The sex work industry’s way of bonding people for life and opening their eyes to the ways that people hurt each other.
I hid dancing from my dad for about a month before he found out. I’m still not entirely sure how he found out, but in honesty his family is like a chain in a game of Telephone. It starts with one person, then moved to the next, and by the time it got back to my dad the truth was so convoluted that I had to fight the lies. He asked me that day why I didn’t tell him, if I did not trust him. I love him, but when it comes to safeguarding my heart and emotional wellbeing, or my siblings’ for that matter, he’s never been the most proactive. So, no, I did not trust him. It was two years later when he picked an argument in which he attacked and belittled my life, that he yelled that I didn’t understand what it was like to be so embarrassed by my child, that I was a fucking stripper. That argument ended him ‘disowning’ me for over a year, in which he told me to not text, not call, not even write letters to my family. I wanted to scream this is why I didn’t trust you to begin with into the phone, but he hung up and left me wondering why my father hated me so much. I don’t really think he does now, but he can be a lot sometimes. I just try to navigate it as best as I can because I don’t hate him, and I need to be there for my siblings.
This is one truth to my story. The others are the unfortunate, unavoidable pitfalls of the industry. With vulnerability, the key aspect to what makes strip clubs such a draw, comes people who seek to take advantage of it and create their own warped reality. Though I love this industry, it has broken me and rebuilt me in so many ways. In my own way, I’ve broken it back in the ways I’ve sought to defend the very people within. Not every person here wants advocacy, and they’re all capable of speaking for themselves. But I’ll join the voices of the other girls, the ones who took sovereignty over their bodies and used these places to break the wheels of abuse and poverty in their own lives. Despite the drama, I’ve never seen a community more bonded by the ties of trauma, growth, and support.
Girls were petty over money. Some are petty over looks, but these days snide commentary on someone else’s body and appearance don’t get you far socially. But money was the driving factor. It came with envy, desperation, and self-disappointment. It led women to pit against each other; to create cliques that would prowl the club together like a hungry pack of wolves — snatching up every big table and customer they could by working together and excluding everyone else. I support it though; my friends and I frequently tag-teamed groups of customers, bounced them from each other to see who could break the challenging ones. We traveled danced as a group, explored the southern United States together, and hustled together. It’s like that quote from Talladega Nights — in the strip club, if you’re not first, you’re last. That competitive edge in the strip clubs will never go away, but at least working together in groups is a step towards uplifting others.
The more you created friendships in the club, the more money came to you. As girls left and new ones took their places, you sort of build up notoriety as a vet girl. The brand-new ones look at three years in the industry as if you’ve been there for ten. They eagerly eat up any words of advice, any pole tricks you’ll teach them, and any lap dance you offer them an in on. They come to you when the customers are being assholes, because they trust you to advocate for them, when they’re still learning to advocate for yourself.
In the strip club, people think age is an important number when they first get there. People believe that every dancer will stop dancing when she no longer retains her youth. Until you’re exposed to the older women who miraculously don’t age or have stellar doctors, or the ones who’ve let their skin crease and their hair grey who just know how to smooth talk a man from years of experience. In my opinion, those women know how to wrangle anybody. Younger, older men, it never mattered. They knew every trick in the book. I learned from them more than anyone else. I knew one woman who retired out after developing more than five decades of wealth from dancing into her fifties. She was beautiful, but she did look her age in a graceful way. She had lines, creases, and cellulite but she wore all of it with pride. When she walked, she glided. She had long hair that was streaked with gray that swung down her back and the body of a ballerina. Her smile could blind you and her voice could make you melt. She was definitely the type of woman whose age didn’t define her, despite it making itself present. She was a skilled pole dancer and an amazing person, overall. I never spoke to her after she retired, but I hope she’s doing well.
We taught each other and held each other when we cried. Even women who expressly didn’t like one another didn’t let customers talk on the other girls. One time a customer reached up and slid a dollar over the back part of my G-string and brushed up where he wasn’t supposed to. A girl I constantly fought with noticed. She could have ignored it out of her own personal distaste for me. But instead, she snatched that man up by the lapel of his shirt in her nine-inch heels and yelled, “If you ever touch one of these girls like that again, I will shove my heel so far up your ass, you’re going to feel it in your throat.”
She was small like me, both of us under five feet tall. But the venom in her voice had that man shook. He’d just stared at her wide-eyed, like a deer in the headlights, before the floor hosts escorted him out for his behavior. Though we still had our squabbles after that, I had a respect for her, and even admiration in a way. I watched girls overcome addiction and abusive relationships in these clubs. Even if a girl hated you, if she overheard that your husband laid his hands on you, she’d sit with you and tell you what you needed to hear in the kindest way. We celebrated the accomplishments of our coworkers, from sobriety to school. Many of us came to work, textbooks in hand, laptop charged, and worked on our education during slow times. Every single time, the other women were our cheerleaders. A former coworker and I made a pact to bake each other goods when we passed our midterm exams.
We brought each other balloons and cakes for birthdays, gifts for Christmas, and supported each other’s businesses. We cracked down on those who tried to abuse one of us, because the trauma bonds we formed overcame any existing issues. Girls would fist fight in the back and still would never let people lay a finger on their fellow dancers. Girls would literally pull up on each other outside of the club to fight, but still wouldn’t let a dancer be slapped or beaten by a customer. They wouldn’t let these customers sexually assault us. I came into the back sobbing one day after a customer laid his hands on me, leaving me bruised and covered in red patches and scratches on my skin. One of the girls, who’d never really spoken to me previously, took pictures of it. The other three girls who’d been in the dressing room hugged me and fixed my hair and my mascara. We didn’t really know each other, as I was relatively new at that time, but we hugged in silence and understood a shared pain that we’d all experienced at some point in the club.
Another time, a customer pulled a gun on our manager as he was walking out a dancer. She ran to the back and blocked the rest of us from leaving and as we panicked, we comforted each other. The dozen of us or so who’d been waiting to check out and leave sat, calling loved ones. We formulated a plan to sneak out the back in case the man came into the building. Multiple girls had permits to carry and kept their glovebox loaded. They were ready to run out ahead of us to get their weapons out of their cars and defend the rest of us if need be. We were afraid and restless until the guys came to let us know he’d left, and the police responded, but we had each other. When I went home and told my then-husband what had happened, he had a stark lack of empathy or compassion. He wasn’t angry at someone for pulling a gun out and threatening people in my workplace; he was angry with me for being there. The fear that my coworkers and I faced that night made me realize I had a community without a man like that. I had a family that was protective and defensive, even with our infighting. It was the first step in making me truly realize that marriage was a sinking ship — and it was thanks to the women who opened my eyes with their fierceness and their passion.
I could regale you with tales of the club, the beauty of it, the roots that take place when you first step into the club. But this is not just a story of women conquering their traumas together. We conquered these traumas with each other because the world left our community at the bottom. Rich men who cheat on their wives and father insurmountable hoards of babies rap in their music about sex workers being nothing more than whores. They ignore the reasons why someone may feel inclined to do sex work. They lack compassion in understanding why women began to weaponize and capitalize off of their sexuality, after centuries of it being held over our heads. Politicians call us a blight in the community. We don’t control the fact that there is a demand for sex workers — we simply fulfill it in different ways. Full-service girls run the whole mile. Dancers provide the fantasy. Online girls give the girlfriend experience. There are dominant women who make money off of the fetish without having to perform a single sex act.
Families disown sex workers; people try to strip us of our individuality and degrade us to nothing. They say we objectify ourselves; we ask for it. They say we are easily bought, when the reality is that we are not easily sold. Sex workers will pick and choose who they interact with; those interactions are earned with respect. We are not merchandise on a shelf, we are not cars, we are not locks and keys. To reduce a human being on the basis of one part of their existence is inexcusable. We know this because people in our society fight for the ability to not be discriminated on the basis of skin color, sexuality, or gender identity. I support those fights, too, but many in those communities do not support ours, despite the mutually shared notion that every human deserves to live a life free of discrimination. Despite the fact that it is people from their own communities who struggle the most in ours.
Sex workers are not the reason human trafficking exists. Human trafficking will always likely exist as long as there are terrible people who would seek to enslave and sell other people like cattle. There are also various forms of human trafficking that don’t involve sex work. There is still slave labor in many parts of the world and people who are blackmailed into doing awful things. These problems are not going to be resolved by eradicating sex work. And because the demand for sex work will always exist, because humans will not stop being primal in nature, sex work can never truly be eradicated — only silenced.
Realize this — we live our double lives and find comfort in other sex workers because our community has little else other than each other. We will always call out problems both within and without the industry, but our voices are suppressed. When you suppress a group of people, ignore their voices, and refuse to acknowledge it in society, then you don’t truly support democracy. When you silence those voices entirely, it becomes dangerous. People radicalize and hurt other people, either in their fight to keep those voices tamped or to fight for survival. Sex workers are people, too. Our work does not define us. We are educated, we are daughters, we are family leaders, we are so much more than the world believes we are. We have thoughts and complex emotions. Our biological families may want us to be crushed by their disappointment, but we find our chosen families in these clubs. These places show you who really cares about you and expose you to the falsehoods of human existence. These lessons guide us, build us, and drive the need to protect what we have, because nobody else will ever truly understand.
