1) How do clubs prevent third-party sexual harassment lawsuits? If a guest says a remark like “you’re sexy” to an entertainer, she could have a claim. Expand on that, and you could have a club with 100 lawsuits a month just from guest harassment. The club would close just for legal fees, especially with litigious professional plaintiffs like yourself.

2) How do clubs make profit? They opened to turn a profit and they exist to turn a profit, but by the time wages, health insurance, ongoing legal fees, and the slew of other expenses are paid, you will have a model where most clubs simply cannot turn a profit. This is especially true for the smaller clubs that already profit little. They will likely close and the very entertainers you are trying to protect will lose the opportunity to make money in their town. The current adult club model is not like a the factories in need of unionization in the 1970’s where greedy owners were profiting hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. Most smaller clubs are lucky to turn a profit of $10-15,000 per month, and diminishing that profit even further would likely lead to their closure.

3) The club could then collect all of the dance fees up-front like in California, use the money to pay an hourly wage to the entertainers, and *maybe* share some of the excess with her as a bonus. This is how clubs that already pay an hourly wage operate, and courts have held it to be correct procedure. Entertainers actually net less money and then have to turn around and pay taxes. If this isn’t the model you propose, what is the model, and is it a model where a club will even be able to afford to stay open?

4) As an employee, entertainers could be forced onto a schedule, have to take direction and instruction from a manager, wear outfits the club wants, etc. There are all employee characteristics with which you can’t argue. Even the most unionized factory workers have a schedule, uniform, and manager whose direction they must follow. Most entertainers don’t want that. Would you? You can’t ask to be an employee and that have all the freedoms afforded to an independent entertainer.

5) What about the clubs that cheat? If a club has employee entertainers, there will likely be some club down the street that goes with the independent model. The entertainers will flock there (whether you want to admit it or not), the guests will follow, and the club trying to operate with employees will fail. Unless you can somehow conjure up a solution in which all clubs operate the same way guaranteed, your “movement” will fail. The government barely has the resources to function now, so don’t expect it to allocate time and money to inspect the labor practices of every strip club everywhere, especially when most of the supposed “victims” aren’t interested or willing to be part of a change to employees.

6) Worse yet, you don’t have a majority of entertainers – or even a quantity greater than maybe a few hundred nationally – who agree with employee status or are even interested in changing the status quo. Most are perfectly happy making somewhere between $400 to $2,000 a night in cash and aren’t willing to join your “movement” to screw that up. You don’t have the support to make anything meaningful happen.

You want freedom and choice. Surely you would espouse this line of logic in any other argument – like abortion, gay marriage, etc. But when it comes to an entertainer selecting her own employment status – legalistic questions aside – you want to force YOUR decision down her throat. Your arrogance precludes you from thinking that other entertainers might be as smart as you and might be able to make decisions on their own.

You want to make the decision for all entertainers everywhere. You are no better or intellectually consistent than the Republicans who want to tell women what they can and cannot do with their bodies.

This is really late, but oh well.
I completely agree that she was being exploited, even more so considering that the manager knew of her underage status. I also think that is is not only bold, but absolutely brave for her to share her story.
What is concerning to me is that people are already so quick to conflate voluntary, consensual sex work with the exploitation of minors. Sure there are exploited minors within the sex industry (largely, I think, do to the stigmatized, underground, and sometimes illegal nature of many of the branches but that’s a topic that everyone here seems to know about). That being said, by highlighting an exploited minor in a film about workplace violations, I think you are inviting people to focus not on the unfair work environments of most strip clubs but on the exploitation of said minor.

Having worked very recently in an INCREDIBLY unfairly run strip club, I really love that you’re making this film. I’m just concerned that the inclusion of a trendy issue like an exploited minor could draw attention away from the fact that there are adult women who just really want to strip in a fair environment out there.

Cate–Lola was 16 yrs old when a manager knowingly hired her in spite of her age. She told her to get fake ID + pretend she was 18. I think it’s pretty bold of Lola to come forward about her experience. If her situation seems exploitive, it’s because it is. I stripped alongside several girls who were underaged–I’m sure we all know of 1 or 2 girls like that. It’s no surprise that minors work in the sex industry. Hopefully, Lola’s story will get people thinking about what motivates minors to enter the sex industry + how as an immigrant with little education, it makes her more vulnerable to remaining quiet when there’s workplace violations.

I was thinking the exact same thing. In addition to that, I think Lola is a very poor example , since her underage status adds a layer of very serious potential exploitation that should be examined.

I really like the main ideas behind this project, but there are elements that I think are not all that well thought through.