
With hindsight, what appeared to have been a conscious choice might have actually been heavily influenced. Since puberty, I had been aware of men staring at me in public. Despite my obvious irritation at this intrusion, the staring hadn’t stopped. While stripping provided an opportunity to launch myself into the big wide world on my terms, it was also a chance to capitalise on my feelings of powerlessness. Putting myself up onstage and demanding payment for being watched were exertions of control. I thought I was subjugating existing power structures it didn’t occur to me that I might have been playing into them. I hadn’t heard of radical feminism and if I had, I would’ve placed myself in the neoliberal camp. That was about individual choice, right? I had the right to choose.Īnd I did choose stripping, again and again. In a capitalist economy where the glass ceiling hasn’t exactly been shattered and women are often valued for their looks, strapping on my Cinderella shoes seemed perfectly logical. Why wouldn’t I strip? It brought financial independence, freedom and flexibility. No other profession I knew paid women significantly more than men. I could choose my hours, take time off and still have a job to come back to. With stripping, I could travel the world and I did, walking into instant employment in clubs in Melbourne and London. I worked alongside fierce women paying off mortgages and masters degrees, raising children and starting charities. Looking back, that possibility, coupled with the superficiality of the work and its instant reward, meant I never had to go deep and figure out what I truly valued. So I didn’t commit to study, other career opportunities, relationships, or even stripping itself. Unlike some dancers who’d come from poverty and minimum wage, I’d never had to go without, so money lost its real value. The goal of making money became an end in itself. Even when getting nude became monotonously unchallenging I couldn’t see the point of working a lesser-paying job. Besides, I could hardly put stripping on my fledgling resume. And still I told myself it was my choice. In the beginning, I’d seen myself as creating a new way of living and being. I didn’t want to be enslaved in a 9-to-5 system, or confined to the narrow roles expected of middle-class women: wife, mother, educator and caregiver. My family, friends and society at large saw it as shocking. Sex workers were stigmatised as morally bankrupt, lacking in self-respect, so not worthy of respecting. I couldn’t put a price on my sexuality and still be a valued human being.Įven though it was totally acceptable for men to visit strip clubs, it wasn’t OK for women to work in them. Additionally, what I did for work on weekends was seen as the sum total of who I was. After a while, though, it became easier not to fight society’s presumptions. By the time I finally hung up my G, I’d taken that stigma on. With hindsight, the social stigma was hugely disempowering.

Often it was worse than the work itself, where I could, by and large, control my exploitation and maintain my boundaries and self-worth. The constant judgment, often from people who had never been inside a strip club, left me excluded from normal life.


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It needs to typecast women, to separate them into virgins and whores, because it needs a justification for the male gaze and for placing women at the sexual service of men.IStripper Pro 3.5.1 Crack + keygen Free Download I know now that male-dominated society needs this stigma to maintain the status quo.
