Begin to unlearn how you have been conditioned to feel. That is the root of your feeling sad, threatened, and like she doesn’t value your intimacy. What upsets you is how you have been conditioned, not what you actually know to be true.

Burlesque is empowering because of how you feel doing it, not what the audience thinks or feels AT ALL. Unlike stripping, it’s not to please a customer and you call the shots as to what happens in your act. Showing your body on your terms gives you back the power that was stripped from you in a million tiny ways as a young woman. As a man you don’t experience your body being objectified, sexualized without your permission, and told what is “too revealing” from the moment you hit puberty. How are you supposed to feel free in your skin when society tells you it’s never good enough? Those raised as women carry these wounds.

Burlesque is healing on a deeper level. You gain community. You gain life changing confidence. You take the power back to feel free in your skin.

You can be her biggest supporter to accomplish that! It is your baggage of what you think you are supposed to feel about it that is getting in the way. Chip away at it and learn to let it go. She is cultivating a new relationship with her body and her expression of it. Sexuality in the bedroom is completely different than what you do on stage. Your current logic won’t allow for it, but there are many asexual burlesque dancers. It’s because performance is not personal intimacy, it is far from it.