10 Upsides to Being a Gigolo

By

-

October 27, 2011

Complex is an ironic name for such a shallow publication. When your major “News” categories include “Rides” and “Girls” alongside “Sneakers” and “Video Games,” it doesn’t bode well for thoughtful commentary. So reading “10 Downsides to Being a Gigolo” didn’t really surprise me: most media discussion of sex work is divided between horror stories and not-so-subtle nudge and wink humor anyway. It is striking how shows like Showtime’s Gigolos can entrench existing assumptions, however. So, while a companion may be subtly different from a gigolo, here is my point by point reply to these supposed downsides:

10. Being Professionally Obligated to Have Sex with Undesirable People

The first problem with this is the assumption that sex is an obligation. While it certainly is safe to say that I have sex with the vast majority of my clients, if I ever felt uncomfortable or unable to perform, I would give them a refund and call the whole thing off. That said, I have had sex with clients who I wasn’t attracted to physically. It is indeed part of the job and, for me at least, it becomes more about finding aspects of personality or focusing on the pleasure that your partner is getting out of the experience. Of course, that’s something men should pay more attention to in bed anyway.

Continue

CNN: Make $2K a Night Stripping in North Dakota!

By

Bubbles

-

October 26, 2011

If I’ve ever danced in a club I didn’t expect to see on CNN.com, it’s Whispers in Williston, North Dakota. But here it is, with some pretty amazing claims about the money to be made there. $1500 on a slow night? Damn!

Williston has been a solid stop for traveling strippers for years. But these claims are pretty grand! I know some good hustlers, and I think the best night any of them reported from here was $1200 (which is great, especially in a club with no champagne room and where you keep $15/dance). I don’t doubt there are dancers who have made more, but to claim that $1500 is slow rather than exceptional is like being one of those dancers who says she averages $1000 on weekend nights when really she made that much one time and the rest of the time says it’s just “never this slow.” The reality of these easy money clubs in the middle of nowhere is, sometimes, a lot closer to what one of my favorite stripper bloggers experienced in South Dakota last week.

Continue

Sex Work in the Strangest Places: Detroit’s Booty Lounge Seized

By

Bubbles

-

October 20, 2011

Detroit’s entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well in the Booty Lounge, a mobile strip club. The Lounge, despite tailgating Lions games since 2005, recently became a target for the Motor City’s anti-stripper brigade when local news station WDIV sent its “Defenders” into the Booty Bus with hidden cameras (jerks!).
The bus was seized last Monday during the Lions game, apparently for being parked in a no parking zone. It remains to be seen if this will be the end of the Booty Lounge. Objections included the suggestion that it would attract the wrong element to Lions games, a laughable concept for anyone who’s ever been to an actual NFL game.

A bus is not the only creative strip club venue in Detroit. Read this great 2010 story about a guy who started a strip club in his rec room.

Rosamund Urwin, You Strip Journalism Of Its Dignity

Silly Media Coverage

By

Elle

-

September 2, 2011

Rosamund Urwin, writing for The London Evening Standard, was sent on assignment to visit Secrets’ Covent Garden club, or rather, as she refers to it, “Tits R Us.” The article begins with a clear bias: “The clubs that strip women of their dignity.” Immediately, Urwin seems determined to give her article credibility by describing herself as a “strident feminist.” Oddly enough, I believe I am a strident feminist too. It would bemuse me to hear her explanation of what a feminist is, because after reading her piece, I suspect it would contrast starkly with my own.

Her article is based upon one and a half ventures into strip clubs. Urwin laments that the first excursion seemed too “sanitised,” and therefore focuses on the latter mission, which she then proceeds to tear into. She describes two dancers as “both attractive and funny,” and asks their reasons for stripping. When the strippers reply that one is singularly supporting her child and another used her earnings to buy an apartment, Urwin finds fault in this too: “Essentially then, they were fixing two social ills: the ludicrous cost of housing and absent fathers. That doesn’t sound very empowering.”

Continue

Fair Trade Lapdances, Free Range Escorts, and Organic Porn

Silly Media Coverage

By

Bubbles

-

August 31, 2011

Sustainability in action: most stripper clothes are line-dry only.

Having long said that lapdances are a low-impact renewable resource, I was tickled to read this Utne Reader reprint of Anna Simpson’s article from Green Futures about an imagined sustainable sex industry. Obviously the desire to buy a product made by workers who are treated well is an established trope in sustainability/free trade circles, so eliminating forced trafficking is a given. But aside from a short discussion of consent, it’s more of a funny little exercise in hypotheticals than a serious stab at sex industry issues.

Continue