The Psychology of Exotic Dancers

By Margo P. Goldman MD

Since I retired in 2021 from psychiatric/psychotherapy practice, I have participated in lifelong learning classes at Brandeis University. During the fall of 2025, I took a class, “Boston Vice: Sex and Censorship in Massachusetts,” which focused on Boston’s history of banning “obscene” literature and the advent of erotic live theater, including the rise and fall of Boston’s Combat Zone (aka adult entertainment district). I was especially intrigued by a reading assignment (“Dancing in the Combat Zone”)^[1] that featured descriptions of three individual (perhaps atypical) Combat Zone dancers: Lauri Lewin, Lucy Wightman (aka Princess Cheyenne) and Julie Jordan (aka Miss Bicentennial). These accounts demonstrated how each of their early life experiences contributed to their decisions to dance in the Combat Zone as well as how their pre-existing internal struggles were played out in and affected by their work.

According to the article, Lewin and Wightman both felt like outsiders during their childhood – Lauri Lewin was Jewish in a Southern Christian world. Because her appearance did not meet the local standards for beauty (blonde, blue-eyed, with button nose), she did not see herself as attractive. Similarly, Lucy Wightman did not identify with her “social register” community and acted out by getting herself expelled from an exclusive private school. I think these feelings of exclusion (and likely other factors) compromised their self-acceptance, prompting them to seek validation, new identities and a counterculture through erotic dancing. They seemed to have difficulty managing disparate components of their lives and therefore had split personas.

Lewin actually described having “dual identities” (a split sense of self) – her self-view contrasted with others’ views of her attractiveness; she saw herself in the stage’s mirrors as the audience perceived her, but she reported being unable to sustain that self-perception off-stage.  At the Combat Zone, she distinguished herself from her peers by emphasizing her middle-class student identity; in school she did so by asserting her identity as a stripper. I agree with the author’s assessment – though this strategy may have been Lewin’s defense mechanism, there was a cost: Being “not-this” or “not-that” probably obscured self-understanding as an autonomous individual. The “other” had to be present for her to self-define; this was likely based on how Lewin experienced the pervasive sense of being “othered” as a Jewish child in a Christian community. Interestingly, her traumatic painful (illegal?) abortion was a defining moment, and reportedly allowed her to feel real rather than continue to numb herself.

Wightman’s history was similar to Lewin’s, but unlike Lewin, she denied having two discrete identities. After her rebellious expulsion from school (at 17) for smoking marijuana, Wightman seemed to need validation from a completely different world. Away from home, she wandered and eventually landed in Boston’s Combat Zone. She incorporated her high-class heritage by performing for educated, well-off patrons as the “thinking man’s stripper.” She said, “stripping fulfilled her longing for rebellion/ adventure” and helped her “feel approved of and adequate – qualities she’d longed for and had lacked previously.” After marrying briefly and having a daughter, she felt “bored,” roamed again and later pursued a doctorate in psychology to become a psychotherapist. Like Lewin (who also pursued a mental health career), she conflated stripping with therapy, and believed that her striptease-associated clients’ “confessions” and sense of intimacy were like that experienced by patients with their therapist. Tragically, she abruptly left graduate school (as in high school, due to the disclosure of scandalized behavior), obtained a fake doctorate and supposedly became an effective, successful but unlicensed psychotherapist – until reported, criminally charged and convicted. To me, these self-sabotaging events were a repetition of her expulsion from private school and her resultant disengagement from her upper-class community. Like Lewin, a painful life event (her child’s death) was said to have enabled her to “find herself” and embark on a long-term career as a photographer. Wightman denied feelings of disintegration described by other dancers (i.e. Lewin) and claimed she felt “authentic.” However, based on her history of upheaval, impulsivity, searching behavior and self-destructive decisions, I believe she, like Lewin, had significant internal turmoil but was uniquely able to mask it with her superior intelligence and verbal skills. (Hopefully she obtained therapy somewhere along the way – perhaps after her child died. Maybe her memoir, now published, will answer some of these questions).

Julie Jordan, in contrast, was also Jewish but unlike Lewin, raised in a predominantly Jewish community, Brookline Massachusetts. Unlike Lewin and Wightman, she had no reported history of childhood trauma, rejection or pain. Her empathy and rage about persecuted, disaffected people led her to abruptly quit her waitressing job when a customer called a long-haired male friend a fag. Immediately after, she “danced her rage;” seeing herself in a mirror led her to explore Boston’s Combat Zone, where she felt captivated by the dancers and eventually auditioned for a job. The Combat Zone’s “other world” engendered a feeling of being special or privileged and made her a star – it was so different from her Brookline background, where she fit in as a Jew. (Rejection came later, when her parents extruded her due to her livelihood and their assumptions about associated drug addiction and prostitution). Like Lewin, she felt conflicted between her left of center, egalitarian world view and the Combat Zone’s exploitation of women. However, despite Jordan’s acknowledgement of internal conflict, she described them in a more integrated way – both exciting and fun, but scary, exploitive and sleazy – suggesting a more “whole” self-view than Lewin had because she was able to tolerate her contrasting feelings about her work. She later left dancing when the negatives outweighed the positives; she ultimately melded her dual perspectives both in her professional and personal lives by managing her husband’s music career and advocating for Afro-American musicians.

Each woman’s unique story explained her foray into dancing in Boston’s Combat Zone. By reading about their early lives’ impact on their choice of such unconventional work, I came to understand how much their dancing careers and performances reflected, and in some cases intensified each one’s self-view and identity.

Sources

^[1] Berson J. The Naked Result Chapter 5.