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Authors: Melinda Tankard Reist,Abigail Bray
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Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry (25 page)
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Conclusion
The basis of this burgeoning industry is the abuse of the bodies of women and girls. Governments derive taxes from the industry, as do local councils. Tourism, entertainment and fashion industries cross promote their products and make profits. Meanwhile the industry creates harms not just for the women in the porn, in the clubs and in the brothels, but for the status of all women. The sex industry constructs the model of what sex is, i.e. the servicing of aggressive male dominant sexuality. It makes it harder for women to create egalitarian relationships with men. The pornography and strip club industries deliver the subordinate sex class to the male ruling class in the form of bodily orifices to be stuffed, swollen and distended anuses to be stared at, naked bodies to be ogled. This industry of women’s subordination and men’s revenge stands right in the middle of the road of women’s progress towards equality and it is growing and diversifying as we speak.
Bibliography
Bindel, Julie (25 March, 2010) ‘Iceland: the world’s most feminist country.’
The Guardian
, <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/25/iceland-most-feminist-country
>.
Blackhurst, Chris and Adrian Gatton (16 September, 2002) ‘A gangland killing, lap dancers who are said to sell sex and the criminal past of the man behind the Spearmint Rhino empire’
Evening Standard
, London.
Bureau of Business Research, IC2 Institute and the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (2009) ‘An Assessment of the Adult Entertainment Industry in Texas’. University of Texas.
Busama (n.d.) ‘Busama Entertainment’, <
http://www.busama.com/
> (accessed 9 November, 2010).
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATWA) (December, 2010) ‘Not Just Harmless Fun: the strip club industry in Victoria’. Melbourne, Australia.
Coy, Maddy, Miranda Horvath and Liz Kelly (2007)
‘It’s just like going to the supermarket’: Men buying sex in East London
. Report for Safe Exit. Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University, London.
Eden, Isabel (2007)
Inappropriate Behaviour: Adult venues and licensing in London
. The Lilith Project, Eaves Housing, London.
Frank, Katherine (2002)
G-Strings and Sympathy. Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
. Duke University Press, Durham and London.
Hanna, Judith Lynne (1998) ‘Undressing the First Amendment and corseting the striptease dancer’
The Drama Review
Cambridge, Mass. 42 (2) pp. 38 (32).
Holsopple, Kelly (1998)
Strip Club Testimony
. The Freedom and Justice Center for Prostitution Resources: A Program of the Volunteers of America of Minnesota. 2825 East Lake Street, Minneapolis MN 55406.
Jeffreys, Sheila (2009)
The Industrial Vagina: The political economy of the global sex trade
. Routledge, London.
Jeffries, Samantha and Mark Lynch (2007) ‘Female Striptease in the Sunshine State: A Description of Queensland’s Live Adult Entertainment Industry and its Regulation’
Queensland University of Technology Law and Justice Journal
, <
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/QUTLJJ/2007/15.html
>.
Justin (7 October, 2010) ‘The Benefits of Exotic Dancing’ Busama Blog, <
http://busamagroup.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/the-benefits-of-exotic-dancing/
>.
Kipnis, Laura (2003)
Bound and Gagged. Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
. Duke University Press, Durham.
Liepe-Levinson, Katherine (2002)
Strip Show. Performances of Gender and Desire
. Routledge, New York.
Montgomery, Dave (3 October, 2005) ‘Industry trying to take its image upscale.’
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
(Texas).
Nelson X (August, 2008) ‘The Evolution of the Gentlemen’s Club’
Adult Video News
, <
http://www.avnmedianetwork.com/magazine/avn/pastissues/August2008.html
>.
Schweitzer, Dahlia (1999) ‘Striptease: The Art of Spectacle and Transgression’
Journal of Popular Culture
34 (1) pp. 65–75.
Tyler, Meagan (2009) ‘Active Service. The Pornographic and Sexological Construction of Women’s Sexuality in the West’. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne.
Ward, Helen and Sophie Day (2004) ‘Sex work in context’ in Sophie Day and Helen Ward (Eds)
Sex Work, Mobility and Health in Europe
. Kegan Paul, London, pp. 15–32.
___________________________
1
See also <
http://melindatankardreist.com/2011/03/not-just-harmless-fun-how-strip-club-harm-women/
>.
The basis of this burgeoning industry is the abuse of the bodies of women and girls. Governments derive taxes from the industry, as do local councils. Tourism, entertainment and fashion industries cross promote their products and make profits. Meanwhile the industry creates harms not just for the women in the porn, in the clubs and in the brothels, but for the status of all women. The sex industry constructs the model of what sex is, i.e. the servicing of aggressive male dominant sexuality. It makes it harder for women to create egalitarian relationships with men. The pornography and strip club industries deliver the subordinate sex class to the male ruling class in the form of bodily orifices to be stuffed, swollen and distended anuses to be stared at, naked bodies to be ogled. This industry of women’s subordination and men’s revenge stands right in the middle of the road of women’s progress towards equality and it is growing and diversifying as we speak.
Bibliography
Bindel, Julie (25 March, 2010) ‘Iceland: the world’s most feminist country.’
The Guardian
, <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/25/iceland-most-feminist-country
>.
Blackhurst, Chris and Adrian Gatton (16 September, 2002) ‘A gangland killing, lap dancers who are said to sell sex and the criminal past of the man behind the Spearmint Rhino empire’
Evening Standard
, London.
Bureau of Business Research, IC2 Institute and the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (2009) ‘An Assessment of the Adult Entertainment Industry in Texas’. University of Texas.
Busama (n.d.) ‘Busama Entertainment’, <
http://www.busama.com/
> (accessed 9 November, 2010).
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATWA) (December, 2010) ‘Not Just Harmless Fun: the strip club industry in Victoria’. Melbourne, Australia.
Coy, Maddy, Miranda Horvath and Liz Kelly (2007)
‘It’s just like going to the supermarket’: Men buying sex in East London
. Report for Safe Exit. Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University, London.
Eden, Isabel (2007)
Inappropriate Behaviour: Adult venues and licensing in London
. The Lilith Project, Eaves Housing, London.
Frank, Katherine (2002)
G-Strings and Sympathy. Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
. Duke University Press, Durham and London.
Hanna, Judith Lynne (1998) ‘Undressing the First Amendment and corseting the striptease dancer’
The Drama Review
Cambridge, Mass. 42 (2) pp. 38 (32).
Holsopple, Kelly (1998)
Strip Club Testimony
. The Freedom and Justice Center for Prostitution Resources: A Program of the Volunteers of America of Minnesota. 2825 East Lake Street, Minneapolis MN 55406.
Jeffreys, Sheila (2009)
The Industrial Vagina: The political economy of the global sex trade
. Routledge, London.
Jeffries, Samantha and Mark Lynch (2007) ‘Female Striptease in the Sunshine State: A Description of Queensland’s Live Adult Entertainment Industry and its Regulation’
Queensland University of Technology Law and Justice Journal
, <
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/QUTLJJ/2007/15.html
>.
Justin (7 October, 2010) ‘The Benefits of Exotic Dancing’ Busama Blog, <
http://busamagroup.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/the-benefits-of-exotic-dancing/
>.
Kipnis, Laura (2003)
Bound and Gagged. Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
. Duke University Press, Durham.
Liepe-Levinson, Katherine (2002)
Strip Show. Performances of Gender and Desire
. Routledge, New York.
Montgomery, Dave (3 October, 2005) ‘Industry trying to take its image upscale.’
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
(Texas).
Nelson X (August, 2008) ‘The Evolution of the Gentlemen’s Club’
Adult Video News
, <
http://www.avnmedianetwork.com/magazine/avn/pastissues/August2008.html
>.
Schweitzer, Dahlia (1999) ‘Striptease: The Art of Spectacle and Transgression’
Journal of Popular Culture
34 (1) pp. 65–75.
Tyler, Meagan (2009) ‘Active Service. The Pornographic and Sexological Construction of Women’s Sexuality in the West’. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne.
Ward, Helen and Sophie Day (2004) ‘Sex work in context’ in Sophie Day and Helen Ward (Eds)
Sex Work, Mobility and Health in Europe
. Kegan Paul, London, pp. 15–32.
___________________________
1
See also <
http://melindatankardreist.com/2011/03/not-just-harmless-fun-how-strip-club-harm-women/
>.
Stella
Dancing Pornography
It didn’t take long to learn how to switch it on, to spin around the brass poles that rose from the centre of the many podiums, to gauge the worth of the crowd, to give it just the right amount of energy. Too much and you wouldn’t last the night, too little and you wouldn’t pull the cash. It didn’t take long to learn to copy the narrow definition of sexuality that made money on the floor, to assemble a costume of fuckability, become a real, living, purchasable manifestation of pornography. It took longer to learn to hustle, to leave aside my humanity and erect that false facade of happy whore, to become that simpering shallow shell of a woman we call a stripper: part air hostess, part sex slave. But it happened, and within a few shifts I was no longer a woman, certainly no lady, but one of ‘The Girls’.
The diamond-hard world of glittering disco balls, fluorescent lit podiums, brass poles, booze and the constant thumping bass turned on at 10 am in time to catch the lonely lunch crowd. The regulars, those poor fuckers who we learned to sneer at, to pretend superiority over, to dissemble the reality of their power to purchase us with money earned in a real job in the sunlit world outside. They came to spend their lunch money on a moment’s attention from a purchased pussy, while they ate the free meal provided by the club. Sober, these guys were harder to fleece, but being regulars, they would buy a dance if they didn’t manage to see enough for free to satisfy them. You had to work efficiently to sort the wheat from the chaff and not waste time with the men who were just there for free food, a free look and to pretend they were living inside one of their well worn porn clips.
Twenty dollars for a song’s worth of simulated sex out on the club floor. Fifty dollars for a Fantasy Dance: 3 songs’ worth of private stripping in a seedy room downstairs, choose from nurse, schoolgirl or cheerleader. It sounds like easy money – one dance every half an hour and over the course of a 12-hour shift you’d have made some significant money. Some days I walked out with $800, some days I barely made $80. Most shifts I pulled between $150 and $250. Every day was long. Every day was hard. Every day someone forced me in some
way – either licked, bit or poked me, sometimes even penetrated me, held me down, hurt me. Then there was the verbal degradation, by the customers and even ourselves. ‘Come here bitch and dance on this’, ‘oh yeah, let me be your little whore’. They cut in, those words, they get inside you. That internalisation of slut slut slut.
Every day I was afraid that I would lose my job. There was no security; if the house said ‘Go’, you went. Once I gave my house fee to a bar girl who was doing the books, but failed to sign for it as I was being called to the podium to dance. She said she would enter it and I could sign later. When I returned to sign, she said I hadn’t given her the money. I protested, but no one would believe me. It was the moment of truth for me: she was believed because she was a real person with a real job. I was just a stripper, a whore, probably a junkie and, no doubt, a thief. I had to pay again or leave the premises. The realisation that I was a stripper now, not a person, was wounding.
People seem to think that strippers work in some kind of protected and controlled environment. That they call the shots, backed up by the authority of the establishment and security staff. That the punters are the underdogs, the manipulated victims of those money-grabbing women who flaunt their sex appeal for cash and never have to pay out. Some strippers themselves perpetuate this myth, I’m not sure whether it is to justify their trade to the world, or to themselves and each other. Sometimes you do feel powerful, twirling around that pole like a dancer in a music box, captivated audience at your feet, but moments later, groped, pinched, and forced, that illusion is quickly broken.
Downstairs we were ‘allowed’ to open our legs, and we dangled this promise in front of the men like Rolex watches from the inside of a jacket. “Come downstairs where I can dance just for you, three songs and you have me all to yourself in the wildest fantasy dance you’ve ever wished for …” The suggestion was always there, the suggestion is always there, when you are buying a woman, that you can script your own porn. Why wouldn’t you get confused in the heady euphoria of purchasing a person, a person barely clothed, pretending the opportunity to take those stupid pieces of skimpy clothes off for you was the best thing that had happened to her all night? Minutes later, closed off in a room dimly lit and decorated like a bedroom, with her breasts pressed against your face and her naked vagina hovering above your erection, why wouldn’t you think it was okay to force what you wanted on her? Why would you even think you were forcing her?
Downstairs in that carefully constructed porn world of flimsy fantasies, so intent on imitating the kitsch stereotyped scenarios watched on pay TV, in offices
on desktop computers, on DVDs smuggled home, in clubs on large screen TVs, seen in newsagents, milkbars, calendars, on billboards … why wouldn’t the delusion deepen and widen to subsume reality? That’s the point, isn’t it? Aren’t we all supposed to want to be porn stars?
Where I worked we took turns to dance on the podiums. It was part of our freelance ‘contract’ which we had to fulfill in order to operate within the club’s rules. Once every couple of hours I would step up onto the podium table and dance around the brass pole, creating that image of free pussy and wanton sexuality that such clubs foster to draw their custom in. For 15 minutes I would rub myself up and down that senseless piece of metal, hoping that someone would pay me to take my g-string or bra off so that I could make some cash. On a crowded night, when men would stand 3-deep around the podiums, this could be a lucrative way to draw in some extra customers. On a bad shift, it was a time when you were just the centre of attention of a bunch of tightwads looking for an opportunity to make themselves look macho in front of their mates. The ugliest and most sexually violent crowds were those men who were there for each other rather than the women, seeking moments to prove their masculinity, their virility, to themselves and each other, fuelled by alcohol, fear and testosterone. On those nights, even inside the club it felt lawless, intimidating, and unsafe.
I really don’t know how I found myself, at 23, dressed up as a schoolgirl, smacking my naked buttocks with a wooden ruler and chewing gum. It wasn’t where I imagined I’d be. I also hadn’t imagined taking the school dress off in a very small room, the chairs around the walls filled with charged-up, drunken men, pumped up with the insane belief that buying a dance from a stripper means that you own her, you can do what you like with her, and that she should shut the fuck up and take it. I hadn’t seen in my future a time when I would be passed around that room, dry fucked and felt up, hit with the ruler, frightened and fragile like a rabbit in a petting zoo. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, my future. I was smarter than that, but there I was, becoming further enmeshed in this foreign world, a long way from the offices and restaurants I’d previously worked in, and further still from the tertiary qualifications I knew I could achieve.
I guess it started a couple of years before when, after leaving a violent relationship with nothing, I’d answered an ad in the paper for ‘glamour’ modelling, or soft porn photography, and been published in a couple of those tacky porn mags for some easy cash. Stripping didn’t seem so far from that – it was just the image of your body that was consumed, not the body itself, yes?
So while out drinking with male friends we found some flyers in a pub and they wanted to go and have a dance. I was curious, so we went. In my memory
it seemed exotic – the lights and costumes made the women look beautiful, raunchy – pornographic. Stilettos and wigs, fake tans, wide white smiles and knowing looks echoed the images many of us have seen in porn flicks. One of the girls came and asked me if I was interested in working there. She talked up the working conditions and the money she made and before I knew what I was doing, I had taken the number, spurred on by the encouragement of my male friends. A couple of the blokes had dances and then we went home. I thought about it for a month or so and when my personal circumstances began to pinch harder, I rang and organised to go in. I mean, if I didn’t like it, I could just stop and go back to waitressing, right?
I scored speed to cope with the stress of my first shift. While speeding, and while it was all optional, I can almost say I enjoyed it. I liked being looked at, I liked feeling sexy, and the provocative flirting came easily. An experienced girl took me in and introduced me around the floor, using my newness and my naivety as fresh bait to secure herself more cash, dancing doubles with me, the ‘new girl’. I made a couple of hundred bucks that first night and felt powerful. I agreed to come back. I quit my day job. I was a showgirl.
The euphoria didn’t last long. The tiredness, the agony of dancing for so many long hours on those ridiculous heels, the sheer length of the shifts, took their toll and I quickly grew weary of the vacuous world of the club. Some of my earnings went straight back into my costumes as the right look pulled more cash. A long, blonde wig could add $50–100 a night to your earnings; thigh-high PVC stiletto boots, another $50–100; new costumes, imported stripper shoes, proper stripper bikinis for sexy disrobing; acrylic nails, tans; all that Barbiefied junk popularised by those mindless porn flicks. For the career showgirls this included surgical procedures like boob jobs, often funded in part by the club, offered to promising girls who lacked that silicone contour that pornography has taught men to desire. The cost of keeping up was high. My days became caught up with grooming and sleeping, my nights with performing at the Club.
My relationships suffered; I was becoming more and more isolated. I started using heroin to soothe the pain, all of the pain: the physical pain of my deteriorating knees and back; the emotional pain of being nothing, negative space, dirt, slut, whore, stripper, junkie. The fear and desperation rose. I just couldn’t afford to lose my job. I couldn’t afford my heroin habit without it, and I couldn’t face dancing without the heroin to buffer the ugliness and pain. My life became one tiny circle that revolved around dancing and scoring. But I never caught up with those debts. In fact, they grew as my life shrank. I was depressed, and desperately miserable.
There was very little socialising or support among the women in the club. Everyone tended to keep to themselves, but I did make friends with one other girl – she called herself Kelly. She had been a prostitute before she stripped and I was drawn to her positive attitude and upbeat persona on the floor and we sometimes worked together in double acts on slow nights. It was nice to know one other person there by her real name; that little intimacy meant a lot. Listening to her stories made me realise how thin the veil was between the stripping and prostitution worlds, with many of the women moving between the two. We were instructed by the management to refer men who were looking for prostitutes on, down the chain, to a brothel not far from the club. I wondered if there was a connection, as many men seemed to come to the club to ‘warm up’ before moving on to a brothel (see also Jeffreys, this volume).
It was against the club rules to go home with a customer, and any dancer caught doing so was fired. I could easily imagine how it would happen, and before long I had also left with a customer and, while not formally arranged, I accepted payment for my time afterwards. It happened more than once. I couldn’t then, and I still struggle now, to call what I did prostitution, but by any definition it was … I suppose denial helped me keep going.
It is easy to imagine where my life may have gone if I had continued to follow this well trodden, spiralling path downwards. It was my body that tripped me up and forced me to change direction. My knees, which had gradually been failing me, finally became too sore and swollen to dance on, and my back, too laced with pain. I rang my father who reached out a loving hand and pulled me as far as he could out of the mire. After I had suffered through the withdrawal from my heroin addiction and my head had cleared, I put in a late application to university and, miraculously, was accepted. Within a few weeks I was studying.
It took me four and a half years to complete the degree. My body suffered from the damage I had done to it from dancing, making full-time study difficult, and my heart and mind suffered from their own slowly healing scars. I relapsed many times with heroin, and it took more than half a decade to overcome the burning need for some chemical amnesia. My personal grief was immense – the time wasted, the damage done, the lack of self-love, all stung me deeply and I struggled to heal. Writing this today, 12 years later, my eyes still prick with tears, and the fear that my own 3 daughters might suffer the same experiences and the fact that I may be incapable of stopping them, truly stills my heart.
I didn’t think that stripping would have the profound and long reaching effect on my life that it did. I didn’t realise that when I left it, it might not leave me, that each time I sold myself, each time I danced pornography, I altered myself,
redefined myself, demeaned myself, erased myself on a fundamental level. The trauma from dancing came in many guises and has taken a long time to recover from. I left with my self-esteem in shreds, my pockets empty, my body damaged, and my heart filled with shame, both self-imposed and compounded by the social stigma of being a junkie stripper. It was a hair-raising ride to the bottom. I often wonder where life would have taken me if I hadn’t been pressed by circumstance to become a stripper, if I had lived in a world without strip clubs, brothels, and other institutions built on the trade of flesh and so heavily reliant on people in compromised positions to feed them. I passionately hope that my daughters might inhabit such a world.
Dancing Pornography
It didn’t take long to learn how to switch it on, to spin around the brass poles that rose from the centre of the many podiums, to gauge the worth of the crowd, to give it just the right amount of energy. Too much and you wouldn’t last the night, too little and you wouldn’t pull the cash. It didn’t take long to learn to copy the narrow definition of sexuality that made money on the floor, to assemble a costume of fuckability, become a real, living, purchasable manifestation of pornography. It took longer to learn to hustle, to leave aside my humanity and erect that false facade of happy whore, to become that simpering shallow shell of a woman we call a stripper: part air hostess, part sex slave. But it happened, and within a few shifts I was no longer a woman, certainly no lady, but one of ‘The Girls’.
The diamond-hard world of glittering disco balls, fluorescent lit podiums, brass poles, booze and the constant thumping bass turned on at 10 am in time to catch the lonely lunch crowd. The regulars, those poor fuckers who we learned to sneer at, to pretend superiority over, to dissemble the reality of their power to purchase us with money earned in a real job in the sunlit world outside. They came to spend their lunch money on a moment’s attention from a purchased pussy, while they ate the free meal provided by the club. Sober, these guys were harder to fleece, but being regulars, they would buy a dance if they didn’t manage to see enough for free to satisfy them. You had to work efficiently to sort the wheat from the chaff and not waste time with the men who were just there for free food, a free look and to pretend they were living inside one of their well worn porn clips.
Twenty dollars for a song’s worth of simulated sex out on the club floor. Fifty dollars for a Fantasy Dance: 3 songs’ worth of private stripping in a seedy room downstairs, choose from nurse, schoolgirl or cheerleader. It sounds like easy money – one dance every half an hour and over the course of a 12-hour shift you’d have made some significant money. Some days I walked out with $800, some days I barely made $80. Most shifts I pulled between $150 and $250. Every day was long. Every day was hard. Every day someone forced me in some
way – either licked, bit or poked me, sometimes even penetrated me, held me down, hurt me. Then there was the verbal degradation, by the customers and even ourselves. ‘Come here bitch and dance on this’, ‘oh yeah, let me be your little whore’. They cut in, those words, they get inside you. That internalisation of slut slut slut.
Every day I was afraid that I would lose my job. There was no security; if the house said ‘Go’, you went. Once I gave my house fee to a bar girl who was doing the books, but failed to sign for it as I was being called to the podium to dance. She said she would enter it and I could sign later. When I returned to sign, she said I hadn’t given her the money. I protested, but no one would believe me. It was the moment of truth for me: she was believed because she was a real person with a real job. I was just a stripper, a whore, probably a junkie and, no doubt, a thief. I had to pay again or leave the premises. The realisation that I was a stripper now, not a person, was wounding.
People seem to think that strippers work in some kind of protected and controlled environment. That they call the shots, backed up by the authority of the establishment and security staff. That the punters are the underdogs, the manipulated victims of those money-grabbing women who flaunt their sex appeal for cash and never have to pay out. Some strippers themselves perpetuate this myth, I’m not sure whether it is to justify their trade to the world, or to themselves and each other. Sometimes you do feel powerful, twirling around that pole like a dancer in a music box, captivated audience at your feet, but moments later, groped, pinched, and forced, that illusion is quickly broken.
Downstairs we were ‘allowed’ to open our legs, and we dangled this promise in front of the men like Rolex watches from the inside of a jacket. “Come downstairs where I can dance just for you, three songs and you have me all to yourself in the wildest fantasy dance you’ve ever wished for …” The suggestion was always there, the suggestion is always there, when you are buying a woman, that you can script your own porn. Why wouldn’t you get confused in the heady euphoria of purchasing a person, a person barely clothed, pretending the opportunity to take those stupid pieces of skimpy clothes off for you was the best thing that had happened to her all night? Minutes later, closed off in a room dimly lit and decorated like a bedroom, with her breasts pressed against your face and her naked vagina hovering above your erection, why wouldn’t you think it was okay to force what you wanted on her? Why would you even think you were forcing her?
Downstairs in that carefully constructed porn world of flimsy fantasies, so intent on imitating the kitsch stereotyped scenarios watched on pay TV, in offices
on desktop computers, on DVDs smuggled home, in clubs on large screen TVs, seen in newsagents, milkbars, calendars, on billboards … why wouldn’t the delusion deepen and widen to subsume reality? That’s the point, isn’t it? Aren’t we all supposed to want to be porn stars?
Where I worked we took turns to dance on the podiums. It was part of our freelance ‘contract’ which we had to fulfill in order to operate within the club’s rules. Once every couple of hours I would step up onto the podium table and dance around the brass pole, creating that image of free pussy and wanton sexuality that such clubs foster to draw their custom in. For 15 minutes I would rub myself up and down that senseless piece of metal, hoping that someone would pay me to take my g-string or bra off so that I could make some cash. On a crowded night, when men would stand 3-deep around the podiums, this could be a lucrative way to draw in some extra customers. On a bad shift, it was a time when you were just the centre of attention of a bunch of tightwads looking for an opportunity to make themselves look macho in front of their mates. The ugliest and most sexually violent crowds were those men who were there for each other rather than the women, seeking moments to prove their masculinity, their virility, to themselves and each other, fuelled by alcohol, fear and testosterone. On those nights, even inside the club it felt lawless, intimidating, and unsafe.
I really don’t know how I found myself, at 23, dressed up as a schoolgirl, smacking my naked buttocks with a wooden ruler and chewing gum. It wasn’t where I imagined I’d be. I also hadn’t imagined taking the school dress off in a very small room, the chairs around the walls filled with charged-up, drunken men, pumped up with the insane belief that buying a dance from a stripper means that you own her, you can do what you like with her, and that she should shut the fuck up and take it. I hadn’t seen in my future a time when I would be passed around that room, dry fucked and felt up, hit with the ruler, frightened and fragile like a rabbit in a petting zoo. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, my future. I was smarter than that, but there I was, becoming further enmeshed in this foreign world, a long way from the offices and restaurants I’d previously worked in, and further still from the tertiary qualifications I knew I could achieve.
I guess it started a couple of years before when, after leaving a violent relationship with nothing, I’d answered an ad in the paper for ‘glamour’ modelling, or soft porn photography, and been published in a couple of those tacky porn mags for some easy cash. Stripping didn’t seem so far from that – it was just the image of your body that was consumed, not the body itself, yes?
So while out drinking with male friends we found some flyers in a pub and they wanted to go and have a dance. I was curious, so we went. In my memory
it seemed exotic – the lights and costumes made the women look beautiful, raunchy – pornographic. Stilettos and wigs, fake tans, wide white smiles and knowing looks echoed the images many of us have seen in porn flicks. One of the girls came and asked me if I was interested in working there. She talked up the working conditions and the money she made and before I knew what I was doing, I had taken the number, spurred on by the encouragement of my male friends. A couple of the blokes had dances and then we went home. I thought about it for a month or so and when my personal circumstances began to pinch harder, I rang and organised to go in. I mean, if I didn’t like it, I could just stop and go back to waitressing, right?
I scored speed to cope with the stress of my first shift. While speeding, and while it was all optional, I can almost say I enjoyed it. I liked being looked at, I liked feeling sexy, and the provocative flirting came easily. An experienced girl took me in and introduced me around the floor, using my newness and my naivety as fresh bait to secure herself more cash, dancing doubles with me, the ‘new girl’. I made a couple of hundred bucks that first night and felt powerful. I agreed to come back. I quit my day job. I was a showgirl.
The euphoria didn’t last long. The tiredness, the agony of dancing for so many long hours on those ridiculous heels, the sheer length of the shifts, took their toll and I quickly grew weary of the vacuous world of the club. Some of my earnings went straight back into my costumes as the right look pulled more cash. A long, blonde wig could add $50–100 a night to your earnings; thigh-high PVC stiletto boots, another $50–100; new costumes, imported stripper shoes, proper stripper bikinis for sexy disrobing; acrylic nails, tans; all that Barbiefied junk popularised by those mindless porn flicks. For the career showgirls this included surgical procedures like boob jobs, often funded in part by the club, offered to promising girls who lacked that silicone contour that pornography has taught men to desire. The cost of keeping up was high. My days became caught up with grooming and sleeping, my nights with performing at the Club.
My relationships suffered; I was becoming more and more isolated. I started using heroin to soothe the pain, all of the pain: the physical pain of my deteriorating knees and back; the emotional pain of being nothing, negative space, dirt, slut, whore, stripper, junkie. The fear and desperation rose. I just couldn’t afford to lose my job. I couldn’t afford my heroin habit without it, and I couldn’t face dancing without the heroin to buffer the ugliness and pain. My life became one tiny circle that revolved around dancing and scoring. But I never caught up with those debts. In fact, they grew as my life shrank. I was depressed, and desperately miserable.
There was very little socialising or support among the women in the club. Everyone tended to keep to themselves, but I did make friends with one other girl – she called herself Kelly. She had been a prostitute before she stripped and I was drawn to her positive attitude and upbeat persona on the floor and we sometimes worked together in double acts on slow nights. It was nice to know one other person there by her real name; that little intimacy meant a lot. Listening to her stories made me realise how thin the veil was between the stripping and prostitution worlds, with many of the women moving between the two. We were instructed by the management to refer men who were looking for prostitutes on, down the chain, to a brothel not far from the club. I wondered if there was a connection, as many men seemed to come to the club to ‘warm up’ before moving on to a brothel (see also Jeffreys, this volume).
It was against the club rules to go home with a customer, and any dancer caught doing so was fired. I could easily imagine how it would happen, and before long I had also left with a customer and, while not formally arranged, I accepted payment for my time afterwards. It happened more than once. I couldn’t then, and I still struggle now, to call what I did prostitution, but by any definition it was … I suppose denial helped me keep going.
It is easy to imagine where my life may have gone if I had continued to follow this well trodden, spiralling path downwards. It was my body that tripped me up and forced me to change direction. My knees, which had gradually been failing me, finally became too sore and swollen to dance on, and my back, too laced with pain. I rang my father who reached out a loving hand and pulled me as far as he could out of the mire. After I had suffered through the withdrawal from my heroin addiction and my head had cleared, I put in a late application to university and, miraculously, was accepted. Within a few weeks I was studying.
It took me four and a half years to complete the degree. My body suffered from the damage I had done to it from dancing, making full-time study difficult, and my heart and mind suffered from their own slowly healing scars. I relapsed many times with heroin, and it took more than half a decade to overcome the burning need for some chemical amnesia. My personal grief was immense – the time wasted, the damage done, the lack of self-love, all stung me deeply and I struggled to heal. Writing this today, 12 years later, my eyes still prick with tears, and the fear that my own 3 daughters might suffer the same experiences and the fact that I may be incapable of stopping them, truly stills my heart.
I didn’t think that stripping would have the profound and long reaching effect on my life that it did. I didn’t realise that when I left it, it might not leave me, that each time I sold myself, each time I danced pornography, I altered myself,
redefined myself, demeaned myself, erased myself on a fundamental level. The trauma from dancing came in many guises and has taken a long time to recover from. I left with my self-esteem in shreds, my pockets empty, my body damaged, and my heart filled with shame, both self-imposed and compounded by the social stigma of being a junkie stripper. It was a hair-raising ride to the bottom. I often wonder where life would have taken me if I hadn’t been pressed by circumstance to become a stripper, if I had lived in a world without strip clubs, brothels, and other institutions built on the trade of flesh and so heavily reliant on people in compromised positions to feed them. I passionately hope that my daughters might inhabit such a world.
BOOK: Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
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