The ladies I performed with in the new Mastodon video, “The Motherload,” were not all strippers, but I don’t think that matters much to the 800,000-plus viewers that watched the video in the first week. Though those of us who were strippers initially sat in cliques—the girls who knew each other from the same club or girls who had danced with each other in the past—we still exchanged pleasant glances. When the director came in and told us we’d be having a twerk dance battle with dancers we didn’t know, there was a momentary gasp.

This could get ugly.