Four Books for Understanding the Stripper

As a longtime fan of the profession, I occasionally get curious what stripping is like as work, and how the girls experience it. This is true for more than one reason. At some point, I started to wonder whether there were any good books about the subject. There are of course plenty of books about strippers. Most of them are not good. The following four are ones I found more helpful than average.

First is $pread: The Best of the Magazine That Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution. $pread was a magazine created in NYC by and for sex workers—strippers and others. It ran from about 2005-2010. So this is an insider anthology of sex work from that period. You get everything from personal stories with political analysis to media criticism to practical information. Some of it was of zero interest to me, but more than I expected was enlightening in this or that way, and it had more angles than anything else I looked at. Also, almost everything in it is short and written plainly, so it’s easy to pick up and put down.

Second, Sunshine: The Diary of a Lap Dancer by Samantha Ross is the most helpful tell-all type book by a dancer that I looked at. That isn’t saying a lot. It's a bit unbearable in places, but if you stick with it, you'll get a useful if partial picture of what the girl might think is going on in the interaction with you. Also there are stories about her and her stripper friend having sex in front of a roomful of Marines and that sort of thing. (She worked mostly in Australia. I looked briefly at some well-known American stripper memoirs--Strip City by Lily Burana and Candy Girl by Diablo Cody--but found them less psychologically revealing than Sunshine and therefore more painful to read.)

Dirty Dancing? by Rachela Colosi is a the driest, most academic book on this list. Colosi worked as a lap dancer at the club she studied for two years (in the north of England), then turned that experience into a book-length ethnography. She pays a lot of attention to the dancers' relationships, the culture in the club, customer interactions, motivation, exploitation, empowerment, and the stigmas around the work.

Last is Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers by Bernadette Barton. Barton spent years doing firsthand research in clubs (mostly in the US) and interviewed dancers about why they entered the business, the rewards of being in it, sexuality, relationships, self-esteem, drugs, extras, and what happens as the work gets harder to sustain. It's a rich source of information. If you only read one book about strippers (for educational purposes), this is probably the one I'd recommend.

I realize that reading these sorts of books may not be everyone’s thing. One basic takeaway is unsurprising: as a general rule, strippers are addicted to the money, have a complex psychological relationship to the work, and don’t think much of the club owners or mongers.