Striptease is older than almost any form of entertainment still practiced today. The first performance widely cited as a modern striptease took place in Paris in 1893, and the art of the tease – the slow reveal, the play between concealment and exposure – has been reinventing itself ever since. Burlesque halls gave way to nightclubs, nightclubs to strip clubs, and now, increasingly, the strip club is giving way to the screen.

This isn’t a story of decline. It’s a story of a centuries-old performance form finding a medium that suits it better than anything before – and, in the process, becoming more interactive, more personal, and more accessible than ever.

What the stage could never offer

The traditional strip club is a fundamentally constrained environment. You see, whoever is working that night. You watch from a fixed distance in a shared room. The performance is, by necessity, for the whole audience at once – even a private dance happens within a club’s walls, on the club’s schedule, at the club’s prices.

For decades, that was simply what striptease was. The constraints were invisible because there was no alternative. Then webcams arrived, and the alternative turned out to be radically less constrained in nearly every dimension that matters to an audience.

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