A New Expression of the Oldest Profession

A few months ago I was meeting some friends at a bar. I arrived first and sat down to order a drink. A stunningly beautiful woman next to me takes a shot of tequila. I see she is by herself and note that it is 7pm. I asked her why she is taking solo shots at this hour. She laughs and says she is getting ready to go to work. With that I immediately knew what her line of work was.

The more we talked the more fascinated I became. I peppered her with questions: how much does she cheat on her taxes, what are the highest spending client demographics, what are the profit-share rules between her and the club, what are her thoughts on the industry facing a slow death due to Onlyfans.

I know strippers spend all day answering the same repetitive questions so I tried to be original. She was brilliant and had a politician's way of making you feel like you are the most interesting man on earth. I had to see her again. My friends arrived and she left for work but I got Ms. X’s phone number.

There is such an allure to dating a stripper in pop culture. Countless rap songs wax poetically on the topic. But it is not new phenomenon, in the bible God commands the prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute. Every man in pursuit of a stripper knows he is being a fool. But sometimes you have to trust your gut and disregard the facts. We are not Vulcans after all.

Why is dating people who work in or around sex work seen as scandalous? Does dancing topless on a pole qualify as cheating? The French and their nude beaches might disagree. What about giving a lap dance? Nothing will enrage a man more that seeing his girlfriend touching another man in a sexual way. This is so well known it’s codified in the legal system. Murderers get lower prison sentences if their offense is considered a crime of passion.

What if it’s not touching but just showing? Strict muslims take this exposure aspect quite seriously. Other men aren’t even allowed to see their wife’s face. But your average western christian man doesn’t seem to have a problem with other people seeing their wives in thong bathing suits on the beach.

I have never understood why guys like to go to strip clubs. I told Ms. X I didn’t really like lap dances she replied that “you just haven’t had a good one yet.” I was more than willing to give her the chance to prove this.

I am fascinated that many men pay large sums of money to talk to, sit by, and occasionally be danced on by young beautiful women that have no genuine interest in them. I have been to a handful of strip clubs in my life. Lap dances have always seemed awkward to me. They make me feel like Ricky Bobby, what am I supposed to do with my hands?

The line between prostitution and stripping is a fascinating one. The United States federally imposed strict regulations on prostitution in 1910, basically making it illegal to operate across state lines. All states had individually banned prostitution by 1970, except of course for Nevada where it is still legal today.

In stripping it seems to me you are paying outrageous sums of money to just be teased a lot. The more you pay the more frustrated you get. Whether you are there just to watch the girls can the stage, get a lap dance on the floor, or get a private dance upstairs. I don’t think American men of a hundred of years ago would have frequented establishments like the ones we have today.

Ms. X and I had the classic conversation about how much money would someone have to pay you to have sex with them. Her position on this topic was resolute. No amount of money would be enough. Most people I have had this conversation with will readily name a large number. Some will even quite honestly go with a reasonable one. This is a woman who isn’t shy to admit a myriad other questionable things she has done in life. So why was she so firm in her position on this issue?

I imagine it’s because for her, unlike the rest of us, this is not a pure hypothetical. She is bombarded every night with men asking her to go back to their hotel rooms and promising obscene amounts of money. In the moment this money can sound convincing so you have to make up your mind beforehand.

I’m reminded of the old George Bernard Shaw quote:

A man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him if he pays her an exorbitant sum. She replies affirmatively. He then names a paltry amount and asks if she would still be willing to sleep with him for the revised fee. The woman is greatly offended and replies “what kind of woman do you think I am?” The man says in response “we’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

Ms. X told me about a time she was giving a younger guy a private dance. He started to choke her and she couldn’t push him off and was starting to black out. She was laughing while recounting this story. She excused it by saying he was young and inexperienced. She was however furious at the security guy who instead of checking the camera feeds was scrolling on his phone. Turns out those private rooms aren’t so private after all.

She had a regular wealthy client who would pay 10 girls for simultaneous private dances. At $350 per half hour per girl this really adds up. But she said they would stay up there for hours just sitting in a circle talking and playing games. The guy never wanted a dance, he just wanted to hangout with pretty girls for a while.

She mentioned how it’s become far more popular for couples to go to strip clubs together. She told me that when giving a dance to a couple if one of them gets up to go to the bathroom the guy would launch into a tirade about how he hates his wife. While if the guy went to the bathroom the woman would immediately get inappropriately physical. This seemed almost too ironic to believe.

I had never dated a girl who did not have a college degree. This girl hadn’t even finished high school. She dropped out after freshman year and worked hostessing and waitressing jobs to help her family get by. She took up stripping at 18 and had been at it for 7 years.

Despite this I never thought she was uneducated. I’m nerdier than your average white-collar white guy and she always had interesting answers to my questions and posed fascinating ones herself. She was a prolific reader, stripping allows for a lot of free time during the day. They often have trouble making friends outside of the girls they work with.

Onto some facts for the quantitatively curious. An average shift for her in the club was from 8pm to 4am and her average earnings was around $800 per night. But she often had “good” nights which were 2–3k. She worked only 3–4 night per week on average. But the key, as in so many professions, is to find your whale. Some rich and naive client who spends thousands in short order and just keeps coming back with more. Where is a Russian oligarch’s son when a girl needs one?

How was this revenue shared with the proprietor of the establishment? She had worked at a few strip clubs and claimed the present one was representative. The club roughly takes 20%: $10 for a standard $50 lap dance. This was up for negotiation of course, but the club’s fee was not. Rolex wearing clients are sure to pay more. During the lap dance you pitch the customer on a private dance. The private dance is $350 dollars for 30 minutes and takes place in a private room upstairs with free alcohol. She said around half of the clients who pay for a private dance shell out for a subsequent 30 minutes.

The most well known image of a stripper is one dancing on a pole while doing a strip tease. This directly generates a paltry sum of earnings but is a good way to advertise your wares. The specifics here are interesting. You start a circuit and dance for two songs on each pole in the club. On busier nights where more rooms are open this can mean dancing on 4–5 poles in a row for 20–30 minutes. This is followed by a rest period of a few hours depending on the number of girls working. As a fan of high intensity interval training this seems like an optimal set up for peak cardiovascular performance.

She said the hardest part of being a stripper is the same as any customer facing service industry job. Fielding the same monotonous questions over and over again without losing your mind. What’s your name? No, what’s your real name? Where are you from? How did you get into this line of work? You’re too pretty to be a stripper what are you doing here? What’s your plan to get out? How much for you to come back to my hotel room?

But despite being both disgusted and bored a lot of the time you have to maintain a constant front of interest. This is what men want more than anything. You have to make the client believe you haven’t had an identical conversation 10 times that night, 40 times that week, and 10 thousand times over the last 7 years.

Her exit plan was not to go to med school or law school. She wanted to open a “micro-bakery.” Her one selling point here is that she didn’t want a large retail space where people “buy a coffee and sit for hours.” Outside of this single strategic insight and the fact that she enjoyed baking in her personal time her business plan wasn’t too well thought out.

I never got a concrete number on how much she had saved up but she was 25 and had been stripping for 7 years. If you assume an average night of $1500, to account for 1 in 5 nights being a good night, and the fact that she worked 4 shifts a week that would add up to $300,000 annual salary. she told me her earnings were less. If she had been saving half or more of this salary she could be well on her way to an early retirement. It says something stark about society that a beautiful woman in her 20s can make multiples of what that same woman would make 20 years later with a doctorate.

She was recently single. She ended a 6 year relationship with her musician ex-boyfriend 2 months before. During their relationship she paid for most things and she occasionally sent money to family members who were struggling. From my conversations with her it seems that most strippers have boyfriends who are starving artists types. The girlfriend pays for most everything. This is one benefit of dating a woman who any man in town can get a lap dance from, some of their spending indirectly accrues to you. She did say a few of her fellow strippers had married high earning men they met in the club. Doctors, pilots, and executives who fell in love with some young sweet thing.

She told me about a regular conversation that strippers have with their starving artist boyfriends. Some evenings in a fit of jealously the man will say “don’t go in baby, I can’t bear the thought of you working tonight.” Then a week later when they are dead broke he will be begging her to go back to work. If there is one thing that erases dignity, it is poverty.

Stripping is a dying industry. Attendance which was already on a steady decline fell markedly during covid. Many of the strip clubs on bourbon street have been shuttered. Younger men do not frequent them the same way their fathers did. Today they have much have much easier access to porn and other online distractions. Many strippers pivoted to Onlyfans during the lockdowns. Some made astronomically more money but most did not.

Stripping is a field with highly stratified financial outcomes. But put sex work online it really becomes a winner take all market. The top 1% of only fans creators took home 33% of the $13 billion the site made in 2023. the top 10% took 73% of it. Like mom-and-pop retailers battling Amazon eventually the internet comes for all of us.

Ms. X was wholeheartedly opposed to pivoting to Onlyfans. She didn’t want to expose her grandchildren to that. One time when we were at a bar we ran into a couple of guys who recognized her from a Christmas party at her club and had revealing photo of her. She was quite embarrassed by this. She told me that she hates when guys film and take pictures in the club. There is obviously a policy against this but you can’t catch everyone.

In past relationships I could get jealous at times. If my girlfriend and I were out somewhere and we ran into her ex, or if she was telling some story that involved her ex, the sting of jealously would strike. Time and experience have a way of numbing you to these things.

I think she saw me as a potential long term dating partner. She would ask me the typical screening questions a stripper asks like: Are you the jealous type? She would say outlandish things to see how I would react. I think it takes a very special kind of a guy to get over the social stigma around being in a relationship with a stripper.

She was violent. She would hit me for an off-color remark, often harder than a playful hit. I think it’s a reflex that naturally gets ingrained when you are around aggressive drunk men on a regular basis.

She offered to pay for everything and I sometimes let her. I was raised that the man is supposed to pay. I only let her pay 20–30% of the time, This is roughly my standard for romantic entanglements. This was my first time dating a woman who made more than me, maybe I should have taken advantage but I am a foolishly proud man.

She was frugal. She drove an old beat up Hyundai and rented a small two bedroom duplex. Her spending habits did not appear to be lavish, no designer bags or clothes. You often hear strippers are terrible with money but she was not.

We live in an era where the relations between the sexes is at a low point. I had assumed that most strippers see this job as a way of getting revenge on the patriarchy. But she said no, most girls really do like most of their regulars.

One thing that shocked me is that most men paying for private dances are not necessarily well off, they are just average guys with average jobs. Most are spending their last dollar in the club for just a few minutes of attention from these beautiful women. Such is the desire to be near beauty.

Ms. X said that most men want two things in a stripper: blond and big boobs. Some of these blond bombshells can make 5–10k per night. She was a petite black girl and made far less but she never seemed bitter about it. To me she was one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever met.

I did consider seriously dating her. She is a high earner, has no student loan debt, and her parents are still together. She is on no prescription drugs and uses no recreational drugs. She was in amazing shape. She was funny and I loved just listening to her talk.

I played the whole fantasy out in my head. We fall in love and plan her exit strategy. She strips for only a few more years to build her bankroll up to a point where she can quit and start the bakery. We apply for an LLC and restaurant licensing permits. We get the bakery up and running. I teach her about tax write-offs and she teaches me how to laminate dough for the perfect croissant. We get married, have 4 kids, and live happily ever after. But alas it could not be.