knightwish
06-12-2013, 06:41 AM
I get sad that I missed the glory days of dancing. My mom danced in the 90s and the late 80s and banked. She's told me what it was like back then and things are entirely different now. She was paid hourly as well as taking home hundreds/thousands a night in tips. The hiring standards were much, much higher. To stay hired, the standards were much higher. When she first started, women danced on boxes in front of the customers, who were not allowed to touch them. Because there was little/no physical contact, the customers were willing to pay more for receiving much less than now.
No question late 80s early 90s was a fantastic time to be a stripper in one of those clubs. Absolute golden age. You had a sexually oriented business receiving societal and governmental support creating a high wage large industry with a low level of contact. Today that support doesn't exist. For example strip club expenses are no longer deductible as sales or entertainment expenses. You had a genuine shortage of prostitutes due to AIDS, today that doesn't exist. In this less supported world the strip club world has to choose to break into 3 subgroups where dancers experience any pair of:
large industry
high wages
low level of contact
They can't get all 3.
I don't know Detroit. But not all clubs are the same. Within 50 miles of my house there are probably 25 clubs where girls mostly have to be beautiful (or at least hot), dance, take off some clothes on stage, sell drinks, play pool and flirt. There are still quite a few low milage gown style clubs in that circle. There are clubs where day shift is blow job expected and night shift is much lower milage. You can get (2) and (3) together as a dancer but the clubs are often very selective. You can get (1) and (3) together but you are there to help sell drinks. What you are talking about does still exist. Delilah's Den Philly. Lace in NJ is a fine bikini club with gorgeous women who provide very tame lap dances that are heavily monitored, you want to be naughty you flash a big tipper. I don't think the situation is as black and white as the women make it out to be.
The quality of dancers is diminishing all over the country. Because now the club makes money off of each girl instead of paying her. In the short run, hiring a new girl will benefit the club directly and quickly. But in the long run, the dancer of lesser quality do not help the club. They create a lower caliber clientele as well. Many of the girls I work with at the clubs I work in would not have gotten hired at this club 10 years ago, and certainly not back in the 1990s. Less girls care about providing the glamorous fantasy experience that was so long ago. Less customers respect the dancers. It's really, really sad.
Absolutely agree with you here. Having dancers be independent contractors is terrible policy. Feature dancers are independent contractors, club dancers are employees and the Department of Labor should have snapped fingers of club owners really hard for the nonsense policies. I would love to see a Secretary of Labor who enforced labor laws in the USA again. This situation never should have been permitted. Another reason you all should form a formal lobby advocating for strippers. But to a certain extent the cost shifting is wage reduction, it is a result of an oversupply of strippers relative to the population of men willing to pay what strippers are charging for the services they are providing.
I think the best way to deal with this is change the pricing policies in clubs: $40-60 admission, focus on selling time at $20/10 min kept by the dancers. But either under this scenario or the current one most women working in most clubs will be providing a lot more milage than they would have had to 25 years ago.
I also think there is a bit of grass is greener when looking back. 25 years ago there were a lot of clean clubs. But there were still plenty of very dirty clubs back then. All the clubs were not like the ones your mother describes. There were strip clubs in the late 1980s where club owners were still more or less openly prostituting the girls, though they were far far fewer than there had been five years earlier. And there were a lot of clubs where so-so women stripped and made very little money. People here don't tend to talk about those clubs and those women as much which is why I think there is a lot of selective memory going on.
Additionally there were still many girls associated with the industry, who were providing extras style services. For example the gown type strip club might be located right next door to a bar where hookers were working doing car dates. I get that the bar next door creates a legal separation, and that's a very good thing in a world where stripping is legal and prostitution is not. I think most dancers today if you talked about would love to go back to that system, or something more modern say have the club next door to a full service massage parlor. But would they really if the option were on the table? How easy is it to sell CR at $250 1/2 hr + champagne, plus extras expenses if the guy can go next door and get a full body naked massage at $70 / hr with BBBJ for an extra $100. It might be equally undercutting or even more-so than extras girls.
IMHO extras girls are mostly still selling fantasy to a great extent. Mostly strippers aren't good hookers. They just don't have the space, the cleaning supplies, the sexual supplies... to really provide a quality purely sex experience. Extras girls are still selling a lot of fantasy and seduction mixed in with delivery. I think I see "extras girl" as very similar to the old George Carlin joke about driving, "everyone who drives slower than me is an asshole and everyone who drives faster is a maniac". An "extras girl" is mainly someone providing more delivery and less fantasy. The extras girls are using fantasy to take what would normally be very a very mediocre sexual experience and making it seem much more alluring.
I started a thread in the Blue commenting about the irony that in the cam world women really have the opportunity to create a low milage high entertainment experience on MFC vs. say cam sights which are "higher milage" (more sexually oriented). By and large most women even on here strongly prefer the steady income of selling a bread and butter product over providing a more pure entertainment experience. It is not just quality dropping. Seduction is harder and more sophisticated work and many women don't want to put the effort in. It is much easier to sell LDs to a man's penis than to sell a fantasy to his heart and his mind.
No question late 80s early 90s was a fantastic time to be a stripper in one of those clubs. Absolute golden age. You had a sexually oriented business receiving societal and governmental support creating a high wage large industry with a low level of contact. Today that support doesn't exist. For example strip club expenses are no longer deductible as sales or entertainment expenses. You had a genuine shortage of prostitutes due to AIDS, today that doesn't exist. In this less supported world the strip club world has to choose to break into 3 subgroups where dancers experience any pair of:
large industry
high wages
low level of contact
They can't get all 3.
I don't know Detroit. But not all clubs are the same. Within 50 miles of my house there are probably 25 clubs where girls mostly have to be beautiful (or at least hot), dance, take off some clothes on stage, sell drinks, play pool and flirt. There are still quite a few low milage gown style clubs in that circle. There are clubs where day shift is blow job expected and night shift is much lower milage. You can get (2) and (3) together as a dancer but the clubs are often very selective. You can get (1) and (3) together but you are there to help sell drinks. What you are talking about does still exist. Delilah's Den Philly. Lace in NJ is a fine bikini club with gorgeous women who provide very tame lap dances that are heavily monitored, you want to be naughty you flash a big tipper. I don't think the situation is as black and white as the women make it out to be.
The quality of dancers is diminishing all over the country. Because now the club makes money off of each girl instead of paying her. In the short run, hiring a new girl will benefit the club directly and quickly. But in the long run, the dancer of lesser quality do not help the club. They create a lower caliber clientele as well. Many of the girls I work with at the clubs I work in would not have gotten hired at this club 10 years ago, and certainly not back in the 1990s. Less girls care about providing the glamorous fantasy experience that was so long ago. Less customers respect the dancers. It's really, really sad.
Absolutely agree with you here. Having dancers be independent contractors is terrible policy. Feature dancers are independent contractors, club dancers are employees and the Department of Labor should have snapped fingers of club owners really hard for the nonsense policies. I would love to see a Secretary of Labor who enforced labor laws in the USA again. This situation never should have been permitted. Another reason you all should form a formal lobby advocating for strippers. But to a certain extent the cost shifting is wage reduction, it is a result of an oversupply of strippers relative to the population of men willing to pay what strippers are charging for the services they are providing.
I think the best way to deal with this is change the pricing policies in clubs: $40-60 admission, focus on selling time at $20/10 min kept by the dancers. But either under this scenario or the current one most women working in most clubs will be providing a lot more milage than they would have had to 25 years ago.
I also think there is a bit of grass is greener when looking back. 25 years ago there were a lot of clean clubs. But there were still plenty of very dirty clubs back then. All the clubs were not like the ones your mother describes. There were strip clubs in the late 1980s where club owners were still more or less openly prostituting the girls, though they were far far fewer than there had been five years earlier. And there were a lot of clubs where so-so women stripped and made very little money. People here don't tend to talk about those clubs and those women as much which is why I think there is a lot of selective memory going on.
Additionally there were still many girls associated with the industry, who were providing extras style services. For example the gown type strip club might be located right next door to a bar where hookers were working doing car dates. I get that the bar next door creates a legal separation, and that's a very good thing in a world where stripping is legal and prostitution is not. I think most dancers today if you talked about would love to go back to that system, or something more modern say have the club next door to a full service massage parlor. But would they really if the option were on the table? How easy is it to sell CR at $250 1/2 hr + champagne, plus extras expenses if the guy can go next door and get a full body naked massage at $70 / hr with BBBJ for an extra $100. It might be equally undercutting or even more-so than extras girls.
IMHO extras girls are mostly still selling fantasy to a great extent. Mostly strippers aren't good hookers. They just don't have the space, the cleaning supplies, the sexual supplies... to really provide a quality purely sex experience. Extras girls are still selling a lot of fantasy and seduction mixed in with delivery. I think I see "extras girl" as very similar to the old George Carlin joke about driving, "everyone who drives slower than me is an asshole and everyone who drives faster is a maniac". An "extras girl" is mainly someone providing more delivery and less fantasy. The extras girls are using fantasy to take what would normally be very a very mediocre sexual experience and making it seem much more alluring.
I started a thread in the Blue commenting about the irony that in the cam world women really have the opportunity to create a low milage high entertainment experience on MFC vs. say cam sights which are "higher milage" (more sexually oriented). By and large most women even on here strongly prefer the steady income of selling a bread and butter product over providing a more pure entertainment experience. It is not just quality dropping. Seduction is harder and more sophisticated work and many women don't want to put the effort in. It is much easier to sell LDs to a man's penis than to sell a fantasy to his heart and his mind.