Pleasure Little Treasure is the name of a song by Depeche Mode, the favourite band of Elina Alminas’s estranged father. As she grew up, they also became her favourite; a link to the parent she never knew and, perhaps, a link to a past weighed down with troubled versions of masculinity.
As warped family backgrounds go, hers is rivalled only by that of Jamie Morton of My Dad Wrote a Porno fame. Born in Tallin in 1991, Alminas was a toddler when her grandmother opened the White Lion, Estonia’s first strip club. Her mother, working as a bartender, would shield her little girl’s eyes from the punters and leave her to do her homework backstage with the dancers, a “matriarchal society” in microcosm. The company of women was more reassuring than the extortion and exploitation front of house.
