The China I remembered was publically nonsexual. Giant roadside posters, at once propaganda and public art, portray a woman and a man smiling toward the horizon. The scene is entirely sanitized, doggedly optimistic in the style of socialist realism. I returned this summer to find a mammoth advertisement for Coors Beer near my home: a five-story tall woman, clothed in silver cellophane, pouts provocatively at the viewer while holding a bottle of Coors next to her bare hip.

The change seemed startling to me. Seven years ago, the Chinese female was valued for her industry, her ability to "hold up half the sky"; now she is visibly a marketer of sex, and the Chinese male a willing buyer. What I saw was the integration of something once marginal into the mainstream. And this is the theme for both Viagra and Stripped : phenomena on the margins of "normal sexuality" and how they can find their way back to public acceptance.

For Meika Loe, an assistant professor of sociology and gender studies, Viagra presented a convenient case study of male sexuality. Since the drug's debut in 1998, Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, has mounted a spectacularly successful media campaign that accomplished two goals. It cemented the idea, in the minds of the male public, that sexual performance is a requisite of masculinity, and at the same time, it also legitimized erectile dysfunction (ED) as a biological result of aging. By attributing sexual dysfunction to a somatic origin, Pfizer lifted the burden of shame from sufferers of ED. They can now comfortably think of themselves as virile men betrayed by bodies in need of repair, rather than sexually inadequate eunuchs, and the very act of medicalizing ED also removes it from the shady realm of sexual aberrations. Pfizer's media blitz clearly branded Viagra as the path to normal masculinity. Even the name itself--suggested by some as a combination of vigor and Niagara --pegged the little blue pill "as a powerful, vital, potent, thundering entity," the perfect antithesis to the vulnerability and powerlessness it cures.

Loe is certainly not a medical historian, but her account of Viagra and how it came to be is incisive and entertaining, with a dash of Viagra humor ("Did you hear about the first death from an overdose of Viagra? A man took twelve pills and his wife died"). Her writing is lively and informal, with none of the staid pretentiousness one might fear from an academic. Her analysis of Prozac and Viagra is particularly memorable. Neither of them, she notes, are for life-threatening situations; both promise a higher quality of life and even the construction of new and better identities. While Viagra is primarily marketed to males, Prozac claims a mostly female clientele. One creates sexually potent men; the other creates happy, focused women. This is, Loe argues, the restoration to classic gender roles and power relationships. That these two drugs have become so popular despite their cost suggests that society is deeply uncomfortable straying away from this chauvinistic norm, a rather dismaying thought.

In fact, if we consider a strong, sexually dominant male and a passive, content female to be the social rule, then male weakness and female aggressiveness are abnormal deviants. Viagra is a convenient and quick fix for both, bringing those involved back to the status quo. A New York Times article from December 2003 describes the "Samantha complex"--inspired by the fictional Samantha Jones of "Sex and the City"--as men's fear of "wilting in the face of a new wave of sexually empowered women." It is this performance anxiety that has led Viagra to shift its focus from sixty-year old retirees recovering from prostate cancer to a younger generation simply looking for security and confidence. In this capacity, Viagra becomes all the more controversial. It fuels what Loe terms the "mythic masculinity," this mad ideal of a man always desiring sex and always ready to deliver. Creating such a narrow and unsustainable definition of what masculinity and sex ought to be is bound to have emotional and psychological repercussions. Loe cites a few interviews in which her subjects dismiss Viagra for that reason, though she does not further explore the trap inherent in the drug: that by establishing unrealistic expectations, Viagra simply creates more anxiety and pressure.

If Viagra is about the possibility for restoration or renormalizing, then Stripped never quite leaves the fringe. Bernadette Barton, like Loe, is also a professor of sociology and gender studies. Her five-year study of exotic dancers involved hundreds of interviews and personal forays into various strip clubs in San Francisco, Hawaii, and her main site of study, a Southeastern city she codenames "Silverton." The environment she investigated is created for male desire at excesses, where the dancers play to male fantasy. Exotic dancing, though legal, is uncomfortably regarded by the mainstream as just a step away from prostitution: both attach monetary value to the female body. The behavior encouraged in the dancers is far removed from what one would expect from a "respectable" woman, and this is perhaps an implicit signal to the male clients that they can also leave the expectations of civil society behind. Consequently, dancers face daily abuse at the hands--often quite literally--of clients. This leads to the most worthwhile portion of Stripped : how dancers protect themselves from the damages inherent in long-term work in the industry.

Barton does give a fair exposition, and she first explains that sex work can be lucrative for those with little education or work experience, and it is the only industry in which women on average earn more than men (a statistic that Barton uses to support her notion that America is a "phallocentric society"). She finds, however, that the benefits of dancing--the money, the flexibility, the ego boost--became overshadowed by its far more negative aspects in usually three years. In interviews, dancers expressed frustration at their inability to attain financial stability or form fulfilling relationships. In response to these industry-unique harms, dancers tend to form close bonds with each other, and Barton even surmises, at one point, that dancers turn to lesbian relationships because they find the heterosexual club environment so draining. The most personally rewarding form of defense mechanism seems to be the transition from sex worker to a sex activist. A few dancers offer narratives of how they became politicized, and in the process of fighting for the rights of their co-workers, they gained a more lasting sense of empowerment and self-agency. They were also the dancers least ostracized by society--they rose above sex work, became the archetypal "fallen women redeemed," and cleansed themselves of the stigma of being an exotic dancer. This possibility of redemption is, however, limited to a sterling few.

Barton has chosen a fascinating topic, so it is regrettable that, with the exception of a few excerpts, her writing is largely flat and predictable, with none of the refreshing novelty that makes Loe's book such a pleasure to read. Despite Barton's claim that she has spent countless hours sitting in strip clubs, her only observation is that "they are all dimly lit with black lights, play loud music, and have one to several stages for the dancers," hardly the most insightful of descriptions. She relies on the words of the dancers she interviewed to provide authenticity, but the constant switching from one dancer's narrative to another's becomes unmanageably schizophrenic. Nonetheless, her exploration of female sexuality is a fitting, and even necessary, counterpart to Loe's Viagra . When read in tandem, the two works show that the boundary between the norm and the margins is permeable, and for Loe and Barton, the very act of writing may be the attempt to bridge the gap.

Nancy Yang likes the idea of margins.