- ‘woah, that’s a bit misogynistic isn’t it?’

‘nah it’s ok she has centre-right political views’

Like…the job description is literally “I am so hot that you could never get me in real life so you’re going to have to pay me to dance for you.”

The majority of your money comes from private dances and from tips. If you are in the industry you know that the best way to ensure your income is to gather regular clients. There are two ways to do this: you can either give them sexual favors or you can play along with their fantasy that you are their girlfriend/will meet them outside the club. Both are objectifying and degrading, not fun. Not sexy.

Aside from having to deal with regular clients, stripping means swimming in a sea of misogynistic assholes. Some men get off on hurting women physically, some men get off on making women cry. You could be a 10/10 and you will still be subjected to abusive treatment by men. No matter how hot you are, there is always some man who feels entitled to list all the “flaws” he sees in your body to put you in your place. Stripping means existing every day in an atmosphere of violence and sexual aggression and having to constantly fend off men who repeatedly try to violate your boundaries.

As rude and entitled as the customers might be, they are nowhere near as bad as club owners/managers can be. Coerced sex is as ubiquitous as you’d expect it to be. Managers can force you to work back to back shifts until you drop or develop a coke habit (so you can buy from them), they can force you to give dances to men that smell like piss and they can retaliate against you if you piss off the wrong client by refusing to fuck. I’ve been called a cunt, a bitch, a whore, literally any insult you can think of - and I was Top Earner for almost a year straight. And I put up with it because I couldn’t afford to stand up for myself and lose my job.

And when i’m saying this, keep in mind I worked in the most expensive, “high-end” club in a major metropolitan city for years. I was one of the hot, “lucky” ones. This is the high end. On the low end you’ve got clubs that are actual no-bones-about-it-lube-in-the-goddamn-sanitizer-bottles brothels filled with trafficked women from Eastern Europe and Asia.

I’m sure some strippers are gonna say it’s not degrading yadda yadda, “I’m empowered!” But I’ve never met a stripper who hasn’t had some sort of emotional breakdown on a shift at least once, and that kind of says something.

The privileged sex worker tourists looking to gain some sort of dangerous mystique/male validation/”self-discovery”/whatever the fuck supplemental identity might never experience this, but who cares about them anyway, they are a joke to the rest of us.

I assure you, everything she said above is true. The owner/manager is an abusive pimp, the girls are doped up just to get through the night, men try to take advantage of you at every turn, it’s a nightmare.

You know what my appeal was? That I had just turned 18 and was a virgin (I wasn’t a virgin, but that was my gimmick). You know who all of my regular clients were? Men old enough to be my dad or, more often, grandfather, trying to get me to suck their dick for extra cash. They’d try to get my drunk enough to do it, but all my “rum and coke"s were just soda.

Girls who needed more cash or drugs could fuck the boss for it. He would pay us to get a tattoo of the club’s name and logo. There all still girls out there with it permanently on them even though now the club is gone, always reminding them of what went on in there.

This was a comment on a post I wrote about how people will support ideologies they don’t understand based on theory they don’t even know exists just because they’ve become synonymous with social justice. I specifically identified postmodernist identity politics as the subject of the post and name-dropped Judith Butler.

This person did the “op is a terf” thing.

And I was like, “Uh… yeah? I wasn’t being subtle about it. Did you miss the Judith Butler reference?”