Notes on a New Strip Club Model

That represents the workers, diversifies the customers, includes everyone, and involves fair pay...please!

I met someone who works in arms manufacturing at the club, at the weekend. My first shift for a long time after battling post-viral fatigue. He bought me a tequila. He didn't talk about his work, but shame hung from him, when we established that the work he did, led to arms traded with countries currently in conflict. He talked about the need to do his work and not think about the consequences. There were a lot of shrugs. He wanted me to follow him on Strava, he competes in marathons. I think he was keen to tell me, there’s another side to him. He was slightly in awe when I sketched out the things I do. He didn’t get a dance, but was at pains to convey it wasn’t me. It was the cost. I explained I don’t mind the rejection at all and leaves me free to now try and sell other dances.

I got one dance, all night. Thirty minutes in VIP. That’s £165 the customer pays, and £97.50 to me. And I had to pay £30 to work. So really I made £67.50. It was slim pickings all night for all of us. That dance I got because I connected with the band t-shirt he was wearing—The Wonder Stuff—whom I saw play live in the nineties. Thus insued a conversation about nineties indie, the acts that have endured, the gigs, and festivals we’ve been to.

I introduced a mixed group to the strip club. Women and genderqueers. I had hoped this would lead to a dance, but they prevaricated and I got my VIP dance and never saw them again. I wanted to dance for them.

In strip clubs, any and all people walk in. It means traversing all kinds of conversations, drawing on all your personal experiences to build connections. I like that part; sometimes I do. It feels like work though. The prelude to a dance is a hard graft. It is work, but it’s also unpaid.

Any dancer will tell you. We need another strip club model. Anything, but this. Let’s try anything but what we have. Imagine I walked away with £165. Imagine no house fees. Imagine no commission. Imagine a basic hourly wage, minimum wage would do. The argument against this is that the clubs are struggling. Dancers know this as we sit for hours waiting for the first customers to arrive. But, why does our labour have to prop up an industry that relies on us? Imagine strip clubs without strippers? Sex work without workers?

The answer, is not to squeeze the workers. It’s to diversify, expand the customers, expand who thinks they are allowed to come to strip clubs. The industry is due for an overhaul. A rethink. Strip clubs can be loud disorienting spaces, and some customers deal with the sensory overwhelm by drinking, to calm themselves. I sort of know what’s going on, there’s too much stimulation to relax in the space, and the customer came in to relax, feel intimacy, closeness, and feel accepted, so they drink when they could be getting dances.

Caitlyn Moran once gleefully wrote that strip clubs were ‘cold shameful places’. I disagree with this perspective, full of her judgement and projection—‘girls, get off the pole, you’re letting us all down’. That’s a quote from memory, so forgive me if it’s imperfect. But the point remains.

In the hours before the customers dribble in, I imagine the clubs differently. Early evening shifts, without music, or softer music, a gentler ambience. Disabled toilets, and accessibility considered throughout the club. That’s for starters.

A club I’ve worked at regularly has changed owners, it’s revamped, rebranded, and relaunched. I haven’t been back yet to report on the overhaul. But there was something interesting about it’s new promotional campaign. Rather than visualise the diversity of dancers I’ve worked alongside (very muscular, chubby, toweringly tall, very petite, at a guess from the smallest size to size 18 or 20, all ethnicities, trans and non-binary dancers) the images presented a polished, tanned dancer with long blonde hair. When I saw her, I wondered if I would even be rehired at the club, if I still fitted their image. I imagine everyone but that model wondered if they would fit, having seen that image. This is not to shame that model at all, I imagine she feels exactly the same way seeing herself so image-perfected. It’s rather to point out that, the stories strip clubs tell about what happens in strip clubs—hedonism, excess, girls, girls, girls!—doesn’t capture what we do. We create moments of magic, intimacy, acceptance, connection, horniness, just with our naked bodies, dancing in front of you, or on your lap. Sometimes, we just hug.

And we want to be paid for our time and labour to be magic.

(Reader, there are alternative models emerging; stripper owned, stripper organised. There’s also a union I’m part of. I will write about the alternatives in the future posts. For now though, I wanted to contemplate my £67.50).