"Why I strip": Britney goes to the clubs to crib new moves, Christian Slater gets dragged out of them by his wife, and pole dancing has become the latest workout craze. Listen in as three strippers reveal the reasons they take it off for a living.(Hot Topics)
Cosmopolitan
| February 01, 2004 | Smith, L.C.
* The nation's economy may still be shaky, but there's one industry that has experienced rapid growth: strip clubs. There are now about 2,500 nationwide, according to Dave Manack, editor of Exotic Dancer magazine, the number having doubled in the last 15 years. The salaries of dancers have also skyrocketed, thanks in part to the popularity of the lap dance. In New York, they perform topless in thongs (price: about $20 per song), but in such cities as Miami, they can dance nude in a customer's lap. Clubs also offer private rooms where a customer can retreat with a stripper and a bottle of champagne for about $400 per hour. "No contact" is the general rule, but it can often be broken for a price.
Despite the sleazy connotations, stripping has made its way into the mainstream. "Strip clubs are less taboo now," notes Jane Rinzler Buckingham, president of the market research firm Youth Intelligence and a Cosmo contributing editor. It's also being glamorized on TV shows like HBO's G-String Divas and the Pamela Anderson animated series Stripperella. It all makes what was once a last resort for desperate young women seem like a decent job. But is it? Here, three women who make their living stripping explain the pros and cons of this controversial profession.
THE OPPORTUNIST
PATRICE, 25
A Jamaican-American woman with glowing skin and almond-shaped eyes, Patrice gets incessant catcalls when she walks down city streets. Her opinion of most men? "They're dogs," she says. One would think this would make working in a strip club hell on earth, but for Patrice, the opposite is true. She knows how to attract men, how to sweet-talk them, and when necessary, how to keep them in line. One method: Accidentally spill a drink on him. She parodies an airhead voice: "Oh, I'm so clumsy!"
Patrice works four nights a week at Tens, a medium-size, neon-hued club in Manhattan where as many as 40 dancers a night compete to get picked for a private session in the lounge. When Patrice lands a customer, she says she usually just talks to the guy about whatever's on his mind (and does an occasional dance). "Some people think any guy who's willing to pay me $400 just to sit with him for an hour is a moron, but I think that's someone who values my time," she says. Experts disagree, noting that strippers who believe they have the upper hand may be deluding themselves. "Dancers can make large sums of money that to a lot of businessmen are just entertainment expenses they can be reimbursed for," notes Katherine Frank, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and author of G-Strings and Sympathy.
Patrice was introduced to the profession three years ago by her aunt, a longtime stripper, when she started college and was struggling to make ends meet. "Girls make money in this business because other girls won't do it," she says. "And I thought if I could dare myself, it might not be so bad." For Patrice, the hardest part was learning how to sell herself to customers who have so many dancers to choose from. "At first, I was really shy and awkward," says Patrice. "Now I go up, say hello, and within a minute, I'll ask if they want a dance or if they want to give me money to talk. If they don't want to do either, I'm gone." On a good night, she can take home $2,000 for an eight-hour shift, which can add up to more than $100,000 a year. But Patrice doesn't consider it easy money. "You deal with some pretty strange people, like this guy who would ask for me all the time and call me his blessed savior." Luckily, most clubs have a platoon of bouncers to protect the dancers and escort them to a cab or their car at the end of their shift.
Patrice says she doesn't sell sex; she sells a fantasy. She works hard to create an illusion when she's with a customer: "He believes he's the center of my universe; that I will die for him. But I'm really thinking, Another $400 and I can get that dress or Another $200 and I can get those shoes," she says. "It's draining." Then there are the customers who confuse her job with prostitution. "They'll offer me thousands of dollars to have sex with them, as if there's some magic number," she says incredulously. "I've never been tempted."
This winter, Patrice will graduate with an engineering degree, but she's not sure what she'd like to do next. "I'd like to find something as interesting as this. You meet a lot of people. It's not monotonous," she says. "I'd shoot myself before I took a job in engineering."
THE FRESH FACE
NINA, 27
While some strippers survive by being shrewd about their job, Nina credits her seeming innocence for her success. "I'm known as the most straight-as-an-arrow girl where I work," she says with genuine pride. "Up in the private rooms, some girls will start touching customers. Not me.'" She also doesn't socialize with other dancers. "This isn't my career," she insists. "I drive in and do my shift, and then I go home to my boyfriend."
As a shy, unassuming teenager in New Jersey, Nina says she was "the girl least likely to become a stripper," After graduating from high school, she began studying for her bachelor's degree in graphic design in Connecticut, where she got an apartment with her long-term boyfriend. In order to cover expenses, she followed the advice of some friends and took a job as a cocktail waitress at a gentleman's club in Manhattan. "I walked in there and thought, How can these girls do this?" she says of the club's strippers. "But after watching them for a couple of months, I realized it was a clean atmosphere and the guys weren't all bad. And those girls were making a lot more money than I was. So I started dancing."
More than two years later, Nina works four nights a week at the Penthouse Executive Club, an elaborate lounge and restaurant that recently opened in Manhattan. Most of her customers are "businesspeople, very polite." But Saturday-night bachelor parties are a different story. "They're really rambunctious," she says. "That's when you feel like a piece of meat." She also doesn't like dancing for men who come with their girlfriends or wives, which has lately become more common. "I'm afraid she'll get mad at me because her husband is looking at me."
So what does her longtime boyfriend think? "He isn't psyched about my dancing, but he supports me." For his birthday, she took him to a strip club (though not her own). "I used to be like every other girlfriend who gets mad when she hears her boyfriend is going to a strip club. But now I'm okay with seeing him get lap dances, because I know he's coming home with me." Elisabeth Eaves, author of Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power, says that romantic relationships with dancers require a lot of repressed jealousy. "It can be very uncomfortable to date a dancer; it's not a normal profession," she says. "But if a dancer insists to her boyfriend that lap dances are meaningless business transactions, then she has no choice but to think the same thing about him getting one."
Like Patrice, Nina has made a bundle. One of her first goals when she started dancing was to make enough money for breast implants, which she did in about two weeks. She 'also wears designer clothes and drives a new Ford Escape SUV, which she secured by putting down $15,000 in cash. Still, having graduated from school last year, she insists she's looking for an entry-level design job. "I don't want to be one of those girls who does this forever," Nina says. "You have to say, 'Okay, that's enough. It's time to do something real.'"
THE CAREER MAKER
EILEEN, 30SOMETHING
For eight months out of the year, Eileen commutes every other week from her home in West Palm Beach, Florida, to clock in a few days of dancing at Tens in Manhattan. She hates New York, but during the fall and summer, this is where the businessmen are. (During the winter, she stays in Florida and works at Rachael's, one of the many all-nude clubs that dot the Gulf Coast.) Few strippers go to such lengths, but then Eileen isn't putting herself through school or earning some quick cash. This is her career. "I'll keep doing this for as long as my body holds out," she says. "I don't have to be here. I have an education. But I love my job."
Eileen made her way to dancing after years of tumult. After growing up in an abusive Mormon household in upstate New York, she decided to join the Army, trained as a nurse's aide, and thought she had "found my niche" until she was stationed in South Korea, where she claims that a man in her unit raped her and her efforts to prosecute him met with a wall of silence. That was followed by an ill-fated marriage to a Special Forces officer "who got crazy," she explains. Eileen left him after little more than a year. But the low point came a few months later. Just as Eileen was about to graduate from nursing school, her car was hit head-on by a driver who ran a stop sign, leaving her in the hospital for two months. Broke and divorced, she was in danger of being kicked out of her apartment when a girlfriend suggested she try stripping. She went for an audition at a nearby club and loved it instantly.
"I made more money in a night than I would have in a month of nursing," she recalls. She put her earnings to good use, chipping away at nearly $80,000 in debt. But as much as she liked the money, she liked the attention even more. "I never thought I was good-looking," she says. "So I really like hearing guys say I am pretty. And I love to show off." Ironically, according to Eaves, this sort of adulation can actually erode a dancer's self-esteem, not strengthen it. "It's an ego trip, no question," Eaves says. "That attention is part of the appeal for a lot of strippers. But if you're constantly being rewarded for your looks and being sexy, you may feel like that's all you're ever going to be rewarded for."
Eileen acknowledges that there are dark sides to the business. "This is an industry where the girls get quick cash that they can spend on booze and pills," she says. "A lot of them get caught in that trap." Her one regret has been dating guys she meets while dancing, (which is usually discouraged), who inevitably have "a certain ideology of what a stripper should be like," she says. "It's hard to find a guy who understands what I do. Sometimes I think I should go back into nursing or pharmaceutical sales, something legitimate, just to have a regular relationship. It gets lonely." Meanwhile, she's been cut off from her extended family and some of her friends have grown distant. (Her parents know about her stripping, but they don't approve.) So Eileen pours her energy into fixing up her house in Florida, which she bought with her savings, and writing a memoir. One thing gives her comfort: Her job isn't going to be downsized anytime soon. "Dancers are like doctors," she says. "We're always in demand."



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