The Academic Merits of Leopard Print and Coconut Oil

---

Or How to Visit a Strip Club One and a Half Times: A Guide for Catholic School Girls

Okay so picture this shit: six Filipino women in our early twenties, fresh out of college, sitting in a car outside a strip club having what can only be described as a collective nervous breakdown disguised as adventure.

We’d been doing the same tired suburban ritual—bars, clubs, the usual performance of being young and free while still terrified of what our high school teachers might think.¹

The city nights had become predictable, and predictable was the enemy of whatever the fuck we thought we were looking for.

“Let’s go to Hot Legs,” Marie said, because Marie was always the one pushing boundaries while the rest of us white-knuckled our rosary beads of respectability.

Hot Legs. A strip club with women dancers. Which felt—and here’s where our logic gets truly spectacular—safer somehow. Less threatening to our carefully constructed ideas about who we were allowed to be.

But then Jen, bless her contrarian heart, threw the curveball: “I know a place with male dancers.”

Christ.

In Which We Construct Elaborate Fantasies of Our Own Ruin

The entire drive there, we spun disaster scenarios like we were writing the pilot for our own telenovela. Our former teachers discovering us. Our parents disowning us. Headlines screaming about daughters of good families caught in vice raids.²

The paranoia fed on itself, growing with every kilometer until we’d convinced ourselves we were driving toward our own moral apocalypse. Because that’s what happens when you’re raised to believe your body and desire are ticking time bombs of shame, just waiting to explode and take down everyone you love.

“We need a cover story,” I announced, because I was the designated driver and somehow that made me the voice of reason in this carnival of bad decisions. “Research paper. Sociology class. Contemporary expressions of… uh… gender performance in nightlife environments?”

We practiced our academic bullshit like we were preparing for a fucking dissertation defense. The universe must have been howling.

Attempt One: A Comedy in One Act

First attempt was pure slapstick. Rain hammering the windshield, parking lot darker than my grandma’s confessional, and none of us brave enough to leave the car. The place lurked behind some forgotten restaurant, invisible from the highway—the kind of establishment that exists in the gaps between respectability and desire, in the spaces polite society pretends don’t exist.

Then came the knock on the window.

Six women screaming in perfect fucking harmony. The car shaking like we’d been hit by divine intervention. Some guy—dancer, bouncer, manifestation of our collective anxiety—grinning at our terror through the glass.

“We’re closed, ladies. Come back tomorrow. Earlier.”

The humiliation was exquisite. We drove away in mortified silence, which lasted approximately three minutes before we started laughing so hard I almost drove into a ditch.

But here’s the thing about being young and stupid and handed a story worth telling—you go back. Of course you go back.

In Which We Actually Do The Thing

The club the second night was everything and nothing we’d prepared for. Purple neon bleeding through smoke, bass lines crawling under your skin, the smell of desperation and Axe body spray mixing with something that might have been hope or might have been air freshener.³

The dancers remembered us. Of course they did. You don’t forget six women who scream at the sight of you like you’re a goddamn jumpscare.

We walked in trying to look casual, which is impossible when you’re six women entering a strip club like you’re infiltrating enemy territory. And then—because guilt makes you do stupid things—we just blurted it out.

“We’re here for research!” one of us announced to literally no one in particular. Maybe the bouncer. Maybe the universe. “For a paper! Sociology!”

That thing where you’re trying so hard to hide something that you just… vomit out your cover story before anyone even asks? Yeah. That.⁴

The dancers exchanged glances. The kind of glances that said they’d seen every type of customer walk through those doors, but six panicking women conducting “research” was a new flavor of chaos.

“So what’s this research really about?” asked a guy who called himself Blade, because of course he did. All sculpted abs and practiced smile—the kind of performance that makes you wonder about the man underneath the costume, the real person who goes home after work and probably just wants to eat leftover adobo and watch Netflix like everyone else.

“Contemporary expressions of gender and performance art in nightlife environments,” Jen shot back without missing a beat, while a dancer in leopard print briefs took center stage.

And then… fuck, I don’t know how to explain this without sounding like I’m writing bad erotica, but—

The world just… stopped.

He was slathered in coconut oil. Glistening. The lights hit him in this way that made everything else fade to black—like someone had taken a spotlight and decided he was the only thing worth illuminating in the entire universe. It was like watching a sunset, except the sun had decided to condense itself into one human body and just… dance.

We went silent.

His body moved like water, like something that understood physics better than we did. Every muscle catching the light, the coconut oil making his skin look like liquid gold. I couldn’t tell you if it was the lighting or the air or some kind of collective hallucination, but for those few minutes, it felt like he was dancing just for us. Just for me, even. Right there. Like the rest of the club didn’t exist.⁵

My brain completely short-circuited. Words? Gone. Coherent thoughts? Absolutely fucking nowhere. I just… stared. We all did.

“That one looks like he’s still in college,” Sarah finally managed to whisper, breaking the spell, fishing through her purse. “Should we put some money in for his college fund?”

Because even while watching a gorgeous man move his body in ways that probably violated several laws of our Catholic-adjacent conditioning, we were still Filipino women trying to be helpful.⁶

The club had a whole cast of characters—something for everyone’s type, a carefully curated fantasy buffet. In another booth, a couple sat watching the show, the woman’s hand resting casually on her boyfriend’s thigh. My brain couldn’t process it. What kind of date night involves bringing your girlfriend to watch gorgeous men strip? But there they were, comfortable as churchgoers, like this was just another Tuesday evening in the great absurd theater of human desire.

The Part Where Someone Calls Our Bluff (Finally)

“Shouldn’t you be interviewing us for this research?”

Another dancer, older, with the kind of knowing eyes that see through every bullshit story customers tell themselves. He slid into our booth and said what we were all thinking.

Game over. We dissolved into the kind of laughter that comes from relief as much as humor—the kind that says oh thank god, we can stop pretending now.

Three of my friends had plastered themselves against the back of our booth like they were trying to phase through the vinyl.⁷

Watching them lean away in slow motion while this guy—all charm and calculated sexuality—settled in next to them was like observing some bizarre mating ritual in reverse.

We stayed long enough to feel like we’d accomplished something. Short enough to maintain our delusions of propriety. Whatever those were worth by then.

The Aftermath, or: Wait, What Just Happened?

When we finally left, we walked out into the night air like we were emerging from underwater. None of us spoke for the longest time.

It wasn’t gross or weird like we’d expected. We were just… speechless. Mesmerized. I couldn’t tell if it was the way those men moved their bodies—the complete confidence in their own skin—or something else entirely.

Maybe it was about being seen. Or feeling seen, even if we knew it was performance, even if we knew it was literally their job. Here’s the thing nobody tells you about going to an all-girls-school-that-allowed-boys-later:⁸ you end up in this ecosystem that produces beauty queens and dancers and strong women who run industries, and if you’re not one of the beauty queens, you become very aware of being the plain one. The outlier. The girl guys didn’t have crushes on.

So there we were, six women who’d spent most of our lives feeling invisible to men, watching gorgeous men move like they were dancing just for us. I know it was their profession. I know it was theater. But my brain—my stupid, insecure brain that had catalogued every time I wasn’t chosen, wasn’t noticed, wasn’t desired—couldn’t quite process the geometry of it. The way his eyes seemed to find mine. The way the performance felt personal even though I knew it wasn’t.

Something about desire and performance and the strange theater of being human that we’d never quite seen laid bare like that.

We drove home in a trance, the city lights blurring past like watercolors bleeding into each other. Maybe it was the dancers. Maybe it was the realization that we’d crossed some invisible line we’d been afraid to approach our whole lives.

Maybe it was simpler than that.

Maybe we’d just seen something beautiful and raw and honest in a place we’d been taught to fear, and our brains were still trying to reconcile that with everything we thought we knew about shame and desire and being good girls.⁹

The Thing I Figured Out Later (Much Later)

Years later—like, years later when I’d stopped trying to be anyone other than my messy self—I started thinking it was never about the strip club at all.

It was about six women testing the boundaries of who we thought we were supposed to be. Discovering that sometimes the most interesting stories happen when everything goes sideways and your careful plans dissolve into chaos and you just… let it happen.

We were sociology students that night, just not the kind we pretended to be. We were studying ourselves—our fear, our curiosity, our desire, our shame. All the contradictory things we’d been taught we couldn’t be simultaneously.

Except… wait.

Maybe I’m doing that thing where I retroactively assign meaning to something that was just… a thing that happened. Maybe the grand lesson is that there is no grand lesson.¹⁰

Maybe I’m just really into abs. Maybe watching a gorgeous, confident man slathered in coconut oil move his body with that kind of precision just short-circuited my brain in the best possible way. Maybe the whole experience was just about feeling giddy because someone hot looked in my direction, even if I knew—knew—it was performance.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the whole story.

Also, never underestimate the power of a practiced ab flex and strategic coconut oil application to render an entire booth of women completely speechless. That’s just science.

Most of those friends have scattered now. Moved to Europe, chasing careers and lives and whatever it is we all chase when we leave our twenties behind. We barely see each other anymore—maybe once every few years if we’re lucky, if flights align and schedules cooperate and the universe feels generous.

But when we do manage to gather in the same room again, inevitably, inevitably, someone brings up that night. The strip club. The coconut oil. The screaming in the car. The fake sociology paper we never wrote. We’ll be sitting there having normal adult conversations about mortgages or whatever, and someone will just start laughing, and we’ll all know exactly what they’re thinking about.¹¹

It’s become this touchstone, this reminder of when we were young enough to be terrified of everything and brave enough to do it anyway. When desire felt dangerous and new. When we still believed we could get in trouble just for looking.

---

P.S. We never wrote that sociology paper. Obviously.

P.P.S. I still can’t hear bass-heavy music without remembering the specific way purple neon looks through cigarette smoke and the shape of my own fear dissolving into something that might have been wonder. And coconut oil. So much fucking coconut oil.

P.P.P.S. Blade, if you’re out there, I hope you got that degree. And I hope life’s been kind to you. Thanks for not making us feel like idiots that night. We were definitely idiots, but you were gracious about it.

P.P.P.P.S. To my friends scattered across Europe: remember when we thought we were going to get arrested for academic research? Remember when we couldn’t remember how to form sentences? I miss you weirdos. Let’s never forget how spectacularly we failed at being proper that night.