Stigma

One of the worst things, if not the worst thing about being a stripper is the stigma you have to carry around with you 24 hours a day. Even when you aren't working you continuously run into situations where it is made all too clear to you what the general, pervasive public opinion is of strippers. As soon as I started dancing I encountered negative reactions from everyone close to me as well as strangers. There is also plenty of derogatory representation in the media.

It's such a given in our collective consciousness that being a stripper means this narrow, one dimensional stereotype that it's just assumed no girl would ever want to do it. I certainly never thought I would do it even up to six months before I started. That's partially why I only did photo shoots first.

Once I started dancing full time and really getting good at it the only thing I didn't like about it was the way people's attitudes toward me colored once they found out what I did for a living. At parties asking what someone does for a living is a pretty common conversation starter so many of the first impressions people would have of me would be based on that. It kept me from getting an apartment, and I know girls who have lost second jobs from being "outed". I won't tell my main job now that I dance on the side because I fear repercussions. I also read an article about a stripper that got kicked out a student teaching program, as if she were a fucking sex-offender or something.

Even if people are decent to my face, I know sometimes they talk behind my back and if I ever have any static with them they try to discredit me by reminding me that I'm a stripper who "shakes my ass for a living". Generally this is unrelated to the argument. My mom found out about me working on a website before I ever started at a strip club so I got spared any kind of dramatic confessional scene, but I regularly hear about other girls who get kicked out of their parent's homes or even completely disowned. It's rare to find a stripper whose parents haven't despaired over them. My mother and sister both still disapprove after nine years. They just don't and can't understand what it's like, what I see in it and what I love about it.

In movies and TV it is shown over and over that it may be okay to visit strip clubs (guys or girls) but to actually be stripper is only for low class/dumb/drug-addicted/desperate sluts. It's okay, in today's media, to be a gold digger, a Playboy centerfold, a belly dancer, a go-go dancer, or a burlesque dancer. But stippers are a freak show or a punchline. They often share with prostitutes the role of murder/abuse victim. They are very rarely portrayed as intelligent, powerful women who own their own sexuality and use it to become financially successful.

Even now in the "sex-positive" social circles I move in this negative opinion persists. Even to my face people ridicule other strippers who are my friends. My boyfriend says it's because people would rather consider me a stylist, not a stripper. But it's not that they don't know, they love watching me doing fancy pole tricks all the time at parties, and I get lots of compliments for my skill!

I also don't like this new phenomenon of non-strippers teaching pole dancing classes and stiptease-aerobics to other non-strippers, emphasizing all the while that it's not "like stripping". In other words co-opting our unique form of dance, dissecting it and repackaging it in a way that makes it safe to continue to look down at strippers while simultaneously emulating them. The message I'm getting is, non-stripping women want to be attractive and desirable to their men, like strippers, but still want the social acceptance of not being a stripper.

I say, if you want to be like strippers so bad, come work in a strip club for a while and earn it, like the rest of us. Or, you can take lessons from me and get the whole story, instead of the watered down, "safe" version offered by more mainstream sources.