I Bleed, Therefore I Am A Vagina

I walked into the club scared for posting about unionizing. I have no protection against retaliation, aside from a mutual threatdown. They threaten me or fire me and then I threaten to report all of their underhanded dealings. But what kind of work environment would that create? Would I just end up shutting the club down and costing other women their livelihood? I’m afraid to interact with my bosses. I dodge the one who called me one night to tell me that he and the other managers had had a meeting and discussed that I don’t tip enough. He told me that he had convinced them not to fire me, that he had volunteered to talk to me about the matter instead of letting me go. When I met with union organizers, they told me that what had really happened was called extortion. My boss was extorting me, and if he had done it via texts, I would have had evidence for a case. But my bosses aren’t stupid. They have these conversations in person, in the dark, or over the phone. I don’t talk to my manager until checkout. He tells me I look very pretty tonight.

I got a dance with an adult man with bangs who audits various government agencies in the energy sector. He told me he flies all over for work. I ask him if they pay for first class. He tells me they fly him economy. I touch his shoulders. He’s tense. I ask him what he does for self-care. He tells me nothing. He buys a half hour with me. Puts my foot in his mouth. Wants to lick my whole body. I keep my hand over my pussy so he won’t lick there. He licks my hand covering my pussy. He wore a wedding ring.

I meet a retiree named Rick, aka Dick. He says, “Aw shucks! You’re gonna make me spend $200. I bet you like that.” He says it like he’s planning to spend $1,000. He tells me some call him Big Dick, others call him Little Dick. He says I’m so hot I was made for sex. He says he wants to have a special relationship with me. Points to himself says “sugar daddy” points to me “sugar baby”. I nod at him. He can’t afford me. He asks my price. I tell him I’m a very expensive date. He’s covered in liver spots. He tells me if I fucked him annually, he could be my fall back plan. I think about Sita only fucking after someone offered her $20,000. I think that I need to raise my standards. It’s time to gentrify this pussy and price out these Sweet & Low daddies.

I found out that one of the men I believed to be a co owner has apparently recently been banned from the premises for sexual harassment. Another person I thought was a co owner is just an enthusiastic manager. Which leaves just one clown running the joint and me very confused about the mastermind who steals half of my paycheck.

I’m exhausted from thinking about customers when they all blend together. How many men over seventy own the same Hawaiin shirt? How many construction workers roll from their work site directly to the club in their Timberlands? How many daddies look like Alex Trebek? It becomes this giant indistinguishable mass of men who say the same things and ask the same questions about my life. Every night at work I have to introduce my entire life to these people over a couple sentences, ideally. I work here. Yes, they don’t just fold me up into the closet at the end of the night-- I do have other pursuits. I’m from Oklahoma. I was riding a radish truck but I fell off in Los Angeles.

My breasts ached this week. I thought about how the pain comes from temporary cysts linked to one’s menstrual cycle. I massaged them, wondering if I could feel the lumps, but I didn’t feel anything in particular even though I knew they were swollen. My nipples remained erect-- not from arousal, but from swelling. I took some tylenol hoping it would help, but the relief was short lived.

I couldn’t retain any defining details about the men this week. My primary concern was making my bottom line without breaking my rule and getting drunk on the job to numb the pain. Not emotional pain, literal pain. I kept rubbing my breasts and customers thought it was just a cute quirk -- one of those fantasies they like to voice: “If I was a girl, I’d always be playing with my tits.” I’m a girl, and I play with my breasts because they’re full of benign cysts.

Customers tend to have one of two reactions when I tell them I’m a writer: 1. “Oh no, you’re gonna write about me”, 2. “Oh this is good, write this down”. The first set assumes, often incorrectly, that I’m going to write about them. I don’t write about most customers I interact with because there’s nothing to write about. They’re men who work jobs and who have never lived an interesting day in their utterly conventional lives. They want to believe they are fascinating subjects, or on the flip side they imagine that the erotic fantasy I provide is a mutual experience that I create masturbatory tributes to for my readers. The second group is convinced of their importance and entertainment value. They command me to “jot this down” because they’ve cracked themselves up which must mean that it’s noteworthy. I would never take down a note a customer considers to be entertaining because not one of them truly understands the situation, no matter how many sex workers they’ve hired throughout the years. Also, men aren’t (intentionally) funny.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not jaded. I don’t hate men or my customers. It’s simply that the better you get at stripping, the less you retain individual interactions. If each interaction is quick and impersonal, you’re more capable of being efficient and avoiding wasted time/emotional energy. When I was a baby stripper, every interaction was a discovery. I didn’t know myself or my boundaries within a sex work setting. I didn’t know what my time was worth. So much was personal including harsh rejections. I took it to be something deficient about me, but now it’s routine like the same California salad with chicken and balsamic vinaigrette I order every shift for dinner.

I have even worse tunnel vision when I’m about to start my period. At that point I’m in Survival Mode, working against the clock, trying to meet my quota before I’m out of commission for a few days. Thursday night when I got home I noticed my inner thighs were stained with the dark brown beginnings of my cycle. I didn’t know when I’d started bleeding. I could have been leaving brown stains on customers all night. I wouldn’t know unless one of them complained. I’ve only received one complaint that stuck with me, aside from all those tearful men who thought they could fuck me. It was this one time when I’d misidentified a white man as a customer I’d hit it off with maybe a year prior. I’d sat in the mans lap, acting as if we knew each other, draping my arm behind his head. When I realized my mistake, I extracted myself in a hurry. My manager, the Extortion Specialist, came by to tell me that a customer had complained of my B.O., and I was humiliated. I sniffed one armpit. Neutral. I sniffed the other armpit. Acrid. It’s incredible how heterogenous bodies can be. That embarrassment was enough that I packed up and went home early to menstruate in peace.

Bleeding is a fact of life for vaginas. I think therefore I am. I bleed therefore I am a vagina.