Future Work

I wrote not long ago about living at a crossroads right now. Well, one of the major lanes of that road is work: what I'll be doing, where I'll be doing it, and how long I'll be doing it for.

I've been working as a stripper for going on two years now. I've had a lot of time to experience and think about that kind of sex work. I wrote at the very beginning of this blog about the reasons I decided to start stripping. The most lasting motivation has been the one that pushed me to understand the industry, the customers, the workers, and what it all says about gender and life. I think it's all incredibly fascinating.

Of course, stripping is hard work. I've tried never to make bones about that. It takes a lot of energy to dance but mostly to hustle, to be very nice, to be sexually available but not, to be charming and beautiful night after night.

When I would work at the club near my college, I'd be too tired to talk much after a shift. It would be like my voice was all used up. I'd be too keyed up to sleep, but too tired to speak. It was great to live in a laid back house of people where I could just sit in a room with others and watch them play video games. They gave me a comforting, calming presence without asking for anything from me in return.

Well, that kind of work isn't really something I can sustain on my own. I really need the supportive relationships, the people around me, in order to keep my energy up. I do like stripping. I like the attention and harnessing the raw sexuality and dancing and talking to people. At the peep show, I get paid to masturbate, which is basically awesome. However, I'm looking for something else now to fill my days, with maybe the occasional lucrative naked night thrown in for good measure and fun.

So I'm sending out résumés looking for work in New York City. I'm moving there at the end of August and I want a full time youth and/or LGBT or women's rights related job. I'm kind of excited at the prospect of work I could like and not have to take home for me. Something that would stimulate me intellectually and hopefully exercise my compassion without making me too much a part of any sexist institutions. You know, a "real" job. It should be fun.

Female Customers

I love it when women come into the strip club and even more when they visit the peep show. Especially when they are clearly into other women, actually watching what I'm doing. Women are a tiny minority of our customer base, and it warms the cockles of my heart (and sometimes other parts) when women show up and ask for a lap dance. Even the shy straight women are fun to interact with, especially if I can get them to be friendly in return.

Many strippers don't seem to feel this way. Granted, there are plenty of women who come in unwillingly with their men, or who come in only to trash the dancers for a self esteem boost. I know lots of dancers who say they've been snubbed by women in couples because of jealousy or awkwardness. "Are you trying to steal my man?" kind of stuff. (To avoid this, I try to pay the most attention to the female member of a hetero couple. That way, he's still getting a show, but she's not feeling too threatened.)

Now, the other dancers are right. Some female customers can be obnoxious. However, I'd say it's in about the same proportion that male customers are obnoxious. We're just more used to the groping attempts and the veiled contempt from men than the girly snubs and the critical looks from women.

All that said, I found a good etiquette guide for female customers on Tales From the Pole that I thought I'd reproduce here. Some of these obviously only apply to straight women, but some things (like no touching) go for queer women, too.

• If it's your boyfriend's idea to go to the club and you really don't want to, please don't go; we all know the night will end in a fight.
  
• Try not to dress too skanky, you're not competing with the strippers. (Note: I don't mind this, although I do hate it when customers oggle non-dancer women who they're not paying for the privilege.)
  
• Being female does not grant you free entry or discounted dances and you are still expected to tip.
  
• Neither does it give you permission to touch the strippers; if male customers cannot touch, neither can you.
  
• Don't sit at the stage and bitch about a stripper's cellulite; she can hear you, and you know you have it too.
  
• Don't complain loudly that the stripper on stage has "no tits" "no ass" or "isn't even using the pole."
  
• Don't ever try to get on stage.
  
• Don't ever take your clothes off. Ever.
  
• Don't give your man a lap dance at the bar.
  
• Don't do any form of dancing at all.
  
• Don't hit on the customers.
  
• Don't cockblock our customers because you are "hotter than the bitches working here."
  
• Try to understand that the strippers are not hitting on your man, they are merely trying to get money out of him because, you know, its work.
  
• And please, if you and your man are trawling for the third member of your fantasy threesome, stay out of the stripclub. Please.

I, like Sakura, have either seen or at least heard about all of these things happening in the club. Three cheers to her for making an etiquette list.

Explicitness On Stage

We had an all dancer meeting today in the peep show. We went through some of the obvious business stuff like finances and scheduling issues and dancer conflicts. The most interesting conversation of the day, though, revolved around the explicitness of our stage show.

Where I work, there is a main stage where three to five dancers perform at a time. There is also a "Private Pleasures" booth where a solo girl can give more "explicit" shows to one (or two, if they're a couple) customer at a time. These can involve masturbation or dildos or dirty talk. The customers get to direct the action, and it's a way for a single girl to be more directly involved in a customer's fantasy.

Of course, the existence of this booth means that we need to keep things slightly less "explicit" on the stage show. If we're sitting there with our legs spread and talking dirty to the customers in the one-dollar stage show, why would they pay twenty dollars to go into Private Pleasures?

The problem becomes how we define explicitness. My job is a very cooperative place; all the dancers reinforce the rules for each other and we govern our dancing together. Which means that when we try to define "explicitness" it becomes a long and involved discussion.

It's been hard, as a new girl, to figure out exactly what I should be doing on the main stage. Some of the girls who have been there longer stand there with their feet up on the window, pussy wide open for the customer to practically breathe on through the glass. Other girls barely ever show cunt at all. Some will flash it standing by the mirrors at the back of the room, so you know, it's not like he can see it all that well. During my whole career as a dancer, I've tried to pick up tricks from other girls and learn by example. It's been a little tricky in the peep show.

Seems like the bottom line is "don't show too much pussy."

I like, though, to play the tease. Shocking, right, a stripper who's a tease? It's one of my favorite parts of the job. To get someone so involved in what I'm doing, to watch them be full of desire because I'm not quite giving them what they want. In the peep show I can do it safely, too, because it's not like they can try to grab me through the glass.

So I can play coy with my cunt. In the end it doesn't put me out at all. Once I'm trained for Private Pleasures, I can collect on some of the desire I'm denying. I'm definitely looking forward to playing a more active role in getting my customers off.

I'm Back, Mothafuckas

I've been home for a while now, about five weeks. I just finally had my audition to start dancing here. (I got the job.) I'd say stripping, but it really is just dancing naked since stripping implies having some clothes on to start with. Hooray, all nudity all the time!!

I am SO FUCKING EAGER TO GET BACK TO WORK. Yes, that's right, all caps. Stripping is sometimes exhausting and very occasionally demoralizing, but I do love it. I miss like hell getting naked in public. I miss feeling totally glamorous and sexxxxxy. I miss putting on makeup and picking out costumes. I love costumes. I miss that face a customer makes, the rapt attention when I catch his (sometimes her) eye. Yeah, it's eye contact that does it. Not titty contact. God, it's a rush. And such a boost to the ol' self esteem.

I'm working in a peep show (and yes I know this means that if you know San Francisco you can probably figure out where) and it's pretty different from my titty bar experiences at school. Obviously, I guess.

I definitely like that the men are masturbating. It makes it much more of a genuinely exhibitionistic experience for me, a sexual thing rather than a business thing. I get to see them while they're seeing me, so there's some reciprocation. I'm big on reciprocation. It's hot, and I get paid for it to boot!

When I auditioned, there was a man moving from booth to booth, getting different view angles on the girls in the show. If you don't know how a peep show works, watch Boondock Saints to get a clearer picture. (Or just watch it because those men are hot and you get to see some gorgeous bare man ass.)

Most of the windows to the booths are about a foot and a half square, enough to see a customer's head and shoulders. There are, however, two booths with bigger windows. When someone is in one of these two booths, we dancers get a full body shot of the customer when the they feed a dollar into the machine that opens the window.

This particular man went from small window to small window for the ten minutes I was dancing. When I went to dance directly in front of him, practicing my fluid movements with slightly atrophied muscles, I could see his shoulders jerking from his hand below jacking himself off. When I made smiling sexy faces at him, he licked his lips back at me.

Some people I guess would find that gross, but like I said I love reciprocity. His tongue looked soft. After I'd been dancing for some time, he moved into one of the big booths. He was wearing baggy clothes, a trucker hat. Your basic ghetto fabulous wardrobe. He stood sideways to the window so I could see that his cock was sticking out from his unzipped pants. He didn't pull anything down or off, just took his cock out, all bare on its own.

It was the kind of cock I like: average length but thick with a lovely spongy head. I was dancing in front of him, watching him play with it when the woman running my audition stuck her head into the room and called me back out again. I missed him coming, I'm sure messily onto the wall of the booth.

God, I missed dancing.