Musings of an Introverted Stripper

On her first anniversary as a professional stripper, a performer looks back on a year spent in the club and what the future of her work could—and should—look like.

The strip club is a mysterious place. In our current collective consciousness, there is an image of music-video-worthy glamour: images of big ballers making it rain on beautiful table dancers excited to get naked. There’s also the stigmatized image of a run-down, dinghy club employing desperate women who are out of options. The truth of my own experience has been neither: sometimes it’s a great job, and other times it’s a stupid job. But overall, it’s a job that works for me—and I genuinely love it.

As I’ve been approaching my “stripperversary”, I’ve been reflecting quite a lot. Note that this is not an attempt to psychoanalyze why stripping was ultimately a good decision for me. Nor what led me to decide to pursue that direction in the first place. I’ve been thinking a lot about the discourse around our relationship to sexuality and how we relate to others—the tension between expression and repression and how all of these dynamics are mediated through commerce.

There are a couple of different ways that strip clubs are structured depending on which jurisdiction you’re in. In Quebec, most of your money is made from giving private lap dances. In other cities, stage shows are the money-makers. As an introverted stripper, I prefer (and tend to do best with) one-on-one interactions. I tend not to do well as a party stripper—a stripper who is down to party with a group, likes to drink, the works. I get overstimulated easily, and I commit to staying sober during shifts. I do my best work with people who are looking to connect on a more intimate level: sex is off the table, but my work is rooted in responding to sexual and emotional needs related to being seen and held.

There’s a certain tension in the commodification of human sexuality. Sometimes, it can lead to the accusation by some clients about how you don’t give a shit about them and that you only care about the money.

For some dancers, this job is just that: a job. Dozens of stripper meme pages can confirm that. Even though I'm an empath, I don’t find that anyone is paying me to care about them. In my line of work, I'm not in a position to give away emotional labour for free. My needs have to be met in order to do my best work, so that I can meet the needs of my clients the best that I can. It also means there have to be certain conditions and boundaries in place to allow for healthy levels of separation. To say that your therapist doesn’t actually give a shit about you and only cares about the money is an absurd thing to say.




I have a lot of respect for the people I share space with at the strip club, from my coworkers to the club's patrons. There are rules in place, and as long as they're followed, the club is generally well set up to be a positive space. I love when I’m able to spend some quality time with a client and they leave telling me they feel fulfilled by their experience. I love when they come to me with what they want and when they receive it on my terms. I love helping people connect to themselves and their desires. I love when people tell me that they’ve learned something new about themselves.

At times though, there are issues around respect that can leave a bad taste in your mouth.

I was sitting at the bar with a man once who insisted that he wasn’t there to get a lap dance, which is understandable—it doesn’t take away from the validity of someone wanting to be there. However, he took it a step further to say that as a handsome guy, he didn’t need to pay for someone’s attention and that it set him apart from the other men in the space (i.e., “I’m not like the other guys.”). He then proclaimed that all the women there were fake. Thinking about this still makes my blood boil. While I'm always quick to defend my girls, I also found myself defending the other men who were there to engage in a meaningful experience.

And while he didn’t want to buy a lap dance from me, he kept asking me to leave with him to join his friends at a nightclub. There was another instance of a colleague giving me a tip about someone who wanted a dance from me, only for him to say when I came to him that he just wanted me to sit down and chat with him (for free): delaying my smoke break to go out of my way to see him only for my time to be wasted—pissing me off in the process. I feel incredulous at times at the way men in the space relate to you and how telling it can be in how they relate to themselves. While money isn’t everything, it’s still a job. While my way of relating to people is authentic, it’s still a service that comes with a cost. And money also doesn’t entitle people to have more of me, which can also trigger people’s egos when I maintain boundaries around what I will and won’t do.




I think the image we have of strip clubs being either overly glamourized or stigmatized makes it feel inaccessible to people. Strip clubs can feel like they belong to another time. There’s an aspect of it that feels like stepping into a time capsule—like a novelty in the age of online sex work. These spaces are also becoming few and far between due to municipal zoning restrictions blocking the opening of new establishments.

Even though our society is becoming more open about sexuality and sexual fluidity, I think that we still widely possess rather conservative views on sex. While more people are choosing to express themselves and capitalize from online sex work like OnlyFans, I believe that for people who haven’t healed from internalized shame, increased exposure to this content is revealing wounds and triggers that result in pretty toxic beliefs and behaviours (see: any men’s social commentary podcast).

But online sex work is not without its limitations. From systematic shadowbanning and limiting reach on mainstream social media platforms that prevent content creators from marketing themselves to wider audiences to restrictions around travel and movement due to discrimination against online sex workers (leading to being denied entry or banned from entering some countries), the saturation of online sexual content may give the impression that we’re more accepting about sexual expression as a culture, but the reality is quite different. Especially for marginalized communities. The increase in visibility obscures the fact that structures already in place are becoming more restrictive.

We’re seeing the opening of more and more pole dance studios while traditional strip clubs continue to close down. Zoning laws are also preventing new ones from opening. And don't get me wrong: all expressions of pole dance are valid. But what’s considered acceptable to be expressed in that environment is limited and can, at times, be sex-worker negative (see: the #notastripper movement).




Strip clubs aren’t perfect. They can be patriarchal in their catering to men, and therefore, abuses can occur. I think that current legislation barring the licensing of new establishments prevents strip clubs from evolving. My dream is for the strip club to be a more community-oriented environment that encourages more authenticity and mutual respect at a base level. It has the potential to be the kind of space that celebrates human sexuality and freedom of expression in more authentic, subversive, and humanistic ways. If only we could move past legislative, societal and egoist barriers to demarginalize our sexual being and embrace it as a facet of our human expression that we can communally take joy in without shame—in some ways, queering the strip club.

There’s something already super queer about the strip club to me, even as the target demographic in these spaces are men. The club subverts our ideas around what sex and agency look like against our heteronormative culture. There is no ownership of any woman working in the space. Ultimately, we choose who we dance for; we’re not forced to tolerate disrespect in the ways we may be forced to in other service industry jobs. More than that, we have the freedom to tell them to fuck off. It’s where I’ve learned that, as a queer Asian woman, I can lean into and embrace my full power—no matter what anyone else projects onto me. Rather than shying away from sexual expression, I can move towards it and own it. That, despite how money can grant certain kinds of access, it does not equate to ownership: your sex is yours. It's not something that can be taken away or possessed, even when you choose to share it with others.

I love being a stripper. I love to dance and express myself. It’s why I do what I do. I've always viewed my sexual expression as connected to my artistic expression. They share a root in my feeling of aliveness that informs and feeds into each other. As an artist and a stripper, expressing my connection to myself has always landed for my audiences—and that’s where the value actually lies. I think that modelling self-acceptance and the integration of sexual expression as a facet of our humanity will, as a whole, allow us to tap into the transformative power of empathy and teach us how to better relate to others and find joy as a community without shame.