DV victim? Nope! Just a stripper!

Pole dancing, stage work and lap dances are hard work. After I've taken a few weeks off, it takes a while to re-acclimatise to it.

In the meantime, this is the result.

I also have a giant scratch on my left buttock from an unsealed part of the stage, but that's not a photo suitable for this blog.

Awkward Invisibility

This post is pretty heavy, but I've been wanting to get it off my chest for a while. The next post will return to my normal light hearted look at things.


Earlier this year, I had the privilege of attending a conference. I consider my ability to afford such things while being a student one of the perks of stripping my way through university. The conference was wonderful, but one experience still hasn't left me.
The speaker, a highly qualified physician, was talking about some of his more interesting and unusual trauma cases. I'll admit that like many people with an interest in emergency medicine, I consider unusual trauma to be one of the sexiest topics there is.

We were shown a wonderfully graphic X-ray of a patient's injuries and the speaker explained to us that the patient was a sex worker, working on the streets, who had gained the injury during an altercation with her client over money.
The impressive injury, contrasted with the situation which had resulted in it, was clearly designed to be interesting and humorous to the audience. And the audience laughed. An awkward, amused, but not quite comfortable laugh. A laugh that made me cringe.

The talk went on to discuss treatment and how the patient made a full recovery, after which the sex worker apparently offered the physician a 'freebie' as a 'thank you'. Once again, the audience laughed awkwardly, and once again I inwardly cringed. At the end of the presentation, the MCs made further innuendos - not about anything else in the talk, but about the sex worker and her relationship with the physician.

So why does this make me cringe? I'm a stripper, not a sex worker.
I've found this really difficult to explain concisely, but I'm going to do my best.

Firstly, many people don't know the difference between a stripper and a sex worker and many more assume all/most strippers DO have sex for money. While this may be true in some places around the world, to date it has not been true anywhere I've worked. Second, I understand that 'not a sex worker' to 'sex worker' is a spectrum, and that by most people's standards, I'm closer to the sex worker end. I don't have sex for money, but I do get naked and intimate for money. Does a stripper who performs dildo shows count as a sex worker? What about someone who is part of a monogamous couple that does 'sex shows' for money? I'm not really sure, but I do know that I consider anyone in this spectrum to be in the same boat as I am in terms of legal and social discrimination.
But what does all this have to do with a group of educated people laughing awkwardly at a whore offering a doctor a freebie?

Well . . . here's the thing. If that patient were an accountant offering the physician a freebie, no one would have laughed. Or felt awkward. Or made jokes about it. Even the scenario of the accountant being assaulted by his client over a monetary dispute is far less likely to happen because accountants are respected members of society, allowed to advertise their services and practice their profession without moral crusaders protesting their existence.
The same can be said for any other profession that doesn't involve sex. Even professions considered to be questionable, such as law or used car sales wouldn't have been made fun of like that.

So what it comes down to is this: That awkward laugh told me that sex workers make the general public uncomfortable. I'm considered to be within the realm of sex work (even though I don't have sex with anyone), and therefore the normal societal rules of what is polite and appropriate are suspended. No wonder I didn't feel safe sitting in that crowd!

But this was not an isolated incident of feeling awkward and vulnerable because of the forced invisibility of my current profession. In fact, in my limited time on the road as a student paramedic, I've had a few of these moments.

-Arriving for placement to find my crew for the day playing with an app called What's Your Stripper Name? It was fun for giggles, until I realised that all the names involved words like Slutty, Easy and Pussy. I don't know any strippers who have stage names like that. Things got even more silently awkward for me when one of the paramedics gave her opinion that 'most strippers must have issues'. Fortunately, her partner used to live with one and explained that most strippers aren't trashy drug fiends, and I didn't have to out myself.

-An older paramedic using the words 'strippers' and 'prostitutes' interchangeably as he described a time before sex work was legalised, when he would collect people from houses with dozens of filthy mattresses on the floor.

-A fellow student paramedic talking about a girl she doesn't like and saying 'She dresses like a stripper!' This one was especially hard. My friend, sitting in front of me, said something derisive towards me and didn't even know it. Nor could I defend myself without outing myself.

-A lecturer spicing up his class with another interesting story about a sex worker. This was only a few weeks after the conference, and I was struck by the similarities. Again, the audience was intrigued, and the sex worker was used for comedic relief. There was awkward laughing from the audience, followed by innuendos from the lecturer.

Unfortunately, standing up for myself in public would also mean outing myself. Outing myself directly impacts my job prospects. This is ridiculous, but it is also the reality in which I currently live. So I stay invisible.
It's not only my job prospects that are affected by being a stripper, but also my safety. In the strip club, people pay me to suspend some of the normal rules of social interaction. Outside of the strip club, I am just another person and all the normal rules of what is appropriate and what counts as sexual harassment still apply. Yet somehow, this seems to be forgotten as soon as the title 'stripper' is added to my identity.

A hairdresser selling a product recently approached me in a mall. Her sales technique was quite aggressive and I explained that I wasn't interested, as I'm a stripper and I already have a hairdresser who does my hair at work (true in one of the clubs I work in). Her response to this was to look at my breasts and ask me 'So, are they real?'
I get that my breasts are related to my work, but would she have asked that if I had told her I'm a plastic surgeon? Somehow, I doubt it.

The other scenario I encounter far too regularly is men asking for a freebie when they find out. First, that's just rude. I don't expect a freebie from whatever my friends do, just because they do it.
Secondly, if I get upset at people asking, I get told that 'they're only joking'. This is really insidious, and to be frank, pisses me off. Because if I had said 'yes' it's pretty obvious they would not be joking. But instead of apologising for being rude, it suddenly becomes my fault for being too sensitive.

So watch what you say. Just because you can't see me doesn't mean I don't exist. It doesn't mean that your words don't hurt. And it doesn't help get rid of the lingering misogyny our historically male based profession still suffers from. It doesn't help our patients, and it doesn't help create a better society.

I know I dropped the feminist 'misogyny' word there, but I promise I'm not a man hating feminazi! Nor am I only aiming this at men. Ladies, every time you trash talk a woman for wearing fewer clothes or having more sexual partners, you're telling everyone that a woman's worth is tied to how much clothing they wear and how many sexual partners they've had. Unless you believe that a burqa clad virgin has greater worth than your average western woman (See how virtue in modesty is a logical fallacy?), you might want to re-think your language.

I'm not the only strippermedic, nor shall I be the last. If 'coming out' didn't have the huge repercussions it currently has, I suspect a lot of people would be surprised at how many people have found work on the sex worker spectrum.