On Vicious Cycles

Recommended reading: Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire proves I'm not the only one who sees it this way. Just sayin'.

Talking to a friend today, she suggested that I try stripping. I'm not against stripping -- far from it. My main issue, however, came up when talking about becoming a bartender in the interim between now and perfecting my dancing skills:

The girls don't fuck with the bartender.
Well, it would be nice not to get fucked with.
At least, the girls who know better don't fuck with the bartender.
Why, what would she do?
Ignore them. When they want a drink, when they want to get a drink for a guy, when a guy wants to get them a drink. Ignore them.
Oh, haha, what a catty industry!
Yeah, it is. That's why I left: it turned me into a real bitch.

Guys probably think that the girls who get into stripping are bitches by default. I'll tell you, that is not the case. We go in naive and come out jaded, having been fucked up by a mutually objectifying culture attached to a perfectly valid art-form.



I'm sure you get a similar thing the first time your friends drag you in, wet behind the ears, for a lap dance. You want to watch a pretty girl dance, have her sit on your lap, and see her smile. Maybe if you give her a dollar it will help with college or child-rearing or whatever else she tells you about her personal life. You inevitably find one to be particularly enamored with and, depending on your personality type, might go back a few times to chase her archetype.

You're most certainly special. She'll notice eventually.

But she never does, and when you show up broke and rained on, looking for her smile, she bails on you. She's sitting on the lap of some real-estate agent two couches away from you, giggling at him. Am I right?

So you make peace with the fact that this isn't a covert dating service for girls with low self-esteem and hard knocks. It's an industry of titty-tassels and ass-shakes, and you're a walking cash machine, and all the lovely mysticism is drained from that first naive infatuation with the pretty girl who sat on your lap.

Oh yeah. But you keep going back. Jaded. Some stumbly gazelle of a girl shows up while you sit in your corner and drink your beer, and her smile is captivating, but you know that you are just a walking cash machine. You're nice to her, but behind that razorblade smile, you know she's just all titty-tassels and ass-shakes. Maybe she'll get out of here on time, but she's probably just gonna be another lippy whore.

So she comes to work, stumbling like a baby gazelle. Two girls practically hijack her at the door -- giving the sweet new girls makeovers is one of the few consolation prizes of their job -- and two others issue backhanded compliments to keep her in her new-girl place. She feels constantly out of place, out of step, but gleeful about self-expression, and is certain that someone in the audience will recognize her special touch to the art-form.

You smile at her, offer her a drink, buy a dance, talk to her. You certainly are different, aren't you? Maybe you do appreciate her art! But one day when she shows up particularly shaken, having been catastrophically maimed with cruel rhetoric in the dressing room, she's sure one of the other girls stole her purse, somebody poured nail-polish directly into her makeup bag, and she tells you that while she's disheveled, rent is coming up and she hopes you can afford to help her out by buying extra dances or tossing her extra tips -- (because you're different, you see. You're a client, but also a friend. You smile, banter, tip, and don't make lewd comments or grabby motions. You're different, you appreciate her craft, you see her art, and she knows you'll help her, because you appreciate her, right?) -- you are appalled by the gall of yet another lippy whore who is going to try and take advantage of you.

Turns out she's just like all the rest.

Maybe you toss her a tip. Maybe you pretend that business has been slow, and you don't. Either way, you probably switch to another club, and if you're feeling especially vindictive, start telling people she's a scam artist.

And you see, these girls are clever. More clever than you can possibly imagine. The more vapid they act, the more likely that it IS an act. An act designed not only to trick you out of your hard-earned cash, but one to now hide their art from you -- because as each individual girl put together when your archetypal demographic stopped checking in on her, you would only ever see her as titty-tassels and ass-shakes, and you are a walking cash machine.

So we let another ridiculous consumerist industry dictate our behavior to match the nature of cold, hard cash by being cold and hard to one another.