Every generation gets its own version of history, whether it's about Civil War battles or the making of the atom bomb or the invention of the striptease. Historian Jessica Glasscock has written a postfeminist history of bump and grind, "Striptease: From Gaslight to Spotlight." Smartly written and marvelously illustrated, Glasscock charts the stripper's progress from the original Victorian "Venus in Fur" Pauline Markham to America's foremost peeler Gypsy Rose Lee to "the World Famous *BOB*," a modern stripper who stands on stage agitating a martini shaker with her breasts.

Glasscock's history is certainly not your mother's striptease book. This is no feminist condemnation of Western society's exploitation of women. Glasscock's political bent is a form of loose postfeminist Marxism. Her book is a history of "undercurrents, underclasses, and underwear. And it is a history of undeniable fun aimed not at the head, the heart, or even the stomach, but just south of all three."

I meet Glasscock, age 33, in a greasy spoon across from my apartment on Second Avenue in New York. Glasscock sports a Louise Brooks bob. Her nostrils flare as she laughs and there is a tattoo of a Lalique Art Nouveau design on her left arm. A tiger prowls on her right. She is dressed in a 1940-ish blouse and dark slacks. I have to laugh when she tells of working for the ACLU in a room staffed with prim middle-aged feminists from the 1970s. "It really upset them how I dressed," she laughs. "The ACLU didn't have a dress code and they couldn't vocally disapprove of the fact that I wore a corset every day to work."

So how on earth did a girl like you write such a book?

I've been interested in transgressive women. That goes all the way back -- my mother was a feminist. She started a women's art group in Alabama where I'm from. She's been with feminists fighting pornography. When I started getting into stripteases, it was not my mother's kind of feminism. I felt like stripping and striptease related to the idea that you can control what someone can do with their body.

How did you get from Alabama to New York?

I always wanted to come to New York. In Alabama I was always, "I'll be out of here soon and in New York." I'm been in the city since I was 18, in 1988. I also ended up working for the ACLU because I thought I was going to be a lawyer, but after working for lawyers for four years, I thought, Why would I want to do this? So I got interested in costume design, and met a designer who did a lot of club clothes for drag queens and dominatrixes. I wanted to get my graduate degree in costume studies and wanted to write a book. My first idea was to write a book on Mardi Gras, but I found someone else was doing a book on that. Then I thought about striptease because I'd been very interested in turn-of-the-century Salome dancers, which was considered the first striptease. I did my thesis on the birth of striptease, tracing its costumes. That ended up being my book proposal.

I can't imagine a woman older than you desiring to write such a book. I'm 10 years older than you. When I remember the vast number of girls who got naked for me in the late 1970s, I realize that to gaze upon a naked girl in appreciation was considered "objectification." Back then, in order to not be a sexist, you had to look without taking in what you were looking at. The idea of hooting at a striptease show would have been considered the lowest rung of cheap sexism.

But in the 1970s, you didn't need striptease because everyone had pornography. And it was private. You didn't need to worry about being seen objectifying a woman because you had this other way to objectify a woman privately.

But there was no wonderful glory of finally seeing someone naked. When were you married?

Two years ago.