It Tastes Different — What it Means to Consider California Strippers Employees
--
When I finally got back to my sister’s apartment in Hollywood, I realized that my tears were not only my tears, but the tears of a thousand girls who had probably been harassed by this man and others just like him, namely strippers. (To find out who the fuck I am talking about, read this first). I cried for the circumstances I guessed they were subjected to. What I failed to realize in the moment was that the guesses were just that — guesses, all of these feelings I had were assumptions, and perhaps my sympathy was horribly misdirected. Maybe I was the sensitive one, or maybe the skin strippers have grown over the years is inhumanly tolerant to bullshit. To help me determine the source of my emotions, I decided to put them on hold and ask strippers myself what was really going on.
I began where any twenty-something would go to begin a research paper: Instagram. After about ten minutes, a friend of mine referred me to one of her friends who was a stripper in San Francisco. “I actually just quit.” Oh, well shit, I thought to myself. What I believed was a dead end wound up being the traffic light that had just turned green. The former dancer, V, told me that clubs all around California are now enforcing the Supreme Court ruling that was made back in 2018, in which exotic dancers are deemed employees rather than their previous consideration as independent contractors. When asking her what that meant exactly, she said, “entertainers get 15 dollars per hour, the first 150 dollars you make is your ‘quota’ and that goes straight to the club. If you don’t meet the quota within the first 3 hours you will get sent home. After you make your $150, the club takes 40 percent of your dances. If a guest gives you a generous tip on their credit card, your paycheck will probably read zero. . . so yeah, I was definitely making less”
After my horrible experience, and then hearing from V, I realized that if I was gonna do this, I was gonna have to really do it. So, almost every weekend for three months, I attended strip clubs across California as a type of immersion, plus it wasn’t bad for a potential write-off, I figured. Weekend after weekend, I transformed my once-glazed over eyes into a determined stare, observing everything in the fucked-up kind of kingdom. Open-jawed men began to seem less like threats who could make me cry, and more like harmless animals there to escape the bigger and badder beasts. . .their wives. I met so many incredible dancers who referred me to others, all with something wildly different to say.
The first question I asked the women I interviewed was if their decision to begin dancing was out of survival or empowerment. When you’re sitting next to a drooling man with a tan line around his ring finger, it’s an easy question to overlook. But the more I stared at the dead faces attached to glamorous outfits (or lack thereof), the more I began to wonder truly how the girls got there, and began to pray to God they still wanted to be.
One dancer, Lacy, told me she was “so desperate” before she started stripping she “even looked into escorting, not really understanding what it was about.” “That’s a whole other story that was a scary experience. Luckily one day I got a text back from the club and I auditioned a couple days after. Long story short, deciding to strip was a means of survival but. . .eventually turned into empowerment.”
A.M Davies, a former stripper and activist affiliated with Soldiers of the Pole, shared her reasons for her start:
“I kind of always wanted to be. A few people put roadblocks in my way. You know, when you tell people close to you that you want to be a stripper they just feel a certain way about it. . . and then. . .and then, I really, really needed money and those roadblocks were gone at that point. But I had wanted to be a stripper since I was about sixteen”
Like Davies, some dancers I interviewed respect the change to employee, all with different reasoning, and some, simply not minding it at all. Although she had been working as a stripper for over eighteen years and was “improperly classified as an independent contractor, [Davies] had absolutely no government help” after getting into a motor scooter accident that amputated her foot. She received no benefits from the government, like qualifying for unemployment or disability insurance. “The day I found that out I had a total breakdown.” Even though she was paying her taxes as an independent contractor, but not directly to the government programs like payroll checks do automatically, there was no clear path to security or peace of mind at a time of pure fear and helplessness.
Hearing her perspective on this told me that not everyone’s relationship with the change is the same: it’s not all angst, sometimes it was relief. However, since she had not been dancing professionally since the accident and had no experience as an employee-stripper, I still wanted to ask if she knew about the differences in income the girls are now making. “I am aware, it is worse because the club owners are stealing more. They have always been stealing wages, but now in order for them to maintain their bottom line, they’re taking more from their dancers, and that’s why we’re organizing. So that’s where the misconception lies. ‘Oh I’m gonna make less money.’ Well yeah, you’re making less money cause they’re stealing more from you.” She was adamant about informing me that because of male club owners, who have no idea how to run a legal business, the stench of corruption is stronger than ever, and strippers are now pitted against the customer and forced to charge outlandish rates in order to match what they were making before.
Lacy, indifferent about the change, agreed that the club owners, even at the place she works at which is essentially a bikini bar (no nudity whatsoever), are asking the girls to elongate and upcharge for lap dances in order for the recently-heightened percentage they take to not seem so large. How genius of them, right? Let’s just make the naked girls look like the assholes.
But, would anything really change if the customers knew what was going on? Would they behave differently, pay the girls more or less, if say, she had ‘EMPLOYEE’ Sharpied across her forehead, and ‘THEY TAKE MORE FROM US NOW” across her ass? Would everyone in the club begin to shape-shift into some educated, respectful creature? The only way I feel like we can answer this is if we compare it to the next most idealized thing in America besides naked women: food. Throughout these past few months, I have realized that going to a strip club isn’t all that much different than fighting over bread at a restaurant.
At the end of the day, the club owner and the stripper are both just trying to get the best piece they can every night, with as little effort, cost, and negotiation as possible. Since the change to employee, the pieces of bread the girls bring home are not only different from the club owners’, but they are inherently different from what they themselves used to bring home — for it used to be bountiful and enough to feed their families, now it feels processed and scarce. And although the reluctant regular may not see the difference in bread he hands to the woman he drools over, if only he could taste the difference, would he understand what that forgettable, average, possibly disappointing night to him, meant to the woman wearing the bra he shoved a few dollar bills into.
