Top Secret FKA Article Preview (plz don’t leak it)

The night FKA Twigs rented out Cheetahs in Hollywood for the Magdelena album release party was the last night the workforce at Cheetahs was able to work. The party was a covert celebration of the management changeover that had been in the works for months. When celebrities shut down these clubs for events, even when the dancers are permitted to dance they are typically receiving a significant pay cut. The events limit the number of customers permitted within the club and often restrict what services the dancers are allowed to provide, such as removing lap dances from the menu which often forms the bulk of a dancer’s wage. It is a misconception to think that most dancers subsist off of our stage money alone. Lap dances are where the majority of strippers earn their take home money and receive tips. When we are not able to provide lap dances, we leave with a quarter of our normal income. FKA rented the club on Friday night, and Saturday morning, every Cheetahs stripper received a text informing them that the club was shutting down for renovations, and that they would no longer have their jobs when the club reopened. Strippers who had worked at Cheetahs for decades were suddenly told they would not be welcome back via a text message. They were not given the chance to inform their regular customers what was going on, so many lost customers and relationships they had sustained for months, if not years. An entire workforce of strippers was suddenly uprooted in a single message, and FKA Twigs was silent. This is not FKA Twigs’ fault. The abuse and corruption within the management and ownership of the strip club industry is rampant, and worthy of an entire separate article, and I do not expect Twigs to have a detailed understanding of the internal politics. I do however expect her to take an interest in the lives of the people who she has chosen to use as the muses for her current body of work.

Hustlers has been a contentious topic within the stripper community. While I appreciate the concept of a movie about strippers that *only* has one plot line following a woman who started stripping out of desperation, and primarily focuses on the sisterhood that I know very well within my industry, this cheerful editorializing overlooks what happened behind the scenes. During the filming of Hustlers, the production company shut down the club and only a handful of the dancers regularly employed at that club were given the chance to perform in the movie. The majority lost days of work without compensation. This is a rampant problem these celebrities do not consider when they decide to rent out our workplaces for their events. When the club is closed, we don’t get paid. The majority of strippers across America are treated as independent contractors, with states like California classifying their dancers as hourly employees. Both IC’s and hourly employees do not receive compensation in the event that our workplaces shut down for any reason, and this is extremely damaging. Contrary to the popular narrative bouncing around that all strippers are bringing home thousands of dollars every night, the majority of dancers are barely getting by. We are mothers caring for children; sons/daughters/children sending money to our families; we are disabled, paying out of pocket for our healthcare; we are people supporting our queer communities through mutual aid-- and much like the majority of laborers in America, we are living paycheck to paycheck so missing a day or week of work can mean the difference between paying rent or facing homelessness.

FKA Twigs is neither the first nor the last celebrity I’ve reached out to in an attempt to educate them in how to be more than cultural tourists perusing sex work, specifically stripping, for their latest artistic ventures. This has been a recurring trend lately, from JLo and Constance Wu hijacking the very real story of a couple of women who look down on sex workers creating a pyramid scheme built upon the labor of real sex workers, and instead fabricating a rosy narrative of a girl gang of strippers hustling their clients; to FKA Twigs “elevating” pole dance while presumably the real strippers remain trashy.

To be fair, she probably was “minding her own business” or completely ignorant of the internal politics of the club she was renting out. For her it was shallow: simply a location rental. She wanted to dance on stripper poles, and where better than a strip club? But at this crucial juncture where marginalized communities are demanding more because we need more, this is no longer tolerable. You can’t come into a community that has been demonized as immoral; ostracized when we attempt to lobby for visibility; censored across online platforms; ignored when we seek justice for rape, assault, theft, or other abuses; excluded from adequate healthcare; and used as the butt of jokes for every inadequate comedian looking for an easy punchline-- and do nothing. This is the meaning of cultural tourism. Celebrities enjoy playing pretend, benefitting from the “edginess” of playing a stripper; find their own personal “liberation” or “healing”; and then get out without considering the healing or liberation our community is literally screaming for.

Most recently Twigs posted a video she titled “Other Womxn,” in which she is quoted as saying, “I wanted to create a matriarchal dominance in a space that’s usually filled with, and run by male energy.” When I read this I was stunned by how grossly misguided and paternalistic the entire concept was. Twigs-- a woman who has never worked as a stripper (Although she likes to imagine her brief stint performing burlesque is similar. It’s not the 1800s or the 1920s, there is nothing sex work about burlesque in the 2000s.) decides she wants to reclaim a space that wasn’t even hers to begin with, and rescue strippers from that dominant “male energy” we’re all apparently living under. How misguided. Additionally, as a trans nonbinary stripper who has stripped with a number of other nonbinary, even trans masculine identifying strippers it is complete erasure to title an event in a strip club about strippers “Other Womxn”. Adding an “x” to the word “women” doesn’t equate to gender inclusion. I am not a woman or a womxn, and it is offensive to stamp that title on the diverse array of people who are strippers. Finally, if you think that strip clubs are filled with dominant male energy, you’ve never spent time with strippers. I have been dancing for four years now across a number of clubs. In my free time I am a member of a number of stripper organizations, talking to other strippers who are working together to create better working conditions for our community. I have never met any group of people who are more radical; more empowered; or more knit together as a community of allies supporting each other through a litany of obstacles the world remains ignorant of than strippers. And this sense of community is present within the club. The media likes to show the stripper fights or perilous accidents at the club. What they don’t show are the friendships; the ways we collaborate together to earn money; and the blatant disregard we have for most of the men who come through the club. To assume that men are running the show is to assume that strippers lack agency, and that is the definition of paternalism. FKA Twigs’ show was not about matriarchal dominance but was instead a thinly veiled replication of the hegemonic male energy she claimed to be subverting.

I wrote a comment under the clip she posted of that performance on Instagram expressing my criticisms. What happened? Hardly an hour later, my comment was gone. I asked my followers on Instagram to check for my comment, to make sure I wasn’t experiencing some sort of glitch, but lo and behold, my words were erased. And so began a campaign to have my voice heard. I got well over fifty different people to repost my original comment. I have receipts from many people showing me that they posted the text, but every time I or one of my followers went to find it on FKA Twigs’ page, there was nothing to be found. A few of the other comments expressing outrage over my silencing remained visible, but my criticism, along with the criticisms of other black, nonbinary, and indigenous dancers also disappeared. Not only were we being silenced by the performance, our voices were now literally being censored from the narrative completely. FKA Twigs was excluding actual strippers from interacting with her work about strippers.

The words Twigs’ team published as the statement for “Other Womxn” are an even more damning testament to her erasure:

“In music video history, pole dancing has been traditionally used as a male trope; a symbol of sex, wealth and power in which female empowerment and enjoyment is secondary to male fantasy. But in Cellophane twigs turns pole dancing into something beautiful imbued with vulnerability and strength.”

Pole dancing was created by black strippers. It has always been a display of strength and athletic prowess. It is a form where radical people have taken off their clothes for money, contrary to shame, stigma, and the judgmental gaze of society at large. They performed a revolutionary act and we continue to be revolutionaries, and to not see this is erasure. Twigs did not transform anything. There is nothing beautiful or vulnerable about stealing a marginalized group’s culture and profiting off of it. She is an unrepentant culture vulture, and this is not even beginning to address the way she did the same exact thing stealing voguing without doing enough for the queer community in return for using their art.

And I know some people will say, “well there’s a link at the bottom of the website for people to donate to sex worker organizations,” and to that I ask: Am I supposed to be satisfied with an unexplained footnote? This is the equivalent of Blackout Tuesday, where all of these corporations decided to throw up a black square “in solidarity” while what they actually did was destroy the lines of communication between BLM organizational activism by clogging up the BLM hashtags. Slacktivism is destructive. We are not simply asking people to throw money at us. We have specific platforms we have created with strategic demands and money is not enough. Donating money is not engaging with a community. Donating money doesn’t shed any insight into what’s going on on the ground, such as what happened at Cheetahs and what’s going on at clubs across America, where Twigs continues to host these events,and beyond. Money thrown at organizations allows the majority of strippers to remain invisible and voiceless. The real ways to support our community involve getting to know us. Why hasn’t she posted features about the dancers she uses in her videos on her timeline? Why hasn’t she allowed a stripper to take over her online presence to give a platform to underrepresented voices? Why hasn’t she shared any information about how strippers and other sex workers have been excluded from government assistance during the pandemic due to a restriction in the Care Act excluding “prurient” businesses? Where in her stories are our PayPal, CashApp, or Venmo requests when so many strippers are fighting against homelessness at this very moment? Dropping links at the very bottom of the page is not enough, and we are not asking for more: we are demanding it.

If you want to be a true ally to sex workers of all kinds, you need to put us at the front. We are not a footnote. If you are dancing on a metal pole in Pleasers without elevating the voices of strippers, you are the problem. You are a performative feminist. You are a SWERF. We can have a symbiotic relationship between celebrities and other pole enthusiasts and the strippers who inspire them, but it requires people taking on the responsibility of being a true ally. We will not tolerate anything less because stripping and all sex work is not a hobby for us. We are fighting for our lives.