Stripper here. Also I moonlight in full service and sometimes rub n tug. And I agree with Ryan. Imma paste some of my own thoughts that I’ve already Tumblr’d during discussions around extras that have been taking place for quite some time. I wrote some of these prior to the publication Josephine’s piece and some after.

-Firstly, I want to call out the common ‘wisdom’ that girls who perform extras undercut others as the utter disingenuousness that it often is. Those who cry the loudest about extras tend to be exceedingly normative, privileged strippers who make an excellent income, some upwards of 100K/year by their own reckonings. If they are being undercut, their takings do not show it. I can believe that they *fear* being undercut, but this fear is frequently not borne out by the reality.

-though the strippers decrying extras claim to have no problem with full service workers and that their concerns are in no way rooted in whorephobia, their use of shaming language – including the use of the term ‘clean dancer’ to describe girls who do not perform extras – speaks to something else entirely. ‘Clean’, for a start, implies that contact sex workers are just filthy.

-Performing extras is strongly bound up with poverty. People who perform extras often do so because they must, to survive. Such poverty, in turn, is strongly correlated with various forms of intersectional oppression. These include but are not limited to race, class, trans* status, motherhood, body size, non-normative appearance, ability, mental health and the like. Those decrying extras tend to be free of such factors, and so in most cases will never be faced down with the choices often facing down ‘extras girls’ . At the end of the day, I find the lack of thought or compassion for those struggling to earn given the listed or other intersectional factors to be frankly repulsive.

-I am also thinking that extras in fact serve to somewhat level the playing field between normative and non-normative SWs but that, like all things that level the playing field, the privileged class see it as the marginalised class gaining privilege over them as opposed to an equaliser.

-‘extras girls’ get blamed for the demands and entitled attitudes of customers and clients, rather than those customers and clients themselves. I hope I don’t even need to point out just how problematic this is…This implies that men can’t help themselves and bear zero responsibility for their actions in the sexual arena, which on its face is both wrong and woman-hating. My experience spans all forms of sex work aside from porn, and I can tell you that men are always demanding more, whatever is offered. In full service they demand unprotected PIV, anal, free GFE, the right to film you – whatever is not on offer – they want it. This is a function of male privilege and entitlement, not other sex workers.

I don’t disagree with you. However, I think our society has fueled the fire of change in the strip club setting. We are a culture of immediate gratification, of entitlement, and are highly sexualized. Porn is getting more extreme and with a click of a button, you can view it all for free on the internet. Men come to a strip club and don’t feel satisfied with only an air dance any longer. Look at any strip club review website. They will post the dancer’s name and say “don’t dance with this person, her dances are a rip-off”. Perhaps this is just my view of the situation and I will admit it may be biased because my club tolerates extras. It’s not any one person’s fault and it can’t be so easily fixed.

How do you think the extras girls can compromise? I’m not asking to be adversarial, I’m just asking out of curiosity. I’m not quite sure how that could happen. Stripping is sex work. If a person is uncomfortable with that, he or she could make probably just as much money as a shot girl, waitress, or bartender.

more interesting, is that all the unionizing, liberal jargon of the extras argument clashes with the mind-your-own-business-i’ll-get-paid-however-i-best-see-fit-and-fuck-the-rules argument made for extras also. it seems like extras girls work in a paradigm of financial conservativism and then expect to be embraced by and unionized with with the same crew of dancers they just undercut. no?

A trip to a strip club is a night out at a bar. Just like any other bar, sometimes one goes with friends, you relax, have some beers, watch girls, talk with girls, maybe buy them drinks. It’s fun and relaxing and you could spend several hours there. And after hanging out with an attractive girl for a while and finally agree to a private dance, well, you have no idea what she will do. She might do an awesome lap dance, might give a horrible lap dance, or she might go all out in terms of extras. One doesn’t know, it is all mystery and suspense. That’s a big reason of the fun for me. Mystery and surprise.

As for seeing a regular, for me at least, what’s fun is that I’m getting a sex act in a bar, sorta a public space, with lots of people right out side the cubicle. That doesn’t happen to me much when I go to regular bars.

This makes good sense to me. In the clubs I’ve worked at where full service was available, not offering full service was never an issue for me when the girls who were doing so were charging lots more than I was for my dances/VIP. The stated VIP price was $220 for half an hour, the full service girls charged around $400, I was regularly able to charge $300, and there was no drama.

I recognize that there are providers reading this who think it’s insulting when strippers like me make comments like, “girl, hook if you want to, but respect yourself/get what you’re worth/etc…” I get that it comes off as shaming. That really isn’t where it comes from, though. Like, of course it pisses me off on a personal level when enough girls are charging $30 for penetration that I can’t pay my rent with $20 dances. That isn’t what I signed up for when I started stripping. But I want us ALL to maximize our profits, and non-extras & extras girls alike aren’t making as much as we could if the range of service available at the standard price didn’t vary so widely.