All Stripped Down
On Feminism and Sex Work

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I was a college kid from an upper-middle class family, so I didn’t get into stripping for the money. The whole thing started as a lark. My junior year at Austin entailed a course called Philosophy and Feminism, and I read a whole bunch of old school, right wing-allied, sex-negative feminist theory. I read about how women in the sex industry are pathological victims of a sexist culture. They are powerless, self-objectified junkies who have nothing else to offer. Their clientele are losers and rapists. And most damning of all, sex workers undermine feminism. I bought every word.

So I drove my used Honda to the neighborhood joint, just to confirm what I already knew. I expected to find pathetic assholes wearing stained wife-beaters grabbing at chain-smoking versions of Anna Nicole Smith. I anticipated white powder caked around the dancers’ nostrils and tracks marking them for the pandering trash I knew they were. Tattoos, silicon, bleach, cum stains, blue eye shadow, farmer tans, fake nails, fake leather, fake eyelashes, and Journey. I was ready. Bring it on.

Was I in the wrong place?

A manager in a very expensive silk suit escorted me to a VIP table and brought me a Shirley Temple. After checking my ID and securing a wristband that read “UNDER 21” around my arm, he invited me to talk to the DJ, visit the dressing room. He asked if I had eaten and then ordered a steak with a shrimp cocktail. He told me to have a nice time and then left me alone.

So did everyone else. Where were the foul men to harass me? Why hadn’t the manager pressured me to “audition?” Everything I had read started to melt in the dim light.

After my eyes adjusted to the play between shadow and strobe, I couldn’t take them off the women. They were extraordinary. They were talented, athletic, and sober. They laughed among themselves and at the men, the DJ, the bouncers, and the manager. Ranging in age from eighteen to about forty-five, most were sweaty, burdened with cellulite, endowed with breasts smaller than mine. Some of them had short “dyke haircuts,” a few wore no makeup at all, and one woman had taken off the obligatory heels and was dancing barefoot. And the men… the men were in awe. If these women were objects, they were objects of worship. I watched them, and I saw the whore and the Madonna shake hands.

When I found out how much they got paid to eat and drink for free, hang out with their friends, and dance to the music they loved, I thought, “I can do this.”

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The first night I worked I made forty dollars, and thought it was a lot. I didn’t have the first clue as to what I was doing. Take off your dress, right? If it were that easy I’d still be stripping. I was oblivious to many fine points I would later perfect: make-up that did not make me look like a crack whore; good jewelry—not the same tacky rhinestone abominations that my mother had let me play dress-up with; expensive perfume; five-inch heels (I was afraid to risk more than three at first); the sort of lingerie you can’t find at Frederick’s of Hollywood; bleached teeth and long hair and ripped abs.

But those are the fine points. The main point a client demonstrated without leaving his table or saying a word: the man gestured to his own face and smiled. It was then I realized that what these men wanted, what really turned them on, was a woman having fun. The fact that they were willing to pay me to have fun in no way meant that they could somehow control it or own it; if that were the case it would have been servitude they paid to watch, not joyful abandon. To make it real, it had to be a gift. In return for the gift they expected nothing but for me to enjoy it. And the fact that they were willing to pay—a lot—underlined the urgency of their need: the insistence on the presence of a woman in ecstasy. They weren’t going to have a good time without me. So much for getting off on my degradation.

I should have been relieved, heartened even. How difficult could it be to show some teeth if I could show my ass? I knew how to have fun. But wait! I’d read all about this: strippers, and sex workers in general, rely on drugs to help them enjoy—no, tolerate—an inherently demeaning profession. Visions of martinis and pot leaves danced in my head. I couldn’t afford cocaine and I didn’t know where to buy it. No dealers were lurking in the ladies’ room to get me hooked. It must be the DJ that got the dancers fucked up in this place. But when I gave him my set list I found him drinking Perrier, offering to show me pictures of his children.

I had nothing to worry about—a drugged up, drunken stripper makes no money. It’s too much of a hassle to hustle if you’re stoned or high. You can’t even make the money to pay for your habit. I watched and I learned: the dancers bringing in the big money, the ones who could convince a man to hand over his Rolex for an hour of time, were stone cold sober. The first thing I learned was that the money was there for me to take. The second thing I learned was that I was going to have to work to take it. By “work” I don’t mean wiggling out of a miniskirt. Anyone can do that. A drunk can do that. I mean charming the client without lying; insinuating promise while delivering anticipation; expressing sincere interest, compassion, and respect. A stripper who makes money will always make the client laugh, make him feel good, and give him what he wants most: escape. The erection is only a minor, and not always necessary, part of the fantasy. It’s a fantasy that requires a stripper’s full attention. There is no room for XTC and hash, only the client.

But what if I’m wrong? Hey. I no doubt am wrong in many cases—this essay is about my years dancing. I was closer to a showgirl than what you’ve seen on The Sopranos. Some strippers are drug addicts because their profession demands it by degrading them. Well, the problem would collapse if the job were not degraded. Rather than continuing to denounce stripping or taking away a dancer’s livelihood, destigmatize it. Legalize sex, in every manifestation. Don’t berate the symptom; remove its cause. Rather than vilifying an entire industry, allow stripping to be as prestigious as the various non-sexual, male-dominated professions—doctors, lawyers, business chiefs—that also have a bad rep when it comes to drug use.

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About my experience. I danced topless in a state that required dancers to wear what would now be called a Brazilian bikini bottom. A distance of one foot always separated the customer from the dancer. No touching, and the clientele weren’t seeing much more than was on display at the public swimming pool. Actually, given that I was working in Austin, this was particularly true: city statutes allowed women to go topless in public anywhere men could, and very often they did. Why a man would toss around twenties to see what he could have seen for free during any warm month is not mysterious: in the club what he saw was special because it was just for him. At a pool or Barton Springs, a woman might be swimming in a few inches of Spandex because she felt like it or to prove her equality in the public nudity realm or as a way of impressing her femchismo on her buddies. If she did it in a private club, solely at the client’s request…well, that was different.

And by the way, where I stripped you had to dance. The better you moved—and I don’t mean hanging upside down from a pole—the more money you made. Priscilla, the star who drew probably a fourth of the crowd any given night, was by far the most talented dancer, and certainly not the prettiest. She came to work an hour before the club opened every night to practice, to warm up. I never saw her still, and she would leave with over a thousand on Thanksgiving or a Sunday afternoon. She worked six nights a week, and I hear she’s working still.

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More times than I care to recall I have heard: “Poor deluded girl. She can’t possibly have known what she was doing.” After reading this essay, you might not look at that eighteen-year-old freshman in a different way; maybe you’ll look at her in the same way you have always secretly looked. Surely that articulate young woman in the third row from the left who no doubt still lives at her parents’ over summer break is not capable of informing herself of the risks involved in the sex industry or consenting to take them. You might feel obligated to take it upon yourself to save her from her ignorance and impending ruin. She’s brainwashed! The fact that she’d even consider such an occupation is proof enough.

But maybe you’d never think anything like that.

The notion that the better-informed, self-appointed savior stands obligated to rescue the misled stripper is patronizing and sexist. Sex industry abolitionists have long claimed in a blind righteousness that strippers, like small children or dogs, do not know what is in their own best interests. I wonder how many of these concerned zealots have ever been inside a topless bar. How many have watched a porn flick or read an “adult book” or talked to a prostitute? And how many have done all these things many times and lied about it? How many of these liars would disown their daughter for doing what they’ve many times paid a stranger to do?

And what about the pay? How much? I can’t speak for pre-op transsexuals flagging down “dates” in the Meat-Packing District of Manhattan or the street-walkers of San Francisco’s Mission. I can’t speak for my old friend Priscilla or Vivid porn actresses or the women working some Singapore floor show. But by the time I hit my stride, I was dancing to the tune of $400 to $600 between ten in the evening and two in the morning. Let’s say I worked five nights a week and that I vacationed two weeks a year. That’s between $92,000 and $138,000 a year in tips. The government taxed only my wage (about $4 an hour). Some of the money I spent on food and travel. Most I squirreled away in mutual funds, an IRA.

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The cash led to the only delusion that stripping visited upon me: after all these years, I still spend money as if I make around $125 an hour. A bizarre notion that money is a simple societal construction that is ridiculously easy to come by is the “damage” my years as a sex worker inflicted. Some people want me to suffer for profiting from the supposed indignities that my exploitation of a sexist culture surely imposed on women as a whole. Very well: I order food at a restaurant without checking the credit available on my Visa; I buy shoes without asking how much they cost; when it comes to vacations and intoxications I gladly pay whatever the market demands. And really, I have no business behaving this way anymore. Stripping really fucked me up. If I owe a pound of flesh, take it.

But there is one thing more: I very rarely dance for fun these days. Since I came to this town I can recall three separate occasions when I danced briefly at parties. At no time did I enjoy myself because—despite the shocking obscenities I’ve watched on MTV during the many early mornings that sleep evades me—I always worried that I was acting depraved. Two nights ago, watching my husband play the Uptowner, a gorgeous young woman asked me to dance with her. Having downed Bloody Marys all night for free (the skinny bartender likes me), I said yes. It was fun, really fun, but I still counted every song, multiplied it out. That’s twenty, forty, sixty, eighty…And the sad thing was that no matter how much fun I was having or how good it felt to get goofy or how much pride I took in my husband’s band, I couldn’t stop the math.

After last call, standing in the blessed cold air outside the smoky bar, one boy after another walked past me. All of them were drunk enough to applaud me, some in polite compliments of my outfit—a most appropriately chosen “Bada-Bing!” t-shirt paying tribute to the strip club featured in The Sopranos—and some that, while sincere and rather sweet, I ought not repeat. But the ego boosts, the great music, my pretty dance partner, and the exhilaration of acting half my age were not enough. I wanted to charge each man who tossed out his praise twenty bucks for every three minutes he watched me. The money can make dancing fun, and it can also suck the fun right out of it. But oh well; at least the bartender gave me my due respect. Not to steal the band’s thunder, but he knew what kept those guys in his bar. Admit it: few hot-blooded college boys want to see an all-male band if no women are dancing to them.

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The possibility that one of those boys might have in any way assaulted me is about as likely as the chance that a given sex worker has been sexually abused. The sensational, anxiety-provoking stereotypes these prejudices evoke are both rare. Men who rape and women who have been raped deviate from the norm; they do not define it. I have found that, despite all assertions to the contrary, of the sex workers I know—from strippers to prostitutes to porn actresses to activists—only two ever told me they had been sexually abused, and one of them is a man. It could be argued the rest of them are lying, but the fact remains that I know a dozen women who work far outside the sex industry who have told me they’ve been raped or molested. Since their disclosures are always followed by a vehement pledge to secrecy, and since women involved in the sex industry are a noisy bunch, I doubt that a smaller percentage of the women I know who work in schools and restaurants and offices have been sexually abused than the women I know who make their living in a sex-related field. I have found that a sex worker is less likely than other women to be a victim of sexual assault.

But, yes, I do know a few sex workers with disturbing pasts. It’s true that any female-dominated profession in this culture will have a high percentage of rape, abuse, and assault survivors, reflecting statistics on women in society at large. Whether or not they represent fewer sex workers than other women is probably irrelevant to the stripper or dominatrix who has been abused. The idea that being raped “caused” them to enter sex work becomes both a theory that defies confirmation and a dangerous, harmful assertion. This leap of logic might do as much damage as the initial insult; to proceed from the assumption that all rape survivors are permanent victims at predators’ mercy renders its own damage. No woman is helped, in the midst of addressing the many emotional, legal, and physical hardships of being raped, abused, or assaulted, by finding herself branded incapable of consent and informed decisions.

I can’t argue it is beyond consideration that sexual abuse leads to employment in a sex-related business. Of course it happens. If a woman sees stripping as degrading and has internalized demeaning abuse, she might become a stripper because she perceives the job as a good fit to her sense of humiliation. However, if she hadn’t bought into our culture’s stigmatization of the profession, she might have never considered dancing. If she had, it wouldn’t have been to perpetuate her victimization.

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The party line argues that men exploit sex workers, that they tell dancers what to do and the women obey their every command. Call it a conservative feminist’s delusion or a chump client’s fantasy, it’s a myth; where I have worked, the strippers run the clubs. The men who work at the clubs—the managers, DJs, bartenders, bouncers—are all employees of the women. Not only does their money come directly from the dancers in a hand-to-hand exchange, their money is doled out in tips determined by the dancers’ satisfaction with their work. The guy who gets a stripper’s sound and lights wrong or who hesitates to kick out a client she finds annoying or who waters down her best customer’s drink isn’t getting any more of a cut than a waiter who serves cold coffee. Beyond the nightly five to ten dollars she pays to essentially rent a workspace as a free contractor, a dancer is not obligated to pay the support staff anything at all.

This standard is double: if a dancer chooses to perform “table dances” (dances for an individual client given at his table, as opposed to dancing on stage), [1] the “tip” a dancer receives is set at a non-negotiable minimum—anywhere from twenty to fifty dollars a song depending on the club—and the client must pay it, even if he gets out of line and she calls the performance off before she lets fall her first glove. Should the client refuse to pay, armed security will take the money from him, give it to her, and escort him to the door. A men’s club would make a challenging arena for taking advantage of women.

But beyond mere economic domination, dancers have the luxury of doing whatever they want. They kick any man out; they tip the support staff what they see fit; they dance on stage or at tables or both; they choose when they dance and for whom and for how long. They are self-employed free agents, and despite job titles, they have all the power and are the final authority. Their “managers” know that their own livelihoods rest in the dancers’ control for several reasons: it is the dancers that bring in the cover charge and the bar sales; there are few women who are able and willing to dance and that minority is free to take their business to the highest bidder; there are far more men who will pay to watch strippers than there are women who will strip.

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It reflects well on men who patronize gentlemen’s clubs that it is almost always the more talented stripper, and not the Barbie doll, who makes more money. A performer who is agile and vivacious will consistently attract more clients than one who is angry and bored but sports a $5,000 pair of silicon implants. I won’t deny that usually—but definitely not always—a dancer who goes under the knife will average more. That’s why they buy the plastic boobies. But I have also seen dancers who make less money after their big investment. And of the women I knew who made more than the other ninety percent, not one had turned to surgery.

Most strippers have a pretty body or a pretty face and often both, but they also have flaws, which is to say they look real. They have sagging breasts, tiny breasts, heavy thighs, cellulite, bellies, stretch marks, scars, acne, and varicose veins. These are things that the smoke and mirrors don’t hide. And often these very “flaws” turn out to be turn-ons for particular men: long before J. Lo popularized a bootylicious bod, I noticed quite a few patrons overlooking the buxom brunette for the fat-bottomed redhead. Both “imperfections” and variations in female beauty are embraced, and in these respects, gentlemen’s clubs are infinitely preferable to Vogue or Cosmopolitan; those airbrushed renditions of femininity barely resemble the models who pose for them, much less the average woman. I would prefer a man to admire a three-dimensional, breathing woman with wrinkles, sweat, and a voice than a processed, polished, and silenced image.

Yeah, a voice. When I started dancing I didn’t realize how much time I’d spend talking. Maybe sweat and wrinkles are overlooked, arguably smeared lipstick is forgiven, but a voice is mandatory. A woman who can’t hold up a conversation will make as little money as one who can’t dance. Given the sad fact that not all of these men are the most witty conversationalists makes that part of the job all the more difficult. Whether he’s a movie star or a professional athlete—I met a few of each—or the night manager at WalMart, the client wants to feel a dancer hang on his every word, whether it’s riveting or not. More challenging to the dancer than paying attention is tossing back something that’ll convince the client that she’s enthralled, something that will engage him. It’s even tougher when he’s all talked out after a power lunch and she’s left to have the conversation by herself. I had a client who regularly paid me just to talk to him for around an hour at a stretch. What I would have given to simply dance.

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However you define the term, this importance placed on conversation pierces the argument that men “objectify” dancers. Unless they are in the advanced stages of senility, men’s club patrons are not in the habit of talking to and listening to objects. No man would ask a woman’s opinion of the political campaign or his new jacket or the quality of the latest action adventure film if he denied her humanity.

If “objectify” means holding yourself as subject of your life experiences and other people as objects of them, objects of your thoughts and actions, then the hypocrisy of the traditional feminist arguments against sex work arises. By its very nature the debate is devoid of solidarity; it hinges on an us/them construct, on the notion of the sex worker as “other.” Conservative feminists objectify both dancers and their clientele. These men, these dancers are the objects of their scorn.

It is true that often men in topless bars aren’t always interested in clever banter. Many people cannot square an instance of a man admiring a woman’s sexuality with the possibility that he is not treating her as an object in one sense or the other. But the fact that he is attending to one part of her personality—her sexuality—and not another—her intelligence or her sense of humor or fashion or her ability to make a mean vodka tonic—does not imply that he exalts one at the expense of the other. This impulse to segregate the body from the brain, to think as if they are not both parts of the same whole—a person—creates a false dichotomy. The cerebral and the corporal are each manifestations of “person,” words used to designate different, though fluid, aspects of the same thing. Neither one is somehow superior to the other. These are merely different ways of discussing the whole, the person. A male physician is not dismissing a female patient’s education or political savvy or musical talent simply by focusing on her body if she is paying him to examine it. A man isn’t denying a woman’s intelligence if he admires her breasts and not her intellect in the appropriate context, which is one that both consent to enter.

What makes this dichotomy so sticky is that one aspect of a person, particularly if that person has a clitoris, is deemed either of utmost if not total importance or somehow not as worthy or significant; not only have Americans drawn a line in the sand between body and brain, we alternately vilify and glorify the sensual. This culture nurtures a pathological relationship to the female form. First it’s the most holy territory, worthy of reserving for only one person if it is shared at all. It is beautiful enough to demand countless portraits and careful veiling. Women, consumed with its supposed perfection, pour millions into cosmetics, dyes, creams, and tweezers; dedicate too many hours to the gym and the tanning salon; offer up their bodies to scalpels and suction; and starve. Then, in the face of this inflated importance placed on women’s bodies, Americans turn about face and roundly condemn any woman who has a good a time with hers. A woman who has fun with her body by making a lot of money with it should be denied any credibility or respect in the best of circumstances. At worst she should serve time.

And it is specifically the sexuality of women’s bodies that all the fuss is about. If the focus on a given woman’s body remains free of sexuality, no one complains. Because Americans do not sexualize pregnancy—an odd choice, all considered—it’s considered perfectly acceptable to ogle a pregnant woman and expect a warm response. No one takes offense when people admire athletes like Mia Hamm or Teresa Edwards for their bodies.

With a view to women: why is mind severed from body? why is body duplicitous? why is the sexuality of the body not valid?

The answer is muddled up in this culture’s attitude toward sexual pleasure and its frequent denial of women’s sexuality. Charles H. Keating Jr., who served on the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography during the Reagan administration, articulates this sensibility in his dissenting statement: “Any form of sexual activity which is impersonal, which uses the body alone for pleasure, violates the integrity of the person and thereby reduces him [sic] to the level of an irrational and irresponsible animal.”[2] He finds every form of explicit material immoral not because of the exceedingly rare snuff film or underage actor, but because it involves the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake.

If not pleasure, what? What’s so bad about our bodies? What is wrong if we use our bodies for pleasure? Apparently a lot of the same things that are wrong with female sexuality.

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The notion that the labels “feminist” and “sex worker” are contradictory and mutually exclusive embraces the misconception that women in the sex industry are disempowered and like it. Again, this myth contradicts everything I personally know about stripping and all I know vicariously about prostitutes, porn stars, peep show performers, phone sex operators, and other pornographers. I believe that crack whores exist, but they are outside my experience. The women (and men) I know in the business are in it because it affords them considerable income without imposing on either their time or lifestyles. Women aren’t stupid. Women wouldn’t pose naked or turn tricks or dance topless if the pay sucked, if the clients threw punches, if the managers somehow forced drug abuse, or if the work humiliated them. Sex workers are in the business because it is a reasonably agreeable, if not downright fun, way to make the money it takes to live where and how they please. Sex work is quite unremarkable in this respect.

Far from being disempowered victims, all the sex workers I know are feminists, including the men. By feminists I mean people who advocate women’s rights, including the right to charge for sex. Their work takes many forms: journalist, comedian, professor, performance artist, playwright. Maybe their interest in relations between men and women leads them to stripping or prostitution. Maybe their experience with sex work creates an interest in the struggles with sexuality feminism takes up. But without exception the sex work funds and makes possible their work as feminists. The guitar player in that angry chick band needs lots of money for equipment and lots of time to practice, the freelance writer needs the money to live broadly and the time to write about it, and the Women’s Studies major needs a job that will fund her education without compromising her study time.

A ban on sex work would gag a lot of women. Instead of an adult film director who authors and edits a dozen books on lesbian sexuality (Tristan Taormino) or a stripper who produces and directs an acclaimed film documenting the first and only unionization of peep show performers (Julia Query) or a porn star who, as a registered nurse, teaches workshops on sexual health (Nina Hartley), instead of these culture-shaping luminaries would be women who work full-time jobs that leave no room for activism or creativity. Even if her work pays a woman well to do what she loves—basketball or psychology or nuclear physics—if it consumes all of her time, to the extent that she can pursue nothing else, it takes on its own oppression. Women I know outside of the sex industry, women who are very successful in competitive fields, complain to me that if only they had the time they would write that long-imagined memoir or start a private practice or enroll in a doctoral program. The time to pursue personal goals and creative or academic ambitions is a luxury the sex workers I know take for granted.

Beneath much of the conservative feminist arguments I sense fear. Topless bars provide an arena for women to exercise unchallenged command over their bodies. Dancers express their sexuality in an environment that upholds and enforces their authority over it. Do people, in the name of feminism, oppose stripping and other sexually oriented professions because they fear women realizing their sexuality while holding complete control of it? Are these unfortunately anomalous conditions not unusual enough? Are women who are sexual and powerful threatening?

Sexist behavior can and does occur in men’s clubs, but that does not mean stripping generates sexism. Universities, law firms, hospitals, insurance agencies, and news rooms also host sexism. The cause cannot be attributed to any one environment or stimulus. The money that Americans spent last year on pornography exceeded the combined gross of ABC, CBS, and NBC. The combined 2002 circulation rates of Playboy and Penthouse surpassed those of Time and Newsweek. With statistics like that, if sexually explicit material caused sexism, every man I’ve ever met would be an asshole. If men’s clubs somehow caused sexism, every man who ever went to one would have fallen sick with it. Every last man I danced for would have been a misogynist jerk. But the truth is I was treated worse by men when I was a teacher than when I was a stripper. Maybe it’s education that causes sexism.

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You’ve heard this one: “Dancers act out a perpetual vendetta against men. They are neurotic exhibitionists who perpetuate their own sexual traumatization.” The psychoanalysis ends when you consider that a healthy desire for wealth may attract women to the industry. Pathologizing them for doing what every “normal” man tries to do—make a lot of money—is sexist. It seems preferable to make up theories about “cycles of sexual abuse” than to think that maybe a woman chooses to use her sexuality to make money. Better to be a whore who was horribly raped by her father than a call girl who likes her clients.

But are we exhibitionists? Is that porn star really coming? Hey, that’s your fantasy and we’ll never tell. Maybe more threatening than a sexual, powerful woman is one who also finds her job truly fulfilling. That’s just not fair.

Or: “Only women who can do nothing else would do something like that.” I think my mother was the first person to tell me that, and I was six. Mom was wrong. It should surprise no one that a woman who excels in her field may choose to double her income by working one night a week in a topless bar. I worked with a math professor, a real estate agent, a professional comedian, a cop, a DJ, a personal trainer, and lots of musicians, writers, and students. With a few exceptions, no one I knew worked full-time as a dancer (which, compared to any other job, is part time—a four hour as opposed to eight hour shift); almost everyone had a career or a degree to pursue.

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What if this is all complete gibberish and sex work should end? The only way to eradicate the business would be to lower the demand for sex by increasing its supply. If we lived in a society where people had sex as often as they shook hands, if sex were as acceptable as bowling or coffee talk, sex workers would go out of business for the first time in history. Prohibition stopped no one from drinking and drugs are expensive in direct relation to the enforcement of laws against them. It is the very conservatism that opposes sex work that ensures it will thrive.

Legal or not, politically correct or not, sex work will flourish. The pragmatic feminist would commit to promoting women’s rights in the work place, regardless of where they work. It is putting ideology before women themselves to demand the razing of an industry that would leave thousands of women out of work or underemployed. Rather, make sure the employment of these women is negotiated on their terms.

And what about the rights of female patrons of sex workers? High on the priority list should be ensuring that lesbians and bisexual women are allowed the same access to topless bars and Nevada bordellos that men are. Unless she's looking for work, In Texas it’s illegal for a woman to enter a men’s club without a man. She might be trying to turn tricks, or worse, she might make the male patrons uncomfortable. If any women are treated unfairly at a topless bar it is the women who try to pay to get in, not the ones who work there.

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Most men who go to topless bars are the same sort of men you see at a restaurant or in the library or at church. They aren’t all wearing three-piece suits but they’re not in stained overalls either. I could say imagine the Village People slightly inebriated, but that’s a bit too flashy. In Austin I dealt primarily with professors and politicians. Plenty of college boys turned up on Saturday nights, but the wealthiest frat boy was a poor candidate next to the most modest rancher; I avoided anyone my age. Lots of bands came in after playing Sixth Street and there were enough garden-variety businessmen to go around. The only crowd I refused to deal with was the miserable, blushing bachelor and all of his wasted buddies.

But there is also the client who, for one reason or another, would not be in a sexual situation if it were not so orchestrated. Most of these guys are freshly wounded from a bad relationship. Some are just shy. Some are impotent and the prospect of actual sex scares them. To deny these men the outlet of topless bars would take away their right to sexual expression, and I defend that as vehemently as I defend my own.

Like strippers, clients rarely live up to their caricatures. Though he can be anyone from a seasoned businessman to a blue-collar worker, the patron pays not to demean women by watching them and talking to them. If a man wants to degrade a woman, he doesn’t pay her for anything; money is a form of acknowledgment and appreciation. A man cannot subjugate a woman if he acts under her consent.

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The most popular argument against topless dancing and other forms of pornography and sex work is that they encourage violence against women at large. The idea is that the meek suit who just bought a table dance will pounce on the next woman he sees and rape her. I don’t understand how asking a woman if she will dance for you, paying what she requests, then watching her twirl around to whatever Madonna recorded last week will lead to anything aggressive, coercive, or violent.

Granted, sex work like stripping is distinct from other forms of sex work like performing in an X-rated film or posing for an adult magazine because it’s interactive. Prostitution, another type of sexual performance, is likewise interactive. Though sex work captured on film does not provoke rape or other forms of violence, neither does it insist that the consumer cooperate with the performer; the women in the film or the magazine have no say over the man looking at it. By contrast, stripping demands that the client deal directly with the sex worker, and her humanity becomes a given.

However, the mere fact that a man does not interact with a photograph of a naked woman as he must interact with an actual naked woman does not mean he is degrading her; degradation is impossible without interaction. The objectification argument does not apply to filmed or photographed pornography (as opposed to live erotic performances) because a photograph or film of a woman is an object. The arguments that there is any relation between male violence and pornography (as either the product of interactive sex work or spectator sex work) fall short.

In her famous book Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm, Dr. Diana Russell points to studies on the correlation between pornography and violence against women. Her evidence, however, relies solely on films, both R-rated and X-rated, which are labeled nonviolent, though they are actually abusive,[3] and films that are sexual and violent.[4,5,6] Stripping can be compared to pornographic movies in the sense that both are sexually explicit. Nonetheless, nothing indicates that nonviolent erotic stimuli are associated with violence. No study has ever established a correlation between representations of consensual sex among adults, or other nonviolent forms of pornography, like stripping, and any sort of violence. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary.[6,7]

All the pornographic movies I’ve seen provide further evidence to the contrary. They never involve barnyard animals, children, or rape. Most porn flicks go something like this: Mr. Electrician rings the doorbell and the lady of the house is eagerly awaiting him in lingerie. She leads him to her bed. Yada yada yada. I’ve seen variations of this cliché so many times because the fantasy for the majority of men who watch porn is a completely willing, enthusiastic partner; that is what they don’t find enough in real life.

Within months, stripping lead me to writing pornography, and my experience producing porn also indicates that adult material does nothing to incite violence against women. I published my first pornographic story when I was nineteen in Susie Bright’s Herotica series. I’ve since published stories in many books and magazines and I’ve seen thousands of calls for submissions over the years. Whether the editor is looking for tales of leather and discipline or transgendered biker stories or femme lesbian fetish fantasies, whether the editor is a man or a woman, and regardless of the intended readership, every single call for manuscripts concludes with “No nonconsensual sex or underage characters.” Today’s industry standard explicitly prohibits anything other than consensual sexual behavior among adults.

Despite a handful of sad exceptions, pornographers and sex workers don’t cater to rapists. If a man wants to rape a woman he will simply do so. If nonconsensual, violent sex is what he’s after, he has no motive whatsoever to sit on his sofa watching Jenna Jameson videos or to pay a woman a couple hundred to look at her dance. Just as a men’s club is a foolish place to try to abuse women, the men who frequent such a place are not the same men who hurt women. Those men are at home beating their wives. They are busy raping their dates. They are well-respected pediatricians fondling their patients. Guys who rape don’t hang around at strip clubs. They rape.

Far from resulting in rape or battery, strip clubs create an arena in which openly fantasizing about women is absolutely appropriate. In turn this distinguishes where that is not acceptable. The topless bar, the brothel, and the adult bookstore clearly define consensual spheres for thinking of women sexually. By establishing these contexts, dancers and other sex workers are establishing the contexts (the grocery store, a City Council meeting, any workplace where the business in not sex work) in which men are to neglect women’s sexuality—or at least behave that way.

•

If dancing is so great, why am I sitting here writing about it? I’ve told you it’s good money, but it is certainly not easy money. I didn’t quit because of the alleged abuses that inspired me to start stripping, but because of more subtle problems that became prominent only with time. First, stripping becomes physically exhausting. Four hours of work can require two days of recuperation. As for the clients, talking to them got boring. Those guys weren’t bad, but by definition they were not the sort of men I’d hang out with for free. After a few years, the combination of dancing in five-inch heels at night and further stressing my joints by lifting weights during the day ruined my back and knees. By “ruin” I mean a physician told me I was heading for surgery. Then there were many annoyances: the thick smoke and loud music; most of an afternoon dedicated to the thrills of shaving; the monotony of fish, broccoli, and the Stairmaster. Hair, makeup, and costumes ate up time, just like exhaustion and the gym.

So I quit. Besides failing knees and weariness, I’d grown bored. By the time I cleared out my locker, I had danced in various clubs for three years. I had all the money I wanted, so it no longer impressed me. The environment had grown mundane, and the glamour of infiltrating a forbidden element had faded. A thrilling adventure turned into just another job. Despite the money and certain freedoms dancing afforded me, my interest in it had run its course and I wanted to pursue other goals. For example, at that point in my life I wanted to take a full-time editing job that left me no room for moonlighting. I wanted to give up the sort of workouts that made my body thin and muscular for meditative disciplines like yoga. I wanted to give the treadmill capitalism and extroversion a rest.

Also, I’d lost my patience. Once compassionate, I had come to lose all empathy for the client. I grew so calculating and deprecating that I felt guilty. In the end, it was I who became the so-called objectifier. Toward the final months, whenever the occasional idiot offered me money to fuck him, I found it hilarious to count the money, fold it into my purse, and say “You’ve been fucked,” as I walked away. Maybe these confused souls had it coming, but I eventually stopped feeling like a witty prankster; in the end I just felt mean.

The calluses may form in different places, but any job can jade you. For me, I became desensitized to money and compliments. A word out of line and I turned predatory. In a sense, I got way too good at what I did. I began to abuse my power. I quit because I didn’t want to enjoy the pleasure of being ruthless.

Not all strippers throw in the towel as quickly as I did. Some women are genetically blessed with knees that never wear out. Some have more energy and deeper wells of empathy. Others enjoy it too much to give it up. For example, I was friends with a dancer who’d posed for Playboy in the late sixties, a woman who’d been dancing for over twenty years. I didn’t have that level of endurance.

•

All considered, I’m glad I did it. Without having stripped, I’d never have vacationed in a dozen countries or come to own every creature comfort I want. I wouldn’t have many of the professional connections I’ve cultivated in publishing. I’d still perceive myself as a vaguely attractive, awkward girl at men’s mercy.

So I have these acquisitions and experiences and opinions, but did it change me? Not really. If anything I got better at being what I was born: dead game. I clamp on and hang tight until the blood comes. Maybe it’s not such a good idea, but my jaws are already locked.

NOTES

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1. Personal dances in Texas consist of the stripper performing a foot away from the client, no touching allowed. She may not touch other strippers. She may not get on the floor or simulate “sexual expressions or noises.”

2. The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, September 1980, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 516.

3. A study conducted by Dolf Zillam and Jennings Bryant studied the effects of massive exposure to “nonviolent” pornography, which, according to their terms, could encompass material in which women were degraded (for example, being pissed on without their consent), scenes featuring children or animals, or verbal assault. Also, they defined “massive” as watching six films back to back three times a week—a far cry from what actual pornography consumers typically watch. They found that the men who watched what they considered non-violent pornography in massive amounts wanted more degrading materials, came to uphold male dominance and to consider rape a less serious crime, and developed a more sexually callous attitude toward women. However, the allegedly nonviolent films they showed were, in fact, abusive. Zillman, Dolf; Bryant, Jennings. (1984). Effects of massive exposure to pornography. In Neil Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein (Eds.), Pornography and Sexual Aggression, (pp. 115-138). New York: Academic Press.

4. In reference to rape myths such as the idea that women enjoy rape or that they are at fault when men force sex on them, Edward Donnerstein reports, “After only ten minutes of exposure to aggressive pornography, particularly material in which women are shown as being aggressed against, you find male subjects are much more willing to accept these particular myths” (emphasis added). Donnerstein, Edward. (1983). Unpublished transcript of the testimony to the Public Hearing on Ordinances to Add Pornography as Discrimination Against Women. Committee on Government Operations, City Council, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 4-12.

5. Neil Malamuth and James Check found that watching sexually violent mainstream (not pornographic) films increases male viewers’ acceptance of violence against women. Malamuth, Neil; Check, James (1981). The effects of mass media exposure on acceptance of violence against women: A field experiment. Journal of Research in Personality, 15, pp. 436-446.

6. Researchers showed one group of men R-rated sexually violent films, another X-rated films depicting consensual sex but not violence, and a third group X-rated films that were both sexually explicit and violent. Then the three subject groups watched a documentary re-enactment of a real rape trial. Compared to a fourth group of men who had not seen any movies before watching the documentary, both the men who had seen the R-rated sexually violent movies and the men who had seen the X-rated sexually explicit and violent movies judged the victim to be of less worth, found her injury less serious, and blamed her more for the rape. The group of men who saw X-rated films that were only sexual, not violent, did not likewise disparage the woman’s rape. Donnerstein, Edward. (1985). Unpublished transcript of testimony to the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography hearings, Houston, TX, pp. 5-33.

7. After exposing men with average aggressing conditions to nonviolent but sexually explicit material, Malamuth agreed with Donnerstein that “there is little evidence that nonviolent pornography has any negative effects.” Malamuth, Neil; Donnerstein, Edward (Eds.). (1984). Pornography and Sexual Aggression, (pp.78-79). New York: Academic Press.

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