The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Please, Drew Barrymore, don't do a dating reality show! Plus: Christmas at 30 Rock, another Gossip Girl couple, and since when is Elisha Cuthbert 'sloppy seconds'?
Meet Jordan in her live NerveCenter Chat on Thursday, October 12, 4PM EST.
I had been banished. The viewers had chosen me, by a landslide vote, over the other hamster nominated for banishment, Curtis the Lawyer. As I walked to the red door, I was aware of millions of invisible eyes — more so than ever before, despite the fact that I had been living in a television show, with twenty-eight cameras and over sixty microphones (plus streaming live video on the Internet), twenty-four hours a day for the past month.
At the end of the sidewalk stood my grinning boyfriend, arms outstretched. I was whisked away into a car, bombarded with fumbling hands and voices shouting instructions. In the studio, there were cheers from strangers — and mortified looks from my sister and best friend. Smarmy CBS host Julie Chen grinned like a barracuda, then introduced a montage of film clips: me sobbing, relentlessly pursuing twenty-three-year-old Josh, talking endlessly about sex and my past as an exotic dancer. I had become America's newest vixen: the conniving, lecherous woman with a "bad heart."
In the eyes of America, I was Jordan the Stripper.
As with my stint on Big Brother, I had begun exotic dancing on a whim. One day I was working at an outdoor adventure store for five dollars an hour, the next I was making five hundred dollars a night as a topless dancer. The money was an obvious factor: "self-discovery" trips to Hawaii and Central America had maxed out my credit cards. But curiosity was my primary motive. The job was many things: empowering, degrading, exhilarating, exhausting. I was both proud and ashamed to be part of it. I didn't tell my family; no one but my closest friends. And now I was telling the entire country.
When I first entered the Big Brother house, I was struck by the diversity: two African-Americans, an "alternative girl" with pink hair and a nose ring, an Asian-American, a man with one leg. But that excitement dissolved. With one exception, the people there seemed boring to me: they wanted to play cards and do chores, not have candid talks. I felt alienated and uncomfortable — emotionally stonewalled. Everything (and everyone) seemed eerily fake.
And I was haunted by my past: paranoid about the lens through which people saw me, and driven to prove them wrong. I thought of myself (and assumed the producers thought of me) as more than a stereotypical "stripper": I was an Ironman triathlete, an educated person. But around the fourth or fifth day, I had a nightmare. I was back in the club where I used to work. In my dream, I was approaching men, soliciting "dances" and being rudely rejected. I was walking around with a price tag, trying to convince people to purchase me. Would anyone like to buy my image? My affection? My attention? A moment of my time?
That vulnerability, that rejection, was horrifying. But it was exactly what I had started feeling again in the house: emotionally starved, unable to relax and be myself — and increasingly defensive. I realize now that I was defensive before I entered the house; it was me against society. I had always felt that I needed to compensate for the stereotypes applied to me as a dancer (dumb girl, whore), and now I was overcompensating. What's more, no one was getting my jokes. The second round of nominations, I dressed in male drag, as a character called "Mario," a persona I had used in my audition tape — joking that if I became someone else, people would stop nominating me. Everyone just thought I was weird.
The isolation was affecting us all. The only sounds we heard were each other's voices, the clucking of chickens, and the incessant high-pitched whine of a camera in pursuit of anyone who moved — and then the macro focusing of the lens as soon as the target was framed.
In this environment, we had no one to turn to except each other. Myself, I turned toward Will-Mega, the "angry black man" of the group. He was the only houseguest who shared my sense of humor, and the two of us joked about creating a website called irritators-agitators-instigators.com. We flirted, too, bantering back and forth as he accused me of having a "six o'clock — straight up and down" white-girl's ass. He called me his "only black friend" in the house. So when Mega was the first one banished, I was flooded with anxiety. On one hand, I felt relieved — and shocked — not to have been banished myself. On the other hand, I was now a sitting duck. The others pretended to be pleased I was there, but it was obvious how they felt.
I changed my approach. If there weren't going to be "deep talks," I might as well be entertaining — sexy and provocative. Someone needed to spice the place up. And it didn't hurt that Big Brother supplied us with plenty of alcohol after Mega's banishment. Later that evening, slightly drunk after several glasses of wine, I wandered back to my room and climbed up to my bunk.
A few minutes later, Josh came into the bedroom. His cuddling with virgin Brittany was the talk of the guests, but it irritated me at the time: it seemed like a cute ploy by Brittany to hide sexual motivations under the guise of innocence. He asked if he could "come up there"; I laughed it off as a bad idea. He slipped his hand under the covers and playfully tapped me. The other houseguest in the room, Cassandra, was irritated by the noise, and Josh suggested we go to the men's bedroom.
We sat on his bed, alone in the dark, laughing and relaxing. I knew how it would look, but I didn't care. Lights weren't blinding me, people weren't chattering in my ear about useless fluff; even the cameras were unusually still. Josh began to whisper about his feelings of sexual restlessness, and for that moment a space of intimacy was created, an illusion of privacy. I was flattered. After two weeks of unspoken mutual flirting, Josh, loosened up by alcohol, declared his affection for my "abs, thighs and tight butt" and made an offering — "the ball's in your court." I was so desperate for positive reactions that it was refreshing to have someone actually affirm me, even in such a surface way, rather than shutting me out.
And Josh was wearing my boyfriend's cologne: the familiar musky scent reminded me of what I missed — being touched, being kissed . . . intimacy. This was how infidelities happened, I knew. So I started analyzing these dynamics out loud, as a way to protect myself from reacting, knowing that these feelings of arousal had more to do with stress than anything else. Laying side by side, the two of us giggled about this attraction we would never act on, joking about how warped the situation was.
But even with the cameras deathly still, I wasn't naive enough to think that we weren't being watched. Big Brother would be stupid to miss this. It was a strange space, a quasi-reality: eerily similar to my experiences in the sex industry, where the line between real intimacy and fantasy is radically blurred. I was strangely comfortable in such an environment. And frankly, I was just plain bored: the performer in me surfaced and I knew this would make "good TV," even if nothing really happened.
Back in the club, I would enter as Jordan, retreat to the locker room and emerge as "Dyllan," my stage persona. It was hard to separate the two — and I often felt uncomfortable, a cartoon of my own sex appeal. On Big Brother, I slid once again into a persona: the playful, carnal, confrontational me, with all other elements stripped away. As much as I thought of myself as an honest person, dancing meant deception. The honest truth — "I would only date you if I was blind and deaf and needed a ride somewhere" — became a white lie — "I can't date people I meet in the club, but I'd love to" (flash of a seductive smile).
Of course, this mix of intimacy and flirtatious play-acting didn't show up on screen. In the end the editors reduced my three-hour discussion with Josh down to a few juicy images and a sound bite of me murmuring seven seductive words — "my sex drive is out of control."
It only went downhill from there. Two weeks later, I was voted out. I had gone in to find out about myself. But what I experienced was rejection, devastation, insecurity. I questioned myself: Was I conceited and condescending? Mean-spirited? Was my style of communication all wrong? Was I really nothing but a stripper? Six weeks later, I'm still struggling to make sense of it all. I've found myself trolling the Internet postings looking for answers — a bad habit, addictive and masochistic.
As with dancing, there's a part of me that feels disturbed by my experience. Certainly, I often felt out of control: crying alone in the bathroom, in front of millions of viewers. But there's another part that feels proud of who I was onscreen. So I'm a confrontational person, so I'm a "drama queen," passionate and sometimes flirtatious! So some people don't like me — so what?
The hardest part is that this is all so public. I don't want to be a victim: I want to fight, to be strong, to be certain of who I am. And I know that I brought all of this on myself — I chose to go on the show, after all. But some days, I feel naked in front of a nation of people, as if they are all pointing and whispering behind my back. Some days, I feel weak and depressed. Maybe I just care way too much about what people think of me; maybe I need to grow an exoskeleton and tell everyone to fuck off. I never had an issue with being physically naked before. But now I am personally naked. And it is the worst feeling I could ever imagine.
Meet Jordan in her live NerveCenter Chat on Thursday, October 12, 4PM EST.
In the studio, there were cheers from strangers — and mortified looks from my sister and best friend. Smarmy CBS host Julie Chen grinned like a barracuda, then introduced a montage of film clips: me sobbing, relentlessly pursuing twenty-three-year-old Josh, talking endlessly about sex and my past as an exotic dancer. I had become America's newest vixen: the conniving, lecherous woman with a "bad heart."
relax and be myself — and increasingly defensive. I realize now that I was defensive before I entered the house; it was me against society. I had always felt that I needed to compensate for the stereotypes applied to me as a dancer (dumb girl, whore), and now I was overcompensating. What's more, no one was getting my jokes. The second round of nominations, I dressed in male drag, as a character called "Mario," a persona I had used in my audition tape — joking that if I became someone else, people would stop nominating me. Everyone just thought I was weird.
chattering in my ear about useless fluff; even the cameras were unusually still. Josh began to whisper about his feelings of sexual restlessness, and for that moment a space of intimacy was created, an illusion of privacy. I was flattered. After two weeks of unspoken mutual flirting, Josh, loosened up by alcohol, declared his affection for my "abs, thighs and tight butt" and made an offering — "the ball's in your court." I was so desperate for positive reactions that it was refreshing to have someone actually affirm me, even in such a surface way, rather than shutting me out.
Certainly, I often felt out of control: crying alone in the bathroom, in front of millions of viewers. But there's another part that feels proud of who I was onscreen. So I'm a confrontational person, so I'm a "drama queen," passionate and sometimes flirtatious! So some people don't like me — so what?
Meet Jordan in her live 
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
