Daddy Issues

What makes someone choose to become a stripper, when they don’t have to? Commonly people conflate the desire to pursue sex work with “daddy issues,” and while I don’t entirely disagree, I’d like to posit that “daddy issues” are the primary driver for most people in their various industries. Do I have daddy issues? Of course. I have daddy issues, my father has daddy issues, his father had daddy issues, and the cycle goes on and on back to our ancestors who survived slavery-- working the fecund earth of Louisiana plantations, and back further to the grueling inhumanity of the Middle Passage aboard slave ships to the Americas, back to West Africa where we came from between Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Camaroon. I’m the product of inherited generational trauma, and that’s simply an inescapable reality.

The other answer people suggest is a past history of sexual assault. I hadn’t been sexually assaulted prior to entering the industry. There is something interesting about the idea of working through trauma by reliving it -- reenacting an assault under your own terms, finding ways to reassert your power and control while simultaneously validating the fact that what happened happened, even in the face of disbelief or systemic barriers to achieving real justice. I relive my own sexual assault constantly. It’s not painful or scarring at this point. Every time I consider it, I feel something different. Sometimes I’m simply meditative, other times it takes on an erotic tinge. What he took from me, I take back. My work isn’t sexual assault. I choose who to speak to, what services I’m willing to provide, where I want to be touched and where I draw the line. My consent makes the difference, regardless of the tone of that consent, whether it’s enthusiastic and orgasmic or whether it’s irritably reluctant.

New Years is one of those holidays we all can celebrate without the taint of religion or reckoning with our colonial history. It’s not a holiday we need to take back or recontextualize because we’ve progressed as a society. On New Years I got a string of texts from my closest daddies. Everyone was taking time to look back upon the year and those who we’d held dear in 2019.

Danny: HNY - you

Me: HNY babe. Getting ready for the party.

Danny: Which party?

Me: Something in Chinatown. What about you?

Danny: Very boring lol

Me: Haha, well probably good for you.

Danny: Ha, why is that?

Me: Because you’re always going the hardest, and this is coming from a person in her twenties.

Danny: True. Well, while we are here and it’s about to turn 2020: thanks for some of my favorite times in 2019.

Me: Aw, love you bb. Have fun out there in NYC.

Danny: I’m a huge fan of you - you have amazing everything - please use your superpowers.

Me: I will. Only for good. Have a happy new year, luv.

Danny: U too luv.

Me: Aw, so wholesome.

Danny: And now the non wholesome part … ready?

Me: Lmao

Danny: What panties are you wearing? Damn turns me on even asking lol.

Me: Haha not cute ones.

I sent him old pics of me in lingerie. I was feeling indulgent and wanted to share the moment with him. I wanted him to want me even though he couldn’t have me.

Danny: Dang. You remember that time where my dick was hard?

Hard dick is a precious commodity for a man struggling with erectile dysfunction. I appreciated that I had been there to witness the momentous occasion where Danny’s body cooperated with his mind, as much as I felt short-changed for that particular outcall. Danny wanted to Venmo me for up-skirt shots, but didn’t want to send the money until after I sent them.

Danny: Show. Me Venmo.

Me: Venmo first.

He’d regressed into his horny monosyllabic caveman self, and I wasn’t in the mood to find proper lighting for the kinds of selfies he wanted. Clients underestimate the amount of work a good selfie requires. Dim light and a cluttered background just won’t do. I didn’t want to begin my year catering to clients. I wanted to do what I wanted to do without anyone offering me money-- not that I don’t love being offered money. It’s precisely because lately I’ve been treated with such generosity that I can enjoy turning down money. It feels powerful. I can look at a hundred dollars and say that it’s nothing to me. I’m not starving anymore. I don’t have to make a choice between peanut butter brands because I can’t afford real food. I don’t have to choose between a larger jar of peanut butter with palm oil additives and a smaller, more expensive, natural one without additives. I’m not trying to squeak through making $500 per month, living in a slum house with five strangers. I am so incredibly privileged to no longer live like I once had to. I’ll never forget where I came from.

I grew up in a tiny house in Norman, Oklahoma. Nobody in my family is a native Oklahoman, we’re all transplants from other places who happened to end up in the stark emptiness that is the panhandle state. My mother, sister, and I arrived in Norman October 19, I want to say 1998 although I was too young to remember the exact year. I know the date, because it was my mother’s birthday. My mother, father, sister, and I had been living in Santa Fe, New Mexico in a little one bedroom adobe apartment. My father worked as a claims adjuster while my mother stayed at home with us. We were very poor and isolated. My mother says my father always had too much pride to do any of the dirty work of poverty survival like applying for food stamps or cutting coupons. My parents had a contentious marriage, full of loud, drawn out fights. My sister and I would hide in the closet whenever it began, with an ear pressed to the door to make sure my mother never got hurt. I grew up listening to screaming and sobbing. It’s why I’m so quiet and reserved now. Anyway, October 19, 1998, my parents reached a breaking point. My father was done. He wanted to know where to take us. My uncle was working as a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He was the closest relative we had, so my mother instructed my father to drive us to Oklahoma. We arrived that night on my uncle’s front lawn, and he and my aunt graciously took us in.

This is not the story I tell customers when they ask how a pretty girl like me ended up in Oklahoma. I’m not a homely corn-fed white girl is what they mean. I usually tell them the shortened account:

“We moved because my mother wanted to live close to her brother, who was a professor out in Oklahoma.” It’s a spoonful of sugar in comparison to the jug of vinegar that was that moment in my life. It’s easier to tell half truths in this industry, not simply because it’s a more economical use of time, but also because the truth is too human. Dream girls don’t cry for themselves. They only cry for you.

I don’t blame my father for what he did. He sent me a Happy New Years gif and checked on me. Years ago when I told him the news that I was a stripper, his response, verbatim was:

Dad: I’m surprised I’m not more upset about this. My daughter is a stripper, and I’m not upset.

He said it half to me, half to himself. I don’t think he ever had a problem with me choosing my own career path, so much as eventually he got sore that I was making more money than him. It’s hard to be a fifty-year-old man making less money than your twenty-three-year-old daughter. My father is a jealous man. He’s always felt like he was competing with me for one thing or another, whether it was my grandmother’s affection or for our family’s approval. In a way, me stripping was a gift. It had the potential to be an equalizer. I would never be the golden child again. But then he learned what I was earning and he found another reason to feel inadequate. I told him about my first sugar daddy, and he was dumbfounded that a man would spend thousands of dollars just to take me to dinner and watch the orchestra.

Dad: He must be rubbing one out for you every night.

It was a disturbing way of putting something obvious. Maybe he was. Ed had ED, and no internet connection. I didn’t know what his masturbatory life looked like, and I wasn’t especially interested. The erotic end of our relationship had been uncomfortable at best, but I was also a baby stripper and I hadn’t been broken in yet. I know that phrasing is unsettling, but there is something to the sentiment. I started ridgid, but now I’m pliant.

My father and mother got engaged after three months of knowing each other, and married three months later. My dad didn’t want children, but my mother wanted us desperately and my father acquiesced. It sounds like the kind of thing twenty-somethings do, but my parents were both solidly thirty. My sister and I were born, and what was once a minor concession became a lifetime commitment my father was in no way prepared to make. To be fair, my mother, while entirely happy to command the undertaking, was even less prepared than my father.

My mother raised us in a panic. Her father was a mostly absent philanderer and she had lost her mother shortly after turning eighteen. She’d been beaten and abused since she was an infant, later molested by an uncle who the family sheltered instead of protecting my mother, and this violence continued into her intimate partnerships. Since she had lived such a tragic life, she wanted us to be prepared for the worst life had to offer. She punished us for minor infractions and kept us on short leashes to abate her own terror over the possibility that we could end up in harm’s way. Between the imposed isolation and my mother’s own battle with mental illness, I knew one thing: I was getting the FUCK ASAP. (If you don’t know this reference, please google the phrase “get the fuck, ASAP”)

As a child, all I wanted was to be an adult. I wanted to be free to do what I wanted, to come and go as I pleased, to do drugs and fuck as many people as possible. I was obsessed with sex work. I didn’t know what it was then, but I knew I wanted to inhabit that world. I watched every movie, every salacious documentary, every reality TV episode about sex work I could get my sheltered little hands on. I also pirated sex education videos because Oklahoma is an “abstinence only” state, and I planned to be very sexually active. I was a sex nerd. Was it a reaction to my circumstances? Undoubtedly. Am I worse for it? Definitely not. We all navigate inherited trauma differently. My first sex talks were about sexual assault. I had to teach myself about pleasure and intimacy.

My mother, a Catholic zealot, always talks about “finding your calling”. She means it in a biblical sense: God “calls” a person to pursue one thing or another. If I believed in god, I’d say that I’m called to be a sex worker.

Sunday, while I sat in a room full of strippers, labor lawyers, and union reps discussing how we could unite for collective action, amidst the fear and debate, a young stripper raised her hand to speak.

Her: I want to say what I can bring to the table: I can bring my love and determination. I can bring my joy and enthusiasm. I can bring the happiness this work gives me. I can bring the friendships I’ve cultivated that will last a lifetime. I can bring my body that can do incredible things. I can bring my appreciation for the strength and courage I’ve seen in this room. What we’re doing is not just necessary-- it is an opportunity to make a place we all know and love even better and more beautiful. We should do it not just for us, but for the generations after us. We should do it so that the girls after us will have a better, safer work environment, because we’re not alone. This is a sisterhood. Together we have more power than we can even imagine.

Beside me, Antonia and AM blotted away tears.

Antonia: I’ve worked with naked women for twenty years, not because I didn’t have any options, but because it was where I wanted to be. I love being a stripper, and that’s why I’m here. There’s nobody braver or more beautiful than strippers.

What makes someone choose to become a stripper, when they don’t have to? I know I’m a bit of a Disney princess with my high ideals and morals in an industry that defiantly thrives on amorality, but I am who I am. I’m here for many reasons. I don’t need to strip, but it’s what I want. It’s what I love. And I couldn’t be luckier.