I keep meaning to write a real intro to this blog and it keeps not happening. It’s at least got to semi start somewhere, so let’s start with a little bit of what it turns out is now technically internet history: the golden age of blogs…
I started working at my first club at the age of 19 in 2007 in a small town (obviously there is more to this story but that’s not where we’re starting today). Stripping tends to be somewhat less isolating than other parts of the industry, but even when you have your friends at the club it’s kind of an isolating gig where people will enable partners who depend on you to pay their bills while fucking around as they please and treating you poorly and your built in work friends can also be their own bubble of both toxic behaviors and strange judgement of in exactly what ways it is acceptable to use substances or get naked for money.
In many ways, I started in an industry that was already decline. Older girls swore the money wasn’t as good as it was a few years before, gentrification policies were starting the slow financial squeeze and city cleanup projects that have ultimately closed many of the more accessible legal workplaces available to us, and we were on the cusp of the first major economic downturn that has set the tone for an adulthood in a climate where income precarity in almost every industry is the one constant we can always plan on. But we also had the sex worker blogs.
2009 and the housing market crash found me working in another college town about an hour away from my home town and home club. True to the nature of times where money in the club is thin, dancers were getting fired for acting out against cheap customers and one of them managed to get her blog out to us on her way out the door and through her page (and another page recommended by a boyfriend angling for threesomes that would later be outed as some creep pretending to be blogging as an escort) I suddenly had access to read about dancers club hopping across the country, dancers working in other states, people working in other parts of the industry, and sex worker art and organizing. Many of those bloggers would go on to found Tits and Sass, a collection of writing that has been a key educational point for over a decade of writers, artists, and organizers in the sex industry.
That club along with the blogs was also a somewhat idyllic time in my work life. After the initial slow times starting at that club during the housing market crash, I spent 3 years making the best money I have made in my 16 years in the industry. The group of us who commuted/carpooled the hour there and back had that time to discuss our work tactics and philosophies, our labor rights, and to collectively dream about what our work spaces could look like.
(I was mostly a reader of blogs since when I tried to start my own a friend of my boyfriend who liked to yell at me until I cried about work found it and told him about it so it got shut down pretty quickly after 2 or 3 posts, so it wasn’t all money and fun then either.)
Of course, that time in history and my relationship with club work has changed significantly in the decade between now and then. The club in my hometown was closed and bought out by a mega church. The club I had commuted to a decade later had hiked their fees to over a hundred dollars a shift and were telling even very slender women they needed to tone up (they would not hire me back), the other club in that town that did hire a more diverse range of bodies closed within a year of me starting there, and now that I live in the southern part of the state where the one club in this town has shut down choices in clubs involve at minimum another hour commute and the options of a corporate owned high fee club, one that requires an agonizing process of a series of auditions and denials on their amateur night, and a third that appears to hire only very small women.
At this time, I have a 40 hour full time job that is in a field I enjoy but consistently falls just short of covering my household expenses and I supplement my income with a handful of online content subscribers and the occasional independent client after a tour through most parts of the industry after losing access to reliable club work. I often miss the club but I know I don’t miss the reality of what trying to make a living working full time in the club or in independent sex work in the terrain of our industry post covid, I miss a time and place both on my life and in the industry that doesn’t exist anymore.
That’s not to say we aren’t busting our asses in other ways to try to support ourselves and our overall community that’s increasingly being backed into a financial and legal corner over the course of the past decade. Our social media posts read like a secret code between the words social media flags us for and the risk of surveillance and the character limits leave us saying the same short catch phrases and tired, censored rhetoric over and over again. We can’t be a whole person where our family can see us, we have to be an entirely different cross section of a persona where our employers and funders can see us, and yet another where our clients can see us.
I know it’s also a symptom of reaching middle adulthood, but I find myself increasingly reflecting on what was still an imperfect but much simpler time where the internet wasn’t so hostile to adult content and the language we use to describe our lives and our work, where it was possible to make a decent living working in one part of the industry a few days a week without a diversity of income streams and a 24/7 online hustle, and before our workplaces and advertising platforms started being shut down in quick succession. Those times weren’t easy by any means and the only real way through any of this is major systemic change, but we have to get through it somehow and bringing back a flash from the past form of online communication while trying to find some kind of a consistent online hustle and trying out all of the new tactics I’ve been avoiding feels like a relatively harmless way to indulge in that sense of nostalgia, so here we are!
