Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.—Yoda
Hola Hater,
Thanks for the helpful suggestions in “An Open Letter to the Extras Girl.” You know, for telling me how to do my job. Don’t take it personally if I ignore them. This is business, girl, and if you can’t wrap your head around what we—you and I—actually do for a living, it’s no problem of mine.
I know times are tough. This recession settled in on the whole country and it’s not going away anytime soon. I’ve been at this job long enough to know that the legendary monsoons of cash in the aughts—when girls could flash a titty and a smile and walk out with one large in their pockets—aren’t coming back. If you want to ply your craft and still turn a profit, sucking and fucking is going to be part of the deal, eventually. [READ MORE]
I get into work at the strip club and put my bag down. “Who is leaving all these condoms around here? We’re not fucking whores!” “Why do people have condoms in here, it’s meant to be a STRIP CLUB, who is doing that shit?” I replied straight back, “They’re not mine, but what’s the big deal? Lots of us do extras.” Hours pass, and in a quieter, more private moment, the same worker who said this earlier confides to me that she does extras too.
The first sex work I did was in a strip club—in the state I was living in at the time (Victoria, Australia) there is a complex legal system for the sex industry which means to work legally for yourself you must register with your legal name and only do outcalls. The only other way to work legally is in a brothel where the money cuts are less and you had to attend monthly invasive health checks to work (recently reduced to once every three months). Neither of these options really appealed to me, so I chose to work in a way that was criminalized, but where I could keep the maximum amount of my money, take care of my own health, have the maximum amount of control over how I worked and also avoid police as much as possible. I chose to work in a strip club. [READ MORE]
by user wootam! on Flickr
This is one of three responses to Josephine’s “An Open Letter to the Extras Girl” that we’ll be running this week. First up is M, a dancer who, like Josephine, works in Detroit.
On a sweltering August afternoon in 2012, I walked through the impossibly heavy glass doors of the glitziest strip club in Detroit. I had done copious amounts of research on the strip clubs in the area, spending nearly a month scouring reviews online and taking trips to clubs in the area. This particular club was the shiniest and it was filled with executives, physicians and lawyers. Promises of riches sparkled like the strobe lights overhead. Even though I had never stripped before, I forged ahead, fearless. Go big or go home, that was my motto.
Looking back, I was somewhat naïve. I had no particular urgency to my sales pitch. I was simultaneously working my “normal” job and stripping. It wasn’t as though I couldn’t pay my bills. So I started with the thought that I would only dance, no extras whatsoever. Perhaps I was conceited enough to think that my pretty face, tight body, and educated mind would be enough to make me money. Unfortunately that notion was completely false. [READ MORE]
photo credit: Bubbles
Hey Girl,
I used to be so jealous of you. How did you do it? I would watch you stride through the club, so confident, the wad of cash strapped to your leg growing, like stripping is the easiest job in the world. Someone always wanted a dance from you. You made it look so easy. I thought you were brilliance walking.
Sure, the other girls whispered. There were rumors. I thought they were just jealous, I thought they were threatened. But I was in denial.
You are the Extras Girl: hated by your colleagues, but loved by men. You fuck and suck, blow and go.
Private dancing, though? Not really.
I’m sure you’ve heard what the other girls said. She’s a hooker. She has no morals. She’s dirty.
You know what? I think those are weak arguments. I think everyone reading Tits and Sass agrees that there’s nothing wrong with hooking and that there’s not some great moral chasm between simulating sex (what strippers do) and having sex (what hookers do).
Girl, none of us are innocent. Once, I tried to fuck my best stripper friend. On stage. In front of my boyfriend.
We’re all human.
I’ll be honest, though. Sometimes, you, the Extras Girl, make my night at work a little harder. Sometimes, I just wish you would go away. Sometimes, I even poke my voodoo doll of you with needles. [READ MORE]
Famous for being helmsman Hikaru Sulu of the USS Enterprise in the original Star Trek series, actor and author George Takei is America’s clever gay grandfather. Takei currently plays to an audience of thousands via social media and is known for quotable and insightful Facebook and Twitter posts on everything from politics to gender issues to cute animal macros. On April 2nd, George alienated a decent amount of his followers when he posted this meme.
As a mother, wife, and child, I was annoyed and almost a little hurt.
My 54-year-old mother sat nearby, her eyes deep in her Catherine Crier book. We had stayed up late despite her return flight being early in the morning. I was rubbing my wrists in anxiousness, set back from the laptop when she glanced over. I turned the screen toward her.
“Who posted that?”
“George Takei.”
“The actor?”
“Yeah. He posts a lot of stuff, but nothing like this usually.”
“Weird.”
“Mom, how does that make you feel? That society says you’re a failure? That I’m a failure?”
A very long pause.
“Well, it doesn’t make me feel good.”
[READ MORE]
