Experience Required

While I spent a substantial amount of time vigilantly compartmentalizing various aspects of my life, at some point I said ‘fuck it’ and started allowing those different areas of being that make me who I really am to slowly and comprehensively marry themselves back together into what I've become today- a coagulation of previously divided parts puzzle-piecing into this finished product. It’s been an exuberant, liberating endeavor for my soul. It started with scrounging up the balls to write about being a stripper as an undergrad, then again as a graduate student, publishing work that ‘outed’ me to the general public, speaking to writers at a national conference about the act of writing about things of a sexual nature, speaking to feminist forums about the sex industry, doing interviews and writing for independent filmmakers to document aspects of my life I’d previously kept hidden.

What’s been great for my soul, I’m sorry to report, hasn't been all that spectacular for my employability. I've applied for 42 jobs since September when I moved to North Carolina. My résumé, as far as I can tell, meets the contemporary standards of what employers might expect, my cover letters are articulate and insightful and catered specifically to each position I apply for and to the company offering the position, and my references, in my humble opinion, are god damned impressive and include a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

I can’t help but suspect that my willingness to be honest about exactly who I am and about my life experiences has something to do with my inability to get a job. And this bums me out. I've written before about the question I’m often asked regarding whether or not I worry that being forthcoming about my experience in the Unholy Arena of the American Nudie Bar might hinder my ability to advance myself in other fields of endeavor later in life, and I maintain that it’s still more important to me to be honest about who I am and what I've seen and what I think about the whole business of being me. 
But this job search business, as soul crushing as it is, I imagine is equally tough for all of my former comrades-in-arms, my girls, my former co-strippers, who have to find jobs outside the confines of the nudie bar at some point, whether it’s because they're pregnant, or they get married, or they finally graduate from the college that their weekend-dancing was paying for. And it occurs to me that we have such a rich experience that in many ways translates to other industries, but because we have to be so secretive about our pasts as strippers, we’re left unable to document the job experience in applications and résumés.

So this is for you, gals of mine, a letter of recommendation of sorts to justify exactly what you've learned and earned in terms of experience that translates to the wider world of work in America.

Excellence in Customer Service:

We don’t get paid unless they love us. And, my darling readers, I mean that in the most precise and literal sense. Strippers, in most cases, do not get a paycheck. In fact, most strip clubs operate under a maintenance system, where a dancer pays a house fee (sometimes called ‘rent’, sometimes called ‘maintenance’) to occupy that club each night. The DJ isn’t lying when he says: “These girls work for tips and tips alone.” We rely, à la Blanche Dubois, on the kindness of strangers. That is to say, if we are not kind, kindness is not usually reciprocated (unless they’re into that sort of thing, but that’s a whole other tale). We are kind, diplomatic, congenial, friendly, outgoing. We are masters of small talk, wranglers of chit-chat, ready with smiles—at least, those of us who've managed to stick with the job. Any dancer worth her salt has no choice but to become proficient at conversation.

Likewise, we are efficient in our conversational skills. Time is money, as the old saying goes, and therefore we've learned to not be overly chatty, but rather talk until we can piece together enough context clues to discover what a patron wants. Should that man (or woman, in some cases) not be particularly interested in spending any additional time with us, or perhaps have expressed interest in another coworker, we aim to please.

Should a fella be into, say, the blonde, girl-next-door cheerleader type, I’ll be the first to say: “You know what, I have a friend you should meet, wait right here while I fetch her for you.” This serves the whole in several ways: 1. I’m freed up to move on to the next guy. 2. The gal I find as a replacement will likely remember this, and return the favor in kind when a dude is interested in a busty, brunette, pinup girl. 3. Everyone is working at an efficient pace. 4. The customer is happy. We truck in happiness. We are happiness dealers by the bushel. And that’s the point.

Business Math and Cash Handling Skills

The fifth question James Lipton always asks his guests on Inside the Actors Studio is:

“What noise or sound do you love?”

I can say that I unequivocally love the sound of 20 strippers counting their money at the end of the night. Forty hands making that ffffttt, ffffttt, fffttt, sound with thousands of dollars between them is hypnotic and enchanting and so, so fast. We can shuffle a deck of singles faster than you can say blueberry pie. In fact, I’m fairly good at guessing, down to the dollar, a stack of ones slapped into my hand, based just on the height and weight. We are money-counting mother fuckers. We deal in cash, and only cash, and we’re good at it.

Likewise, because we’re obligated to tip gratuity out to our DJ, our bouncers, and our bartenders at the end of the night, we've conquered figuring percentages in our head. It’s part of our job.

Diversity in the Workplace

Despite what pop culture might lead you to believe, strippers come from extraordinarily varied backgrounds. Of course, I've danced with girls who've grown up on welfare and who come from broken homes. But I've also worked with girls whose parents were doctors and account executives and whose parents have been married for 30 years. I've worked with women born and raised in small Missouri towns, and women from as far away as Canada and Australia. I've shared a stage with dancers of every conceivable race and religion and ethnicity. And when you get naked with people every night, any sense of discomfort regarding these differences evaporates. We love each other, we are truly immersed in one another’s cultural variances and accept and cherish our distinctions.

Similarly, we are exposed to every type of person imaginable. We treat everyone we encounter with the same respect and congeniality. We chance upon rich old men and poor college students, men from every country on earth, lawyers and union guys, construction workers, military service members, lobbyists and laborers, professional sports players and famous actors (I’ll never tell, so don’t ask . . . well, I will tell, but not on the internet and only if we’re friends). There is no room for prejudices in dealing with customers.

Determination and Hard Work

No matter how good you are at being a stripper, some nights just suck balls. While a dancer can count on relatively good pay in the long term, there are those nights when she might say to herself, “Fuck, I’d have made more money tonight if I worked at McDonalds.” It’s just the way it is. Because there is no paycheck, the pay varies based on customer attendance and participation, but also sometimes plain old-fashioned luck. Some nights are shit, but dancers know that the next night will be better and we show up, slate-cleaned and determined to make up for the bad nights with good ones.

And while it may look like an easy job, being a stripper is hard, just in the practical sense. We work long, and I mean long, hours. Many a night I arrived at work at 5:30 pm and watched the sun crack the sky on my commute home. And we work long hours in 7 inch platform stilettos. And we dance, dance, dance all night long. It is a physically demanding job. We bruise our knees on stages and bruise our ribs on brass poles, we twist ankles, and we climb up and down stairs, and don’t even get me started on what a decade of stripping does to your lower spine . . . a very real condition my friend, Jenni, and I have coined ‘stripper back’. Frequently, even office jobs require minor lifting . . . can you lift 20lbs? the job advertisements ask—dude, we can lift our own body weight and turn upside down on a three inch diameter brass pole.

Managerial Demands

I've been fortunate to work with some very wonderful managers in my tenure, but there have been severe exceptions to that statement. I assure you, dancers often deal with bosses who are major assholes with a capital A. If a potential boss thinks his gruff demeanor or high standards might be too stringent for a ‘delicate gal who’s only known the coddling environment of a strip club’, that dude is DEAD WRONG. I promise you, that gal has worked for a bigger dickhead than you. Take a chance, she’s got thick skin, I promise.

And I don’t suspect any former dancer will actually use this as an addendum to an application in which she’s chosen to include her experience as a stripper to translate to ‘real-world’ work, but I wish she could. I wish she could be ballsy enough to do it, but even more, I wish a person doing the hiring would be ballsy enough to accept it as true. Because it is.

I love you, my bitches, with all my strippery heart.