This piece first appeared in the publication Boston Hassle.
“Do something interesting,” the blonde woman whines at me from her spot at the tip rail.
At my strip club, stage sets are mandatory. Every couple hours the DJ calls your name through the speaker and you have to go up and dance for three songs. You must be topless by the third song, regardless of whether anyone is tipping. The club is slow tonight, and the blonde woman and her well-dressed husband are the only people at the stage. They’ve been seated there for the past hour, barely spending any money. I’m on song number three.
The woman stares at me glassily, blue-eyed and expectant. Her large, diamond wedding ring twinkles in the disco lights as she sips her white wine. Her husband pulls out one dollar. She snatches it from him and waves it at me.
“I wanna see a trick!” she commands.
I don’t even fight the urge to roll my eyes. I extend my hand down to receive the cash, but she pulls it from my reach, pointing at my g-string with her free hand.
“I wanna put it in there,” she fusses.
I know I’m on camera, so I can’t refuse her money. As I crouch down, I pull the strap of my panties away from my hip, making it possible for her to slide the single bill in with minimal contact. As she finally parts with her grubby dollar, she clumsily grabs my ass.
Women strip club customers are notoriously disrespectful, often groping us without our consent or even offering to tip. Of course, some are totally lovely, but it’s worth examining why so many of them behave ghoulishly. In private rooms with straight couples, many women have tried to have sex with me, assuming I’d be open to it without even asking. The entitlement to my body, the lack of consideration that I may have boundaries, the assumption that I’d be available to indulge their lesbian sex fantasies…it’s all just so damn hetero of them.
Heteronormativity refers to the compulsory social rules, gender roles, and sexual behaviors associated with heterosexuality within a patriarchy. In our heteronormative culture, people in the sex trade are widely regarded as sex objects, rather than individual human beings in a vastly diverse population performing a wide variety of services for pay.
Often, our customers assume that just because we’re in the sex industry, we’re obligated to fulfill any of their desires or fantasies. In my line of work as a stripper, I regularly encounter rich male customers who chat me up while flaunting their wealth, only to refuse to invest in any of my advertised services (like lap dances, champagne rooms, and the entertaining conversation I just gave them). Instead, they offer to pay me “double” if I come back to their hotel rooms and have sex. This is degrading and humiliating not because they proposition me for sex, but because they trick me into wasting my time on them. They approach me–a stripper–with their mind already made up that if I refuse to fuck them, which is a service explicitly outside the bounds of my job description, I won’t get paid for the time I’ve already invested entertaining them as customers who have voluntarily chosen to patronize a strip club instead of an escort service.
These assumptions that sex workers are boundaryless sex objects don’t just stop with men. It doesn’t surprise me when women customers assume they can grope me onstage, or that I’ll fuck them in front of their husbands in a champagne room. Anyone participating, uncritically, in heteronormative relationship dynamics, is likely to violate the boundaries of a sex worker should they come into contact with one.
Ironically, some “straight” women who have been repressing queer desires see the sex worker as a workaround to actually confronting their own queerness. They assume they can use us for sexual gratification, because, that way, even if they claim a queer sexuality, they don’t have to grapple with what it would mean to fully claim a queer identity.
Heteronormativity is slick. It tries to convince us that what makes a person queer is simply defined by with whom they have sex. That’s why so many “straight” people only indulge in queer sex with sex workers; that way, they don’t have to participate in the monumental task of dismantling the privileges and protections heteronormativity affords them in their “real” life.
Of course, some people have to keep their queer identities hidden for safety reasons. At one club, I had a customer who would come get lap dances from me after her shift in the kitchen at the restaurant next door. She was a working class Chinese immigrant who, for complex family and cultural reasons, did not feel safe living openly as a queer person. She did what she had to do to survive, and was a very sweet customer–unlike a lot of the suburban, married American women who have sexually harassed me over the years in the presence of their husbands, exploiting their enormous privileges and the power gap between us. Yes, it’s true that in our anti-queer society many people have to hide their queerness. But it shouldn’t be at the expense of sex workers’ safety.
America has an ongoing legacy of conservative, white, male politicians who push anti-queer, anti-sex worker legislation, but turn out to be secretly engaged in queer sex or indulging in the services of sex workers. The argument that these politicians stay closeted because they’d otherwise “lose everything” is a red herring. While it’s important to understand why they might feel ashamed or afraid to admit they’re queer, their abuse of power is inexcusable. These men’s denial of their own desires is not just about them. Identity fragmentation is certainly a valid personal struggle, but it is not a valid reason to extend the arm of a violent, racist patriarchy into the lives, bank accounts, beds, and genitals of millions of people. From politicians to lawyers, bankers, and oil tycoons, the men who pay to fuck us in secret are also the ones who uphold the laws that keep us in danger.
At the time of this writing, throughout the world, except in New Zealand, part of Australia, and parts of the state of Nevada, most sex work is a crime. Stripping is legal, but, as one of the only places sex workers have some protection from police, the strip club industry is notoriously exploitative. Strippers pay the club to work–not the other way around–in the form of dubiously legal “house fees”. What’s more, our customers spend tens of thousands of dollars per day, but we take home only a tiny fraction of that money, while the club keeps most of it. If a customer is a big spender, and they feel entitled to molest me or verbally harass me, I know the club won’t protect me. I’m an expendable commodity. The club protects the customer; never the dancer. Strip clubs offer us just enough shelter from arrest, and just enough cash, that most of us have no choice but to swallow the bitter pill of mistreatment.
The criminalization and stigmatization of our community makes it easy for anyone to abuse us–not just men. When I talk about the power imbalances in the sex industry, well-meaning folks often propose that we need more women in charge of strip clubs. The idea is that if women were in management positions, the industry would be more equitable. That’s simply not true. Not only because women are well-capable of misogyny (as demonstrated by the gropey, high-society wives who plague strip clubs everywhere), but because it’s not about gender. It’s about the industry structure.
First, making clubs safer won’t do anything for the majority of sex workers, who don’t work in strip clubs (largely due to clubs’ common deployment of discriminatory hiring practices, which bar many fat people, trans people, older folks, undocumented immigrants, and BIPOC from attaining jobs). Second, our industry shouldn’t be run by managers and club owners; it should be run by strippers. We should have power over management, not the other way around. Women in management positions within the current structure might sometimes–sometimes–be sympathetic to our powerlessness, but the very nature of strip club management ultimately upholds the structure that keeps us vulnerable.
Strippers rarely speak up against personal or labor violations, not because we’re timid, but because we know the deck is stacked against us and our jobs are not secure. This makes it even more infuriating when the customers who violate us are women, because it shows they don’t see us in themselves. Many women are convinced that we couldn’t possibly bear the torch of patriarchy; that we’re incapable of kindling the fires that burn so many of our own.
This shit’s exhausting.
The chasm between sex workers and the rest of civilization is no accident. Sex workers are held hostage by society’s self-created forces majeures–namely capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. So long as the global citizenry lacks understanding of the true nature of our struggle, they can’t fully empathize with it, even if they want to. We become pawns–a perpetual place to dump hatred against all women, femmes, and queers. So long as the whore is despised, the bloodsucking monster of misogyny has a food supply.
Customers who assault and harass us, like the woman who felt entitled to grab me because she gave me $1, are a symptom of the patriarchal plague that keeps people of most genders perpetually vulnerable to danger. For many of us–sex workers or not–it can be really validating to recognize that we’ve endured misogyny from our own kind. It can also be disturbing when we realize that we ourselves may have transgressed against each other in this way. Either way, understanding the issue is a huge key to changing the circumstances moving forward. When we’re able to accurately see our own positionality, we’re better poised to pluck at the seams of the inequities blanketing our personal corner of the world.
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for rich white women, working at a strip club would 100% be a choice, and therefore they walk around with the assumption that strippers are 100% choosing this, that strippers are choosing this job because it's fun and "empowering" and not because everything else pays like 8 bucks an hour
This is a brilliant article. So well expressed and hugely thought provoking. Bravo (from a white, straight, cis woman who isn’t an arsehole). Thank you for the insight, I can’t wait to read more x