People wonder, I try to answer. So it goes.
People take jobs of all kinds for various reasons – some people are lucky enough to do what they love and what they’ve always dreamed of. Others go into a profession they can tolerate because it provides security. Still others take whatever they can get so that they can do other things that are more important to them. Some people are willing to do something most others are not because they realize that it’s very lucrative to provide a specialized service (I really doubt most people ever aspire to work in slaughterhouses or to drive the honey wagon on film sets… and what little boy or girl dreams of cleaning up crime scenes?). Then there are those who reluctantly do one thing after another just to pay the bills and eat, who get trapped just staying afloat and trying to provide for their families, who feel that life is passing them by.
Some professions are dangerous; some are tedious. Some are dirty, or repugnant. The reasons each individual enters any given profession are their own, and reflect not at all on the job itself.
Therefore, it goes to follow that women want to be strippers for any of the reasons people take any job. When you meet a telemarketer, even though it takes very little talent or education it’s very rare to assume that she has that job because she’s not able to get another one, to wonder what she does in her spare time, or to assume that telemarketing is a lifestyle instead of a job. Strippers do it because they like the money – who doesn’t want to be paid well? Some strippers do it because they like the attention – is that bad? Babies look three times longer at faces that look back at them than at ones that are looking away. Humans are social creatures who learn through praise and validation. Wanting and enjoying attention isn’t necessarily unhealthy. Some strippers do it because they don’t have any other job skills. So do some telemarketers, cashiers, and ditch diggers. If you’re a happy housewife who wants to supplement your household income, but you got married instead of finishing college, what’s the difference between dancing and waitressing if it pays to repaint the nursery or add on a deck – especially when you can go to work after your children are in bed?
The blue-collar worker is the backbone of our society, yet many of these workers have limited educations and few alternatives. They’ve learned a skill, to perform a function. However, society needs the services and products they provide, whether the workers themselves dream of something better or not. Many of them love their jobs, too – that doesn’t change that quite a few of them aren’t qualified to do much else. There’s no shame in that.
Some strippers really do it because they’re beautiful and very stupid. Society has looked down on stripping as the refuge for dumb beauties for many years. But let’s look at that: being born genuinely stupid is no one’s fault any more than being born crippled or deformed. Stripping and other jobs that market beauty are really some of the very few ways that these women can truly empower themselves and command that kind of income, and there’s nothing they can do about that. Does that mean that they should simply resign themselves to their fate and live in some sort of caste system in which those born with less advantage may not transcend their station in life? Just because some women dance because they have no other skills doesn’t mean that they hate being there. It means that they’re earning more and living better than they could anywhere else under their present circumstances. Whether they change that in the future is entirely up to them, but in the meantime, what’s wrong with taking the better-paying job?
What I really resent is women who do very little to improve their own lot in life, compromise their own morality for short-term financial gain, and then blame the very industry that improved their lifestyle for victimizing them, exploiting them, or ‘sucking them in,’ effectively denying responsibility for their own actions and choices. Aside from Linda Lovelace, there are very few women that are truly forced, either through desperate poverty or some other difficulty, to walk up the steps and start undressing when the music begins to play. They could have made other choices, and endured further hardships to preserve their integrity (if they believe what they’re doing is wrong); many have done so before. In no other instance is an industry that provides such a quick leg up for those in need blamed for the very hardships it relieves. Instead of being seen as a cesspool that sucks in the needy and unsuspecting, the sex industry should be seen as an oasis for some in a desert of bad circumstances and limited earning potential.
(So some people become sex workers because they have no other skills, and that makes the industry exploitative? Isn't the entire premise of minimum wage paying people to do menial but necessary tasks for the very least you can pay them because they have no alternative but to do the work? No one works for minimum wage because they want to. They do it because they have no alternative, either temporarily or permanently. Are they being victimized, or is that simply the way industry works? Not to mention the fact that the poor, exploited dancers are making WAY more than minimum wage...)
Occasionally there’s a bad club or an unethical manager, and so people denigrate the industry for being abusive to women, but remember: sweatshop conditions don’t mean it’s wrong to make clothing, but that it’s wrong to exploit workers. In no other industry do we blame mistreated workers for their unfair treatment and refuse to help them or to provide recourse, then blame them because they should have known all along.
One thing that is common to virtually all strippers is that, regardless of their original motivation, they have looked past a widely held convention of society and examined something for its innate value and for its potential benefit to them. Yes, some women are desperate, whether through divorce or other unfortunate circumstance, when they start dancing. However, any person who remains unemployed for long enough after personal difficulty is bound to become desperate after a while, and the next job they take will then, by definition, be out of desperation. If you’re divorced, uneducated, or homeless and you take a job washing dishes or mopping floors and don’t like it, is your choice more valid somehow? Lives of quiet desperation are the desolate territory of all mankind.
I can’t speak for anyone else without being rightly accused of making assumptions. I can only tell you my own experience. The answer is not simple or short, but is probably reasonably typical.
When I was a young, poor college student and struggling actress, I never would have dreamed of dancing. I saw the ads in the paper and assumed the claims they made about the potential income were exaggerated. Moreover, I couldn’t really imagine myself actually walking into a place like that, climbing up on the stage, and disrobing. I worried about the kind of people I’d meet in a place like that; nice folks didn’t go there. I thought perhaps that other dirty, seedy things went on there – after all, if a woman is willing to take her clothes off for money, what wouldn’t she be willing to do for a price? I took the conventional route, and had a conventional idea of what people did and didn’t do.
Then a friend of mine, a girl I liked and respected, started showing up at the restaurant where I worked the graveyard shift and leaving huge tips after her meal. I was so dirt poor, I couldn’t really imagine what it was like to have an extra $20 to eat out, much less $10 on top of that just to tip the help. The job I had before that, I used to go into the cooler when no one was looking and stuff food into my mouth so that I didn’t pass out from hunger and get fired.
I wondered about it for a couple of weeks, and then one day she brought it up: she was dancing now in a go-go club. That meant that she didn’t actually expose anything private, she just danced in a teeny bikini or a bra and panties.
I was shocked. So this was how she had so much money. I could hardly believe it. I had read about strippers, but assumed that they had to have been cut from an entirely different cloth than I to do a job like that; they weren’t like me. I didn’t know people like that. But she seemed so normal… she was the same girl I’d always known. She didn’t seem dirty or diminished; she hadn’t suddenly lost her mind. I had a lot to think about.
Still, I didn’t consider it in relation to myself, only in my perception of her. My objections were partially moral and partly because I didn’t think my self-image could stand being looked at without my clothes on. I didn’t look like the girls on the magazine covers, so I clearly wasn’t beautiful enough to let people see me that way. I went on about my business for several months more, hating my job, miserably trying to make time to study, to rehearse and audition, all the while barely eking out an existence. There was never food in the house. Our power and phone had been shut off more than once. I never had money to go to the movies or to buy new clothes. When my work pants got damaged, a friend’s mother kindly took me out to get a new pair so that I could keep my job. My life was a dead end. This was the single unhappiest period of my life.
Then I began dating someone new. I had known him for a while, but we had been friends for a long time before we became romantically interested in each other. He was older than I, an artist. I found out that he often went to a certain strip club on nights he wasn’t around our crowd to draw the dancers.
I struggled with the things that most of my older feminist friends would have said about how bad that was, how it meant that his view of women was skewed, that he saw them as objects, not people. However, he treated me like a person, not an object. My mother always told me that actions speak louder than words; I think sometimes we forget that universal truths don’t always support our position.
Then I had a personal tragedy: my ex-boyfriend, my first love and a longtime friend, was killed in a car accident. I was overwhelmed with grief. The restaurant where I worked refused to give me a couple of days off to go to the funeral and deal with my crippling sorrow. Suddenly it all became too much, and in the next few weeks it became impossible for me to continue in the poverty-stricken life of drudgery I was living. When you’re 18, it seems like bad things are really never going to end, that things are always going to be the way they are just at that moment. I quit my job, not knowing what I would do next.
(Please note here that I wasn't desperate. Unhappy, yes - but 18, able-bodied, drug-and-alcohol-free, employable, educated, and loved and supported by friends and family. My destitution, though the hunger was real, was that of students and artists, not of the truly disadvantaged. What happened next was by choice, not out of necessity or lack of alternatives.)
My boyfriend told me that the club where he spent time was hiring waitresses. It wasn’t actually dancing, and the job requirements were much less stressful: I had been working at an all-you-can-eat diner, bringing plate after plate to drunks and freaks in the middle of the night, and the tips were meager, to say the least. Here, all I had to do was bring soda or juice, and I would be pleasantly surprised at my earnings.
It didn’t take too much thought. I was still unsure about what I thought of stripping, but since I was just going to be a waitress, it didn’t really apply to me. I was younger then, and didn’t really understand yet about choosing things and what they really mean, and about condoning things through proximity or silence. I did know that many of the things that adults had told me as the gospel truth had turned out, as I got older, to be gray areas, so I wasn’t sure that just because I had always been told something that it necessarily meant that’s the way it is.
To make a long story short, I worked there as a waitress for a few months, commanding a higher income than ever before and living at a level of comfort I hadn’t known since I left home, getting to know the dancers and the customers and watching their interactions. I enjoyed this job. I suddenly realized that I was happy. I had worked in retail, in food service, in offices, and always hated going to work. After a very short time I realized that dancing didn’t look bad to me at all. It would be a few years before I really examined all of the ramifications of my actions and decided to become an activist and to see sex work as a relevant social issue. I was a child then, and all I knew was that I could see that it wasn’t what I had thought. Simply realizing that the dancers were real women whose experiences I could relate to went a long way toward reevaluating the validity of the things most mainstream society had told me about them. I saw that the picture most people had of them was unfair; that they were people, not ideas, and that morality wasn’t black and white. As I got older, I had already begun to realize that sometimes what society thinks of as moral isn’t at all. I knew I had to decide for myself, to open my eyes and see how things really worked.
Another profound realization for me was that these women didn’t look like the girls on magazine covers, either. They were real women, with real bodies: some with stretch marks, some with extra weight or cellulite. I suddenly realized that they were beautiful, that the magazines were wrong. In one instant this burden, carried by young girls all over the world, was lifted from my shoulders, and I came one step closer to truly understanding what it is to be a woman.
After a while I realized that it wasn’t scary, that the things I assumed a woman would feel standing nude in a roomful of strangers (scared, exposed, humiliated, subservient, compromised) weren’t what these dancers were feeling, and that because the experience wasn’t what I would have thought, the reasons that brought each woman to that experience weren’t what I would have thought (desperation, apathy, self-hatred, emotional disturbance), either.
Once I saw it for what it really was, once I was willing to accept that I risked being perceived differently (and erroneously) by others, I knew I could do it.
I remember some of the dancers warning me before I auditioned that this was not to be entered into lightly or unadvisedly; that I was about to change my life. I didn’t understand what they meant, really. The young don’t really know what we mean when we tell them how something is going to be, any more than any of us really knew what ‘hot’ meant when we were tiny; we saw that it was important to our mothers, that the thing we weren’t supposed to touch was significant, that something bad would happen – but we didn’t really know what it was like to be burned until we finally disregarded her advice.
So I did it. I took the plunge, I shouldered the responsibility, I crossed the line. I realized that I loved it. I loved the money (who doesn’t love a well-paying job after working for peanuts?), I enjoyed the attention (I wasn’t desperate for it, but was pleased by it, like a friend dropping by unexpectedly, or good news from far away – it’s nicer to have a job where someone claps for you than one where your hard work goes unappreciated, after all), I came to understand the incredible power of female sexuality and the joy of truly knowing how to use it – and realized that enjoying it wasn’t undignified or perverse. I came to see the interaction as a good thing, and I was pleased to participate. I liked the other girls, we laughed a lot at work, my bills were paid, I had time to study and money to buy books, and I could do any play any time without worrying about having to quit my job to rehearse. I learned what was truly part of the job and what came from the outside (the desire to humiliate any woman, dancer or not, comes from inside that person and not from where they’re standing), and saw stripping from the only valid perspective, which, as it is with any aspect of the human condition, is firsthand experience.
They were right. It did change my life. When I think of what could have happened if I hadn’t walked into that dark place out of the bright sunlight that day, if I hadn’t decided to take a risk and see something new, I feel the way someone might if they suddenly realized that they had narrowly missed being hit by a truck: I could have missed so much.
Copyright 2000 - 2002 Alysabeth Clements
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