Meditation on Lap Dances

Hi everyone,

I’m about to take a little vacation. I’m planning to write an entry for next week, then I’ll be bringing back one from the vault the following week so that I can avoid completely losing my mind. I’m super burned out, but trying my best to hold up.

For this week, I thought I would share a meandering meditation. I hope it’s not total garbage. Thank you all for your support and for giving me wiggle room to be human.

xo

~s

There have been many leaders throughout the decades of the sex worker rights movement, but the stripper rights movement is much younger, and many of the people who created the movement are still alive. The strip tease may have had its origins in the hootchy kootchy tents of the Chicago world’s fair of 1893, but the strip club as we know it--with lap dances in exchange for money, were born at the Mitchell Brothers in the late 70’s. I’m somewhere in this lineage, a few generations out with friends on both ends of the spectrum: some fresh into adulthood, some who remember the glory days when making a few thousand a night was nothing to write home about. They tell me about a time before house or stage fees; back when strippers had real sex on stage; back when there was no such thing as Pleasers or any specialized stripper heel. It was a wilder time. A less regulated, experimental moment. A time before social media, when camcorders were new and secretly recording dancers was more of a bulky production.

There is something uniquely American about the creation of the strip club. Our little Puritanical experiment has always had a love hate relationship with sex. We paint it as dirty, and yet we’re obsessed. We’re repulsed and yet we can’t get enough of the tease. Actually, this country is all about tease and denial. Other places reluctantly accept some level of prostitution, whether it be permitted only if performed by independent agents rather than agencies, or whether it be relegated to particular areas of a city. But the US draws the line well before penetration. We are allowed to rub our bodies against each other, and that’s about it (except if there’s a camera around, and then by all means gangbang away!).

I was reading my employee handbook recently, which extensively outlined what we are not allowed to do because it crosses the threshold into prostitution, and I was surprised by how many rules I’ve broken. You’re not allowed to let customers touch you at all. Customers aren’t allowed to kiss or lick your body (which, good luck with that one. I get shoulder and neck kisses before I even know what’s happening). You’re not allowed to intentionally stimulate anybody’s genitals, even if it’s via grinding on their lap, which is the core of what a lap dance is. You’re not even allowed to say that you’ll give a better lap dance if you get tipped more, which is a common lie we all tell to make sure we get better tips. Maybe Ciara got it right in Body Party when she demonstrated how to give a proper air dance (The main problem is the lap dance booths are too small for me to roll across the floor before crawling up to these gents!). But that’s not what I saw when I first became a stripper, and it’s not what I’ve seen after working in the industry on and off for five years now.

The first club I ever worked for was The Ritz in Baltimore. I still think of the mirrored stage, the tiny pair of clear heels I bought at a local thrift shop, and the way it felt to watch money rain from the second floor balcony. But the first club I ever visited was Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club on the Baltimore Block. The Block is a street with a row of strip clubs shoulder to shoulder, nestled between smoke shops, sex shops, and other vice industries. I’d gotten a coupon for free entry, and went with a male friend because I was scared of going alone. It was a reconnaissance mission, to see what a strip club was actually like on the inside, and to see if I had what it takes to bravely dance upon one of those hallowed stages. That Hustler club was particularly intimidating. It was three, maybe four floors with stages dotted throughout and a labyrinth of lap dance rooms tucked around every corner. The central stage had a pole several stories tall, flanked by smaller, more intimate stages. I heard the DJ calling out dancers’ names, telling them which stage to go to next. I hadn’t realized I would be so close to fully naked, fully exposed pussies, but there I was, close enough to ponder them.

I hadn’t considered any of the aesthetic properties of my own vulva. I knew it was not a white person’s pussy. I was brown, and I knew that meant something as far as how I would be perceived. I was also hairy *because of feminism*. Hair felt powerful and rebellious, but judging from the pussies I was witnessing on parade, I knew it would have to go. My leg hair and armpit hair would also probably have to go. The strip club didn’t just have a dress code, it had an unspoken grooming code I would have to comply with. I was entering into a very defined, developed culture where I would need to learn how to fit in or else I wouldn’t be successful. It was at a time where I was deep into exploring my gender expression, and felt most at home in androgyny. But I knew to succeed, I would have to commit to performing femininity. And not just any sort of femininity, nay nay! I would have to perform hypersexual femininity.

I’ve never been a sexually squeamish person. I’ve always been adventurous and curious, even if my desire to explore hasn’t come from a place of desire. I entered into a full-time DS polycule just to see if I might enjoy myself. I wasn’t wet for it or attracted to either of the people involved, I just wanted to know if maybe they held the key to a world of arousal I hadn’t been able to access without kink. In the end, I learned that I wasn’t into pain, restraint, sensory deprivation, or submission, and while that wasn’t the most fun outcome, it scratched my curiosity itch.

I had a similar itch with sex work. Was it the dark deviance of working in a den of vice? Was it the glamour of being alluring? Was it a desire to be used by strangers? Was it a fantasy of being insatiable? Was it about social climbing? Was it Anna Nicole Smith laughing giddily with her tits out, looking like a deliciously hot mess with her wheelchair-bound century old husband beside her? Maybe it was all of that, and hoping that this image would possess me, transforming me into a syren, harkening men to their ruin. But I wasn't a syren at the beginning. I was a brash young twenty-something who was only ever seductive by accident. The most seductive thing about me when I first began dancing was my naïveté. Not knowing what a lap dance was or what boundaries I might have made me vulnerable, and the men could smell it like blood on the water. Not all of the customers wanted to dance with someone who wasn’t a pro. There’s a confidence and finesse to a seasoned dancer that takes years to develop. New strippers are like baby giraffes, unsteady on their long legs. They aren’t sure of themselves, let alone sure of how to do their job. Customers love “breaking in” a new girl. They push our limits and may even “forget” to tip us. I was taken advantage of more times than I like to admit. Still, there’s an allure to not knowing, and I still look back at that time with a degree of romanticism. I may not have known what my particular brand of allure was. I may not have known how to ask for a tip or negotiate without customers clocking my hard sale tactics. I may not have had lingerie sets that cost $500. I may have been making less than half of what I make now. But I was none the wiser, and I felt so free. My body was more open to the erotic than it is now. I didn’t have anything to compare my success to. Everything was a discovery.

Now I’m a true pro in every sense, but then, I remember walking into the lap dance area, incredulous. My eyes didn’t know where to look. There were two walls of booths facing each other without any curtains to hide what was going on, so I just saw rows of strippers, writhing on top of customers. I saw hands creeping out from underneath their bodies, caressing and teasing them. I accidentally made eye contact with one of the dancers as she performed her lap dance and she glared at me briefly before rotating to the next position. I hadn’t meant to make eye contact, but I felt mesmerized by what I was seeing. I hadn’t had a lot of experience watching people simulate sex in person. It was kinda hot, but I also felt like I was intruding. I realized if I could see her, she and everyone else could see me. I realized I was scared of being seen when I inevitably gave my first lap dance. Would I be watched?

It wasn’t so much that I had performance anxiety, or any prudishness. I was primarily afraid of getting in trouble for crossing those very blurry lines of what is permitted and what is not. Most of the time, management will give new strippers a brief rundown of the rules of the club, but they seldom go into what you can and cannot do in a lap dance. They won’t even tell you what a lap dance is. That’s confidential information dancers pass on to other dancers, and even then, we’re vague. My stripper friends gave me my first lap dance ever. We had down time in the early hours of our shift. The club was empty. They sat me down in one of the booths, and I received, taking mental notes. I don’t remember much of it now, other than that it was very PG-13 and platonic. It wasn’t the kind of dance any of us were really giving, but it was enough to start me on my journey. Even though we knew each other well, in and out of the club, we were tight-lipped about our personal boundaries. It was the shame of stigma, and something more. Maybe after drinking, a loose lipped dancer will cop to a hand job or talk about a customer creaming their pants, but most of the time we kept what we did private because we live in the gray netherworld of quasi legality, and the less we talked, the more we could preserve our positions in our beloved purgatory.

Now, half a decade later, I couldn’t ballpark how many lap dances I’ve given. Definitely hundreds, but it could be thousands. My boundaries have expanded, relaxed, dissolved only to return. So much has changed about the industry, and yet some things are constant. The lap dance has been a gray zone in our country, regulated and yet simultaneously very unregulated, up to the will and whims of each dancer, loosely or tightly enforced from club to club. Secret formulas we keep close. Enjoyed by the cops shortly before they bust us for showing too much under boob. It is the tease toward prostitution that the US reluctantly allows. Raunchy like grandma liked it, back when she danced decades ago.