Stripped

Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers

Bernadette Barton

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814787045
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What kind of woman dances naked for money? Bernadette Barton takes us inside countless strip bars and clubs, from upscale to back road as well as those that specialize in lapdancing, table dancing, topless only, or peep shows, to reveal the startling lives of exotic dancers.

Based on over five years of research and from visiting clubs around the country, particularly in San Francisco, Hawaii, and Kentucky, Stripped offers a rare portrait of not just how dancers get into the business but what it's like for those who choose to strip year after year. Through captivating interviews and first-hand observation, Barton recounts why these women began stripping, the initial excitement and financial rewards from the work, the dangers of the life—namely, drugs and prostitution—and, inevitably, the difficulties in staying in the business over time, especially for their sexuality and self-esteem.

Stripped provides fresh insight into the complex work and personal experiences of exotic dancers, one that goes beyond the “sex wars” debate to offer an important new understanding of sex work.

1

Becoming a Stripper

Maureen was seventeen when she decided to support herself and her child doing the most lucrative job she knew she was qualified for: exotic dancing. Pregnant at sixteen and the victim of wretched parenting, Maureen found herself cast adrift when her mother kicked her out of her home upon learning of the pregnancy. After Maureen had the child, she felt her options for supporting herself were limited:

I just had a kid, and I didn’t want to get in welfare. Actually it was a friend that used to hang out in the bars that got me the job and stuff. He’s a fireman. He said, “Why don’t you be a dancer?” I said, “Well, I’m not old enough.” And they worked around that.

Maureen is not unusual among the women I interviewed. Several found themselves homeless or with a child to raise or both when they began dancing. Most turned to dancing with little formal education; some chose stripping to help them finance college tuition and living expenses. Nancy, a dancer working in a Honolulu club explained, “I ran out of gas in Florida. I had to do something, and I looked it up in the newspaper, and eleven years later I’m still doing it.” The single most common reason why any woman starts dancing (and continues) is for the money.¹ Dancers in most locations in the United States can count on making an average of at least two hundred dollars a shift, and, on some days, and in certain clubs, they may make much more. This means that for women with little formal education and few professional skills, dancing is among the most well-paying occupations available.² Stripping offers a higher salary than most pink-collar jobs. For example, in 2004 secretaries averaged $13.38 an hour, totaling a gross annual salary of $27,830 for a forty-hour work week.³ The dancer earning two hundred dollars a shift (and this is the low end of the salary range for stripping) and working three shifts a week will bring home $31,200 for a twenty-hour work week, and much of this is untaxed. Furthermore—feminists take note—sex work is the only occupation in which women make more money than men. The question, then, could easily be, why don’t more women start stripping?

Many women begin dancing after struggling to support themselves through more conventional means and after exhausting other employment options. Finding work that supports oneself without a bachelor’s degree—and, unfortunately, sometimes with one—is increasingly difficult in the twenty-first-century United States. With deindustrialization—the outsourcing of relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs from the United States to foreign countries—the number of jobs that pay a living wage is decreasing. Meanwhile, as sociologist Jennifer Johnson eloquently documented in her insightful book Getting By on the Minimum: The Lives of Working-Class Women, over the past thirty years the number of service-sector jobs has increased. Today, three-quarters of American workers are employed in the service sector in highly stratified jobs that are compensated accordingly. The low-paying end includes cooking, cleaning, serving, and general care work available to anyone, although traditionally performed by working-class women, and the average service-sector job pays only $7.94 an hour.⁴

Work is work. Some jobs are better than others. In her pivotal book, Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich described the difficulties individuals in low-paid service-sector jobs faced to meet their daily expenses. These included problems finding affordable housing, transportation expenses to and from work, drug testing, and an overall lack of time to look for better-paying alternatives. A woman who needs to make fast cash can avoid most of these problems through exotic dancing.⁵ Dana, for example, had just gone through a divorce and, like Maureen, also had a child to raise:

Actually I went through a divorce, and I had so many people telling me what to do, what to do, what to do, and I just kind of wanted to be able to be financially secure on my own. So I tried it once and just stuck with it from there on out…. I was always curious, always. From the time you were young and you see the ads for dancers—make two hundred to three hundred dollars, so much a week.

Delia, like Dana, decided stripping was her most practical option for making ends meet:

I think that my major motivation for doing it was twofold: first, I could make a fairly good living for myself and my daughter, and I think that that was the only thing I had. I could sell myself through dancing, but I didn’t think I had the ability to do anything else. I didn’t have any education until my daughter graduated from high school. When she went away to college, I went with her. So, I really think that that wasn’t such a bad choice at the time, because it was an easy way to make money, and I had fun, for a while. It wasn’t much fun after a while, but for a while, it was a lot of fun…. I think that one of the reasons I did it for a while was because it was an ego boost at that time.

Although many dancers spoke about enjoying the attention they received when they first began dancing, no one I interviewed decided to enter the sex industry for the “ego boost”—to feel better about her body or for the attention. Flattery, adoration, attention, and control were the unexpected perks of the job, not the main motivators for entering the business. Several women, however, did share that they were attracted to dancing specifically because they found the idea of breaking a taboo both exciting and liberating.

“I Was Curious. It Was Exciting!”

Performing in a strip club is also attractive to women with a certain kind of adventurous, experience-oriented, I’ll-do-it-if-you-dare-me attitude. It’s taboo, but it isn’t illegal. It’s dangerous, but the financial rewards may be high. It’s risky, but it can also be exciting to live on the edge of a morally correct society. Moreover, strip club managers, owners, and dancers encourage this attitude of reckless abandon when they recruit women into stripping. Often, they will ply a potential applicant with alcohol, tell her she is as beautiful as any woman up there, and ask her, “Don’t you want to know what it’s like to dance?” This is especially attractive to women who feel repressed, bored, or frustrated with their lives. Morgan, who left home at seventeen, was looking for a way to make ends meet and was not averse to the idea of combining her sexuality with her work life.

I had several people tell me that it was a good way to make money, enough money to live on. Just yeah, I thought about dancing before, and I worked for a guy named Chris. The name of the company was Playful Entertainment. I’d done the lingerie shows at the hotel they used to have on Monday Night Football. I guess my profile fits a certain moral flexibility, but I wasn’t absolutely revolted by the idea.

Topless bars are environments in which some women feel they can act out their own fantasies (not just their clients’) and resist familial and cultural expectations that they behave virtuously. Kelly, a women’s studies major in college, started dancing in a peep show in Chicago before she moved to San Francisco. At first, she interpreted dancing as a feminist expression of her sexuality:

It just allowed me a lot of freedom. I could pick my own schedule. I thought my job was cool and interesting. It was a side of life I hadn’t seen before, and I was really attracted to it. I thought it was great. I had this very idealistic, feminist opinion about it at the beginning. I thought it was really empowering; I’m using my sexuality and getting paid what I’m worth.

Most women start dancing when they are very young—when they are more likely to lack economic alternatives, when they are perceived as most attractive by club managers, and when they are best able to thrive in a physically taxing occupation. Mandy was unusual in that she did not begin dancing until she turned forty. Although she started dancing largely for the money, she was also curious about dancing and wanted to experience it for herself:

I wanted to ’cause I didn’t know about it. I wanted to experience it because per se you hear this, you hear that, and I’m a person that wants to find out for yourself. My ex-husband used to go, and I wanted to know why. Then I got there, it’s different, it’s different.

Joscelyn, like Mandy and Dana, investigated a strip club before she auditioned to see if the way she imagined stripping matched reality. At first, she found that dancing met some of her emotional and financial needs. Being in a wholly different world freed her creatively in the beginning—she designed her own innovative costumes and choreographed complicated dance performances. This was exciting for Joscelyn:

I had a friend that was working at the Market Street Cinema, and she was a single mom. She auditioned and got a job. And she told me it was great and she was making three hundred dollars a day. So, of course, I was curious. I had been a dancer before. I had done dancing and gymnastics growing up. So I knew how to do it. But of course, for that job, if you can walk, you can have a job! So, I didn’t really need those skills.

I also did fashion design, so I would make some of my costumes. And I had that creative outlet, so it was exciting for me. When I first started, it was a whole new world. I had never been in a strip club before. I just had a stereotypical image that I had gathered from TV and media. I had no idea what to expect. I was exposed to lap dancing. It was very interesting. This was totally new to me. At first, when I saw the lap dancing, I was like, okay, there’s this woman on stage tying herself in a knot, and these women look like they are having sex with these men in the audience with the gyrations back and forth, was something I hadn’t seen before, and it didn’t even occur to me that that happened in these places. I just had no idea what to expect. Needless to say, that is where it all started, and that was my little part-time job during school.

Approximately one-third of the women I interviewed were dancing to support themselves while they worked on an undergraduate degree. As tuition for higher education continues to rise and government funding for education declines, and as popular figures like Brittany Spears and Janet Jackson dance provocatively on prime-time television (in Jackson’s case actually going topless herself at the 2003 Super Bowl), some young women consider stripping a practical way to meet college expenses. Indeed, a 2004 issue of the Nation explored the trend of stripper-inspired consumer habits: young girls exercising to stripper workout videos, buying thongs in droves, and asking their parents for poles to practice in their bedrooms.⁶ “Slutwear,” as I have dubbed the latest fashion in girls’ and women’s clothing, has never been more “in.” As I write this, female fashion trends feature crop tops, stiletto heels, low-cut pants, impossibly short miniskirts, and latex body suits. For many of the women I interviewed, it was only a short step across—an admittedly large taboo—from mainstream expectations about their sexual desirability to stripping for money. As Joscelyn admitted wryly, “I already had all the clothes.”

“I Was There. I Got Drunk”

Several of the women I interviewed intended to work, or began to work, in some other capacity at a strip bar. Few were certain from the beginning that they wanted to dance. Three of my informants waitressed before they started dancing. It’s easier for a woman to decide to dance after she has worked in a club in another capacity, for example, as a waitress or bartender, because she has had the opportunity to watch what the dancers do, as Dana and Joscelyn explained, and become acculturated to the environment. Julie had waitressed at Polished Pearls for a few months before coming to the conclusion that dancers made more money than she did, doing less work. She explained why she changed jobs from waitress to dancer:

Waitressing, you work very hard. You’re always on your feet; you’re on five-inch heels. But dancers get to sit most of the night. Big difference. Waitresses cannot sit. They don’t get any breaks. It’s only a five-hour shift. You’re on your feet constantly, and if it’s real busy it’s very, very frustrating. You deal with drinks, you deal with bartenders, you deal with time period, like if you’re impatient like me, it kills you to wait on drinks. You deal with everything in the club, where dancers don’t have to. Dancers are pampered: they sit down, they work when they want to work ’cause their money is all on tips, so they’re making their own money at their own pace. You get to party if you want to, you sit down, you can socialize. It’s a lot different. Waitressing, you can’t do any of that. Waitresses, no one cares, no one notices you, no one’s polite with you. Most men are in there typically for the dancers. They want to spend their money on the dancers. So whereas you’re getting seventy-five cents maybe to a five-dollar tip, they’re getting a fifty- to a hundred-dollar tip. And if you’re in need of money…

The prestige of stripping relative to the other employment possibilities for women in strip clubs—waitress, hostess, bartender—is reinforced by management, which generally allows dancers more leeway in their job responsibilities. Most clubs constantly require a fresh supply of women because of the extremely high turnover rate among dancers. Dancing is difficult, demanding, and draining. It is not unusual for a woman to try dancing for a night or two, feel overwhelmed and uncomfortable in strip bars, figure working at the factory or in the copy room isn’t so bad, and quit. Also, dancers regularly switch clubs when the money dries up at their current establishments, hoping to increase their income elsewhere.

Managers routinely try to turn women workers into strippers. One method management uses to replenish an unreliable labor pool is to coerce waitresses into dancing. Frequently alcohol is involved in this recruitment strategy.⁷ In Darby’s case, the management at her club employed alternating techniques of bullying and coaxing her to drink alcohol to propel her onstage. Darby was sixteen years old when she started waitressing at Lace and Lashes, a small, working-class club in Silverton. It was not long before she found herself performing onstage instead of serving drinks.

I started waitressing at Lace and Lashes. My girlfriend got me the job. Up in Silverton. And she got me the job waitressing. I waitressed for like two or three months, and I got used to the money. And then they told me, they got me real drunk one night, and they told me that they really didn’t need as many waitresses and they were going to have to cut back, so I needed to dance or find me a new job. And so they got me a little bit drunker, and I got up there. That’s all it was.

In this case, the intimidation tactics are unmistakable. Management employed Darby when they knew she was a minor, encouraged her to drink vast amounts of an inhibition-reducing intoxicant, and threatened her livelihood in order to “encourage” her to dance topless for men two to three times her age. This was the most blatant example of being coerced into dancing that I encountered, but most dancers reported similar intimidation by management. For example, April, who originally worked as a waitress, was persuaded onto the main stage on a slow night after the management had gotten her very drunk:

I was coaxed into doing it. I was so drunk I can’t remember exact sentences or exact dialogue. I never thought I could do it. When I started, I thought my boobs are too small. I thought I was too ugly to do it, and then to have that sort of acceptance was in itself kind of flattering I think.

To indicate how common this transition is, April told me that the week I interviewed her three women in her club had changed from waitress to dancer.

Since clubs will apply a variety of techniques to recruit dancers, including economic threats and bribes, flattery, peer pressure, and alcohol, management predictably prefers to hire waitresses with dancer potential. Once in the club, however, and having learned that there were only vacancies for dancers, several of my informants auditioned to dance on the spot. This is how Melinda became a dancer:

I walked into a bar. I was going to be a waitress. A little hole in the wall, a backside country bar, and I walked in and they told me they weren’t hiring for waitresses, but they were like, “We’re hiring for dancers.” And I was like, “I don’t know if I want to be a dancer.” They’re like, “Try it anyway.” So they put me onstage like ten minutes later. They had this girl take me in the dressing room and put me in her clothes, and they put me onstage. I stayed, and worked the rest of the night, and made a lot of money. I was pretty happy. I was like, “I guess I’ll keep doing this.”

As a further incentive, novice dancers are heavily tipped their first time onstage. Melinda continued:

Well, I was nervous. They put me onstage, but as soon as guys come up and start handing you money, you start feeling a little bit better about being up there. It took me—like I said, that night I went to work and got put onstage—I was nervous for about two minutes, and then after that, I had a lot of fun because I was the new girl. And when you’re the new girl, people will give you all kinds of money that first day so you get all geared up feeling good about yourself. And then, after that, dancing seems a little bit easier.

Becoming a dancer entails overcoming personal and cultural taboos about being perceived as everything from sexually available to a “hooker.” Women shared that their motivations for battling this taboo were generally very compelling: the need to support a child, financial insolvency, a chance to go to school, a personal dare. And, as I will discuss later, although it is an extremely controversial topic among sex workers and sex-radical feminist researchers—with some claiming that a large percentage of those in the industry are victims of abuse and others resenting the way this so-called stereotype undermines sex workers’ ability to control their life choices—a few of the women I interviewed spoke at length about how their personal histories of sexual and physical abuse influenced their choice to dance and their lives as strippers.⁸

“My Mind Was Trying to Work It Out by Replaying It”

Sex workers embody a nexus of oppression: they are almost always women, often they are economically disadvantaged, many are women of color, and a substantial percentage are lesbian or bisexual. In addition, sex workers perform work that is considered dirty, dangerous...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Come Inside and See the Show
• 1 Becoming a Stripper
• 2 Dancing on the Möbius Strip
• 3 Bad Girls
• 4 The Toll
• 5 “You Have to Be Sexually Open”
• 6 Sticking Together
• 7 “Everything Is Not Okay”
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author