tuscl

A sad, but common, strip club tale

DickJohnson
Illinois
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 3:50 PM
There is a dancer at a club I go to that I have known for about 4 yrs. This was her second job in life, at the time I met her she was only 18. She was pretty green when she first started and I liked that about her. Very attractive, sweet in some ways. I never gave her much money ever, but she always dropped by to say hello whenever she saw me. Recently we started talking on the phone, she asked for my phone number and started to call to talk about anything. I never really felt the desire to call her, I find the conversations boring and frustrating because she can go over and over the same things. nevertheless, i will talk to her if she calls and did come to have a caring heart for her because she is so lost in some ways. When I first met her she was just an innocent 18yr. old girl with no life experiences in careers or hardly any with men, just too young for much of that. Now, 4 yrs. later the skills she has acquired from working at the SC aren't too impressive. She is a great and effective manipulator. She knows what to say to a man when to say it in order to maximize her money gains. She is a prolific liar, I really don't know what to believe is true or not with most of what she tells me. She has absolutley no use for morals. She does extras ITC and meets customers OTC. She makes sure she gets maximum mileage out of a guy first before anything like that happens. Her drug use has gotten her into trouble but she still loves to do them. It's just really sad. Maybe if she had taken a different job 4 yrs ago she would be somebody else. she is responsible for who she is, but this is what the SC scene may do to a young girl. I have confronted her about much of this and she was contrite and listened, but she apparently has no interest in change.

23 comments

  • gk
    •
    16 years ago
    Re 'it's sad.' I'm convinced that strippers in general (I'm sure there are many exceptions) choose to do what they do because of three things: 1) they live in "the moment" and can't make long-range plans for themselves or their families. (There are exceptions to this, but they eventually leave the business.) 2) Most don't have a decent/well-employed/or educated man in their lives. 3) or, they are supporting a drug habit. (It used to be that many were working their way through school, but that has changed so much that I now believe it's statistically insignificant.) Change one or more of the above variables and their lives change vary quickly. Now, we all benefit from this. So, is it sad--not really, it's just reality and they are simply trying to make a living. What's sad is if they don't have a Plan B or if people like us don't remind them to get one.
  • jablake
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    16 years ago
    Unfortunately, I think it is too common. So do you protect the weaker members of society at the expense of other people's freedoms. For example, many people love beer and it is probably even a health food believe it or not! :) For other people it leads to total destruction. I believe many people would think Singapore is an ideal, but it is very unappealing to me what little I learned about.
  • gk
    •
    16 years ago
    It's a fine line we walk between fun and philosophical!
  • David9999
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    16 years ago
    As you've stated "She is a great and effective manipulator. She knows what to say to a man when to say it in order to maximize her money gains. She is a prolific liar" I find that even true with dancers who are not into drugs, and it seems to a large extent more connected to their longevity in the business and knowing what works and what works over a number of years. What I've found even more interesting, is that many of these lies seem to operate on a subconscious basis, i.e they don't even know they're lying half the time. Now admittedly its not unusual for people in the sales related fields in general to follow this same trend, an example would be real estate agents, especially some of the more sucessful ones, the difference being that real estate agents get no benefit by romantic or sexual manipulations of clients, whereas with strippers we're dealing with a very unique profession.
  • chitownlawyer
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    16 years ago
    None of this is new. See the novel, _Maggie, A Girl of the Streets_, by Theodore Dreiser, which came out in about 1915, and discusses the transformation of an innocent Iowa farm girl into a hardened sex worker in Chicago. To quote another ancient, once-respected source of authority, "There is nothing new under the sun."
  • DandyDan
    •
    16 years ago
    I had a long conversation about this (amongst other things) with one of my current favorites in my most recent trip to my favorite club. She says she likes dancing, but there are things she'd do over, and one of those was not get fired from the fast food job she had immediately before becoming a dancer. She wonders what would happen if she suddenly decided she didn't want to dance anymore, because it's not like you learn anything.
  • ozymandias
    •
    16 years ago
    Why does everyone assume it's the job that messes the dancer up. Really, if you think about it, a girl has to be pretty fucked up from the get-go to seek out a job where she dances completely nude for strange men, up to and including grinding her pussy on their laps. While dancing may have exacerbated her problems, I can promise she'd have been a messed up drug user anyway. In fact - and this may sound surprising - the VAST majority of fucked-up, drug using sluts with a history of abusive boyfriends in fact are NOT dancers... they are receptionists, cashiers, waitresses at Chilis, maybe even sometimes attorneys and professors. Stripping doesn't create "bad girls" - it's the other way around! O.
  • ozymandias
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    16 years ago
    Oh, and before you lament the poor girl, bear in mind that if it weren't for girls being messed up drug users and the like - there'd be precious little available in the way of high-mileage, ITC/OTC dancers available for your pleasure. It's the bright side of a dark cloud. O.
  • ShotDisc
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    16 years ago
    the lindsey lohan story, if she wasn't famous.
  • quimby
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    16 years ago
    It seems pretty clear that the two things that you need to improve your odds of finding a good niche in life are: A) A family support structure to show you how life works (and) B) Some sort of support or grubstake to get you an education or profession. If you don't have either of these, the odds are stacked against you. (What do you think Lindsey Lohan or Paris Hilton would be w/o the constant familial propping up, or w/o money ?? )
  • FONDL
    •
    16 years ago
    I think that strip clubs create two related problems for a lot of young girls: the constant pressue to lower their morals, and the prevalance of drug use in most clubs. The combination can destroy the life of a young girl who doesn't have much of a postive self image and just goes along with the crowd. Which sadly is most of them. That's the dark side of strip clubs and one obvious reason why so many people are opposed to them. It's a valid concern that we shouldn't ignore.
  • FONDL
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    16 years ago
    Incidently, my ATF was heading down this path, but she had enough sense to quit dancing before she got in too deep and lost control. But she's also much more intelligent than most dancers. Many of them aren't that fortunate.
  • Clubber
    •
    16 years ago
    So, would the uncommon tale be my ATF? She didn't drink, do drugs, nor waste her money. Now she is under 30 and pretty much set for life with her portfolio.
  • elmalo
    •
    16 years ago
    well thats part of the game and its the girl that decides what path to take
  • Book Guy
    •
    16 years ago
    Funny how people are flinging about the word "morals" without really defining it. Makes ya wanna go "hmmmmmm" ...
  • emmy7
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    16 years ago
    I cringe at the idea of if I'd started dancing at 18. I didn't start dancing until 22, and wow, what a world of wisdom that can be had in 5 years. That aside, environment is SO important, and unfortunately, I notice that a lot of dancers come from a such a background that makes me wonder whether dancing has a damn thing to do with their poor lives. I mean, the dancers who walk in with it "together" are the ones who tend to walk out "together". I truly believe that the dancer you referred to would be doing all the toxic stuff given any opportunity to do it, whether a stripper or not.
  • Book Guy
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    16 years ago
    Yeah, the five years between 18 and 22 are really ... umm ... amazingly wisdomful. :^)
  • FONDL
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    16 years ago
    I agree with Emmy - for a lot of these girls it's not dancing in clubs that makes them screwed up, it's the fact that they're all screwed up that leads them to become dancers. And I think there's often a huge difference in maturity between 18 and 22.
  • Clubber
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    16 years ago
    As BG noticed, apparently wisdom and mathematics are not compatible.
  • Book Guy
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    16 years ago
    I guess I should have said there was a lot of wisdomification going on in that decadeness.
  • Slothrop
    •
    16 years ago
    I'm not finding the type of loser girls mentioned thus far in threads like this one. Maybe it's just the way I'm picking them out or something, but the strippers I'm finding seem to be confident, self-assured and strong...usually college-aged who have a good take on what they're doing and why. They're paying their bills, buying cars and houses and have established relationships with guys with careers. For the most part, in my experience -- I tend to pick only the most beautiful, sexually alluring dancers and skip everything else. Also, it's hypocritical to judge strippers as hopeless losers without taking a good look at the mirror: what are you doing in a strip club with an attitude like that?
  • FONDL
    •
    16 years ago
    Slothrop, I think you can find both kinds of dancer in most clubs. I too try to avoid the really screwed up ones, but they always seem to be around. It probably also depends on the nature of the club you go to, some clubs seem to attract more of the really screwed up ones than do others. If the club can afford to be picky, they probably get rid of the messed-up girls. Other clubs don't have that luxury because they have trouble attracting enough girls to fill their roster, especially if they're in an area where there are a lot of clubs nearby.
  • Book Guy
    •
    16 years ago
    Interesting point, though, about the Darwinian situation, Slothrop. If you're interacting with the most self-assured and competent of women in a given population of strippers, and with the most visually appealing women in a given club, then which comes first? Are beautiful people more likely to have their acts together? Or are people with their acts together more likely to appear beautiful, or more likely to be the most beautiful of a given club-ful of strippers?
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