Please welcome our very first Dear Tits and Sass entry, wherein one of our readers needs to know what to do about her stalker of two years’ fiancé of six years.
While we aren’t planning on routinely answering questions for newbies or outsiders (we don’t want pandering charges, among other reasons), every now and then there comes a question that begs to be answered… and shared. If you are an current sex worker with an unusual predicament, you can email info [at] titsandsass.com and we’ll do our best to help or call in a guest who can.
Dear Tits and Sass,
I’m hoping you can help me with a serious problem: a stalker and his fiancé. One Friday almost two years ago, a man approached me at the club and asked for dances. When we reached the private dance room, he paid me to sit and chat for four songs. He also made me a money ring (that I later realized was made with a $100), which he put on my finger. After getting dances he left the club immediately and I never saw him there again.
You gotta admire the hustle all over this video. It’s not easy being in hip hop in Portland, Oregon! Filmed at Exotica International, this track gives shout outs to Texas titties, Alabama asses, Florida faces, and Oregon … manners! They are polite in the 503. It’s produced by Terrell Brandon. Pretty damn Portland.
Chanel: When thinking about Miley’s horrible performance at the VMAs, I let out a big sigh. Where do I begin? There was so much wrong with her performance. It wasn’t tasteful or well-choreographed. I wasn’t expecting her to slip back into her role as Hannah Montana and give the VMAs a sweet and boring show, but I sure wasn’t expecting that.
As strippers, we perform on stage for one to three songs per set. Sometimes routines are choreographed well to music and other times it’s short and sweet and then it’s over. When it comes to twerking, it’s about more than just having a big round booty. I’ve seen white women and black women and every color in between shake it well on stage. There’s no huge thought process behind it but it’s hard when you don’t know what you’re doing, just like any other dance move. When (most) strippers shake it, we know it’s for entertainment, so it should be good which can mean extra tips on stage and off stage in terms of lapdance sales. When Miley shakes it, it’s because she’s trying to shock us with her uncoordinated hip wiggles. She’s not like the strippers in her song lyrics. I’ve seen those women, and they are much better than she will ever be.
The show was much like her video, complete with human accessories. I wasn’t shocked that there were big booty black women dancing on stage with her. It wouldn’t be the first time people have accessorized with black women (or women of any race) for entertainment. Countless hip-hop and rap videos use black heavy-bottomed women as accessories. As a black mixed woman, I’m offended by Miley’s choice to do this. I’m not sure what she’s trying to prove or say by hiring black women to act as her friends in the “We Can’t Stop” video and on the VMAs. It’s more than the bad pancake booty twerking. It’s the selected parts of black culture she attempted to portray though her song and dance. There’s more to black and hip-hop/rap culture than what she is picking apart and glorifying. She only glorifies ideas from the way black and hip hop/rap culture is portrayed in the media—grills, twerking, big butts, getting high, being surrounded by hot women and acquiring money. Her performance and song lyrics show that she is completely unaware of what actually defines black and rap/hip hop culture.
When the play in question is called Stripper Lesbians, one might assume that there will be strippers who are also lesbians. An astute reader is also likely to surmise that the subtext is going to center on labels. Neither assumption is incorrect when applied to the play Stripper Lesbians, directed by Jeff Woodbridge, currently running as part of the Frigid Festival in New York City. It is about strippers who are lesbians and the major dramatic (or possibly comedic) arc makes great swooping circles around the issue with labeling.
The center of this play, written by Kate Foster, teeters uneasily on a love triangle—at its vertex sits the androgynously named Evan (Amanda Berry). Her ex-boyfriend DJ (Joe Beaudin) and her current girlfriend Aisha (Samantha Cooper) serve as the two base angles. Because this play is also about labels, these three characters are also “the academic,” “the heterosexual male,” and the “stripper-lesbian.” There is, therefore, some truth in advertising.
Evan’s writing a thesis (presumably in women’s studies, indistinctly a senior or masters thesis) on strippers. At the behest of the symbolically named DJ, then her boyfriend, Evan takes a job at Wildlands, the local strip club. There she meets Aisha, whom she first studies for her thesis and with whom she later gets Sapphic. It’s the old “Girl-Meets-Girl,” “Girl-Dumps-Boy,” “Girls-Dance-For-Cash-Using-Vaguely-Pina-Baush-Inspired-Choreography-In-The-Most-Improbable-Strip-Club-Ever-Brought-To-The-Stage” story. You know how it goes.
Human strippers with robot strippers. (photo via The Busty Bruiser)
When hypnotizing videos of robot strippers went viral recently, the internet was abuzz. (At least it was in my circles, comprised primarily of current/former sex workers and horny writers who never miss an opportunity to crack a Philip K. Dick joke.) People marveled and hypothesized about the potential implications these gyrating mannequins might have on the strip club landscape: Were these robots here to replace ladies who dance for a living? Were men actually like, into this? Should your friendly neighborhood strippers start worrying about being usurped by rechargeable batteries and knees that will never need replacement? It seemed that everyone who encountered this quirky bit of tech-lore was either mesmerized, amused, or vaguely hostile to the idea; but was anyone actually turned on? (Turns out, the answer to all of these questions is basically: not really.)
An old friend with tech media connections was able to score an invite to an exclusive media-only event being held at Sapphire, a major pillar of the Vegas strip club scene. We were lucky enough to check out the robots up close and personal before they make their debut on the CES Expo floor later this week. I spoke with the robots’ creator, Giles Walker, about their inception and how they came to be the most buzzed-about attraction at the biggest tech event of the year.
Despite all of the jokes and speculation about emotionally-stunted nerds in basements building girlfriends for themselves, Walker doesn’t even come close to the socially-awkward engineer I had envisioned. In fact, he’s a British sculptor with deep roots in the London punk and art scenes. With his spiked ear-gauges and cheeky fedora, Walker looks more like the guy who wants to sell you rare Japanese Sex Pistols b-sides on eBay, not the Dr. Frankenstein of sexy late-stage capitalism. An active member of art collective, The Mutoid Waste Company, which erects guerrilla-art installations all over Europe, Walker first began incorporating motors into his found-object sculptures in the mid-1990s using scavenged parts from junkyards. “When I first started I was just a broke punk, you know? I didn’t have $10 in my pocket, so I had to use whatever I could find on the street.” Today, the robots are constructed using mannequin limbs, windshield-wiper motors, a gate-opening motor, and CCTV cameras.
The dancing fembot concept first began to take shape for Walker after the broadcast of an infamous “sexed up” report on British television convincing the nation to go to war in Iraq.At the time, Walker says, “I started noticing these CCTV surveillance cameras on every single street corner in London, it was nuts. And those things are total garbage! They don’t even protect people, they only protect f*ckin’ property!”
