floor of the stage and caressed as it wrapped around her legs.


The show took a dirty turn when one of the dolls climbed into a bath tub and pretended to bathe herself with a bright yellow sponge. She bent over in the tub and squeezed water down her backside and over her arms and her chest as the crowd hooted and whistled with approval. It felt comparable to watching a sex scene in a movie with your parents in the room; overtly sexual to the point of embarrassment.


At one point in the routine, the girls lay with their backs on the floor and their legs straight up in the air, showing off their thin, small panties with a "come hither" swing of the legs; open then closed, open then closed. Never once appearing fragile or submissive, their movements spoke a language of strength and assuredness of self. Some might argue that the entire performance was an exploitation of the female form, but there were no remnants of a dependent relationship with the opposite sex. The girls danced like they were empowered, dominating the stage and demanding attention as they shook their breasts violently and glared into the audience.


I tried to pin-point what it was about their movements that made the show so sexual, and tried to ignore the influence of the barely there costumes. I decided that it was the emphasis on the reproductive organs as the Venus of Willendorf came to mind. Each turn of the hips, leg lift and sway of the arms was meant to draw the viewer's eye to the dancer's breasts, vagina and rear end. Their faces, make-up, costumes and voices were all irrelevant. Every dance step had a distinct and loud purpose: to make you think about sex.
