Last week I did an article called “Strippergrams, Anyone?” for the Sugar Beet, which, if you weren’t sure, is the satire section of the Spur. Unfortunately, not everyone took well to this piece, so I got some rare and very valuable feedback! (I guess people actually do read the Spur). I thought I’d do a follow-up article on the subject.
The concern was that this article was poking fun at a subject that shouldn’t be breached. My respondent pointed out that strippers and others in the sex industry are often the victims of childhood abuse (somewhere around 60-80 percent), that many are not a part of that world willingly.
There is a lot of pain and trauma under the surface, which is why I called attention to it in my article. By taking such a detached stance on strippers, by inventing a world where a college campus has a club for it and we demean women in new and creative ways, with costumes and whatnot, I was trying to call attention to how casual we are about such a bad problem, a problem that can be considered modern slavery. Initially, it might have just seemed like a joke, but trust me, I had a deeper meaning behind it (I know, my brilliance can be subtle, but bear with me).
So I thought I’d share my own experience with strippers, and some of the troubling things I noticed. A few months ago, I went to a strip club for the first and probably only time (Gasp! But Dan, you’re so innocent!). It wasn’t exactly what I expected, since all I had to go off of was what I’d seen on TV shows. They didn’t quite do it justice.
It was dark in there. Red lighting on the stage, music blaring. Some of the women were scantily clad, others didn’t even have their breasts covered. Fifteen dollars to get in. It was probably all going to the guy working the counter and whoever owned the place, because, as he so kindly reminded us over the intercom, “Come on guys, start tipping! These girls don’t get a salary.” Not only that, but I’ve heard they don’t even get to keep all their tips, that a chunk of it goes to the owner, to the DJ playing the songs, or to the bartenders. These women have to pay just to be allowed to strip. The money they got came from how well they charmed us, which, I later discovered, wasn’t all about their bodies.
The girl who gave me a dance called herself Amore. She was pretty open about the fact that it was her stripper name, when she told me about her tattoos. This girl seemed out of place in a strip club. She looked pretty young, and if I had to describe her, I’d use the word “adorable.”
Of course, I had to wonder what she was doing there. She looked like a girl that could easily have gone to my high school, been in drama club with me or a fellow anime geek. Given the stats I’ve seen about these factors, I have to wonder if this otherwise ordinary girl was the victim of sexual abuse.
We talked for a while before the song she was going to dance to started, and I told her about my writing. She seemed genuinely interested, and for a while, I was under the spell. My brother, who was with me at the time, said he talked to ‘his’ stripper about psychology.
The thing that broke the illusion was when she noticed a can of tobacco chew next to me, and thought it was mine. She then proceeded to make conversation about that, talking about how she used to chew. That kinda tipped me off to the fact that she would make conversation about anything at all and sound interested.
Who knows, maybe she really did think it was cool that I was a writer. Maybe the stripper my brother talked to was doing the job to pay for a psychology degree. But it was obvious afterwards that they had a lasting effect on us. My brother commented on how amazing it was that he could come to like someone so much after only knowing them for five minutes. And I wanted to know more about the girl I’d talked to, who hugged me afterwards and called me sweetie. My cousin told us about a friend of his who was convinced that a stripper he’d met was in love with him.
And what better way to make more money? With your body alone won’t get those guys to tip, even when they know that you don’t get a salary, then charming them will do the job. It’s an industry that demands manipulation, which brands it into these women. Their livelihood depends on it.
I said earlier that that would probably be my last time going to a strip club. One of the reasons is because I felt uneasy about being there. When Amore asked me if this was my first time, if I was a strip club virgin, I was glad I was able to say yes, that this trip was just out of curiosity and not a habit. It made me wonder what these women thought of the regulars, the ones they saw there every night eyeballing them and tossing out two or three dollar bills. They were paying them, yes, but only barely. The man at the counter had to prod us over the loudspeaker to tip, appealing to what little pity we had for the strippers by making it clear that they were not getting paid by the club. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Many strippers get asked to do acts of prostitution, are groped and violated by their customers, and get drunk or high beforehand so these experiences aren’t so traumatic. There are rules and standards but no one cares to enforce them. They’d just as soon fire a stripper as protect one.
My brother forgot to pay the stripper who gave him the dance, and we went back in to do so. She gave him a kiss on the cheek, and said that he was a good man. That was one of the things I got from this experience, seeing that. Strippers are people who have, more often than not, seen a lot of bad in the world—a lot of pigs, dirt-bags, and perverts. So you can’t help but trust their judgment when they say you’re a good man.
