There are a few things I've really been itching to talk about lately. I want to commit to doing them soon so I can get them off my mind. They are:
1) Sex in the champagne room is bad for business.
2) The hierarchy of strippers as earners on the basis of "beauty" and age.
2A) Subsequently: self esteem, beauty and power in the club.
2B) The Economical Ugly and the Economical Pretty: pressure, sexism, power and negotiating.
3) Inherent differences between stripping and other sex work, and changes that occur when they overlap, both economic and environmental.
4) Why I don't drink on the job.
It seems a little stupid, but I really have to break it down, because I keep trying to write on topics 1-3 as one post, and all I get is a really complicated, confusing mess of academic sounding douchebaggery. So I'm just going to level with you and tackle one piece at a time in a series of posts.
So, sex in the champagne room. I know I've posted before about specifically not having sex in the champagne room, but just because I don't do it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It does, with some frequency in fact. And that makes me sad.
In a club where as a general rule (and I don't mean a written rule as in the law, I mean a rule as in what actually tends to happen) the entertainers don't offer "extras" in the champagne room, everybody's prices level out. They mostly hover around a common number with some girls being more or less expensive depending on a few factors I'll get into later.
Stripping is supposed to be an entertainment that does not include any actual sex acts (between the customers and entertainers - shower shows and girl/girl shows set aside, for my purposes here). Still, the striptease is obviously erotic and sexual in nature. And considering that there is sex work of all kinds, it's not hard to understand how lines get blurred. But when an entertainer in a club starts offering extras in the champagne room with her dances, things get complicated and fucked up (no pun intended) for everybody. This is because, to simplify the situation, entertainers who don't do extras can't compete with one who does in the same club. No customer is going to choose to pay $300 for an hour in the champagne room that leaves him with blue balls over an hour in the champagne room, for the same price, that includes a bj. (In fact, many customers will pay for the whole hour, go in just for the bj, and leave - as having achieved a sexual favor puts them atop the ladder of gratification, by which I mean return for their money, so they instantly have bragging rights.) Even if they want to, they won't, because capitalist tendencies have been so engrained in them that they'll feel practically guilted into taking the best "deal" or whatever gets them the "most" product for their money. It also implies a hierarchy of sexuality in which acts that include touching are superior to those centered around watching, which isn't kind to the folks who actually prefer watching. And that's a problem. It means the other entertainers have to come up with a competitive edge. And generally speaking, their most obvious options are to either lower their rates or start giving head too, because other competitive edges they may have had have probably already been played out in the establishing of the previous equilibrium.
If it's just one entertainer, the consequences are somewhat mitigated, for a time, until the customers start catching wind. Once they know that some girls will provide extras with their services, they gain more power in the negotiations. It's shitty to be an entertainer faced with a customer who's telling you that they'll take their $300 and go spend 20 minutes with Sapphire unless you have something more to offer than the standard fare you've been serving. And it seems unfair, because it's not your job to provide extras, it is the deal than an hour long dance is $300, and now that's not going to happen.
It's like a customer in a restaurant demanding the server go change the oil in his car while his eggs are cooking. As that server, you want to be like, "What the fuck is your problem? I'm not your servant. My job here is to bring you eggs, and that's it dickhead. Don't forget, 15%."
But you can't do that. Number one, you work in a service position, so being rude to the customers is a one way ticket to unemployment. You can't be particularly sensitive about how demanding they are in the taking of you services, because you know they could go easily sit in someone else's section, and then you'd have no business at all. And you can't even demand a tip because technically, they're not obligated to give you one. And you know that being demanding about it isn't going to bump you from 15 to 20%. So what do you do? You take their bullshit with a smile and you weigh your options. But these days, who really has the option to tell a customer with cash to get the hell out?
It's unfortunate. If every entertainer in a club committed to a "no extras" policy and actually stuck with it, they'd all be making about $300 an hour simply by doing the job they're supposed to be there for. I'm not saying that nobody actually wants to provide sex services or that it in itself is wrong or inherently problematic. I'm saying that it's not what stripping is, and it's not what many people become strippers to do. And if none of them did, none of them would have to. That doesn't happen though, because there's not much in the way of motivation for strippers to unify. In most cases they're independent contractors who are owed nothing by their clubs or by other dancers. It's every entertainer for herself (not to say there aren't boy strippers and sex workers too, but that's just not the environment I'm talking about here because I haven't experienced it). There are already enough factors at play that give some entertainers an edge (which is where that tricky little word "about" comes in, because it's actually a big deal) with either most general customers of specific subsets of customers, that they have no or little control over, so it's not surprising that a) people would only perform work in ways that served their own best interests and b) customers would take advantage of the competitiveness that abounds. Why shouldn't they? Pretty much everything about the social standards and dynamics inside and outside of the club tell them that it's okay, it's not personal, it's just capitalism. But frankly, that's just stupid. There are so many different historical processes that come into play here. But I think they're for the next post. This is getting a little lengthy.
So, to sum it up: sex in the champagne room happens. It makes it really hard for entertainers who don't want it to keep doing the work they do want to do. It's not nice to bring it into the strip club. It's kind of like cheating at the game. But cheating is to be expected in a game you can't win any other way.
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