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ReBecca Beguin interviews Jenny Scholten, author of Day Stripper

 

What motivated you or inspired you to write Daystripper? The experience of working as an exotic dancer or the unions entering the dancers workplace? Either/both?

The experience of working as an exotic dancer. I worked at the Lusty Lady Theater, the peep show in San Francisco that was unionized in 1996, for two years. I actually quit to work in a lapdancing place right before the union came in. Since then I've worked in two different lapdancing places in the city, and two in Hawaii. Many of my friends were engaged in sex work of some kind. I knew about stripping and the world of sex work in a way that Carl Hiassen never would. I read Strip Tease and, clearly, he's never been a stripper. What's written about strippers is rarely written by a stripper. The only exception I found, in fiction, is "The G String Murders," by Gypsy Rose Lee.

I'd been reading detective fiction, a genre about crime and the underworld that's dominated by women writers and characters. Most of the women detectives were the type who changed into lower heels and climbed into their sports car before battling the forces of evil somewhere on the other side of the tracks. What about a female detective actually living in the "underworld" that all the crime supposedly comes from? If anything, I thought, the fictional women detectives were even more distanced from that world than male characters. In real life, of course, that world is populated with women, despite the hype that we're soft, weak, and good.

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One of the characters, Peaches, becomes a stripper out of her political idealism. But what would you say a typical background of a stripper would be?

Like Hillary said, it takes a village...such a diverse group of women work as sex workers that no generalizations are possible. Peaches' motivation is not typical. Her father was a Maoist, which is not a typical background for anyone growing up in this country. In reality American strippers' fathers are Republicans or Democrats and money is our motivation.

The different clubs I worked in did seem to attract slightly different groups as dancers. The first place I lapdanced I worked mostly with white women. I'd end up working a shift with twenty blondes. Many of the women there seemed to be exiles from middle-class suburbs, which is what I was, and which describes half of San Francisco's residents.

The next place I worked was known as an Asian club. There were still plenty of dancers there who would have fit in at Club A, above, and there were some Latinas and black women, but about fifty percent of the dancers were Asian: Filipina, Thai, Japanese, Malaysian. Most were immigrants. Some were second or third generation Chinese and lived in San Francisco with their parents. Almost everyone else lived in the East Bay where it's cheaper, and was buying a house, or having kids. Many were studying but more often they were taking a class or two instead of being full-time students, and they were studying cosmetology, for instance, rather than feminist theory, which brings me to the other place in San Francisco where I worked.

I started out at the Lusty Lady Theater, a peep show. The majority of the women working there were in college or grad school. Many were artists, cartoonists, writers. The Lusty Lady billed itself in recruitment ads as a place to "explore your sexuality in a supportive environment". When I was there, management enforced a maniacally rigid Protestant work ethic: if you were one minute late your hourly wage was reduced for weeks, and if you missed a shift your pay was cut in half (these practices were later abolished by the union). To succeed there you pretty much couldn't have kids or a commute that could stall you on the bridge. And it didn't pay enough to attract women who needed to support a family.

So there's no typical stripper background. I can say that successful strippers share, for whatever reason, a willingness to defy everyone who's been telling us since girlhood to close our legs. The reason is usually need for money.

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Peaches exits her dancing career violently, but why do most dancers leave that line of work, and after how long (age and the body sag?)and what do they do next?

I don't actually know that many dancers/sex workers who have completely quit! It's impossible to find another job that pays as well for the part-time hours, so a lot of women do sex work for a long time. I met plenty of women in their forties who were strippers. And I think all of us who have done it keep it in the back of our minds, if money gets tight, we can always go back to stripping.

A few months ago I got a job in HTML production. Of other women I know who are no longer stripping, one is a hospital interpreter, one works in a bike repair shop, one has started a porn website, one's in Physician's Assistant school, one's a high school teacher, one's a prostitute, one works in an instrument factory making harps, one just got laid off from a dot com and is about to have a baby.

I'm sure I know a lot more ex-dancers. I just don't know I know them. It's not on anybody's resume.

Lapdancers leave when they burn out or start making less money. We make less money when our attitude is bad or when we've slipped from the customers' standard of desirability in some other way. It's common for a woman to quit under pressure from a husband or boyfriend. I never heard of a lesbian partner causing her girlfriend to quit dancing.

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There seems to be a definite barrier between being an exotic dancer or a prostitute. How often is the barrier blurred?

Illegalities definitely go on in the "private" booths at lapdancing clubs, hand jobs and blow jobs for the most part. I don't think these were common occurrences in either place I worked. There were massage parlors nearby where customers could go for that sort of thing. Theoretically, dancers get fired for having sex with customers. This never happened. Hand jobs and blow jobs went on with the tacit knowledge of club management. In an orientation video I was forced to watch at one of the places I auditioned, the manager sputters, directly to the camera, "NO HAND JOBS! Okay? NO BLOW JOBS!" But on the subsequent tour I found every booth equipped with family-sized boxes of Kleenex.

A big insult at the lapdancing places I worked at was to be called a whore by the other dancers. What controlled prostitution was dancers shunning women they suspected of going above and beyond the call of duty. The ostracism was usually fierce enough to make the dancer stop her activities or leave. When it came to people "messing with the money" (the dancer willing to have sex would obviously make more than her share), other strippers could be ruthless.

Some lapdancers made a point of distinguishing themselves from "whores." "I may be a dancer, but I'm no whore," was something I heard a few times. At the Lusty Lady, we danced behind glass, so there was no customer contact (why it paid relatively poorly). There, we could keep our self-images squarely non-whore.

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Your protagonist, Aubrey Lyle, makes some sharp observations about the club clientele and how they behave. The tease, the sweat, the smell of stale nonalcoholic beer, the frantic male group excitement is so in-your-face and so well contained by stage distance, flimsy material and the bouncer at Naughtyland. But is cyberporn the wave of the future as another character says? Or is there still a need for the club physicality, the throb of loud music and stobe light, live girls and lapdances? Will it be as lucrative..for the dancers and the owners?

I didn't notice a drop in the number of customers coming to the clubs when the Internet arrived. I think that cyberporn is serving the people who don't want to consume their porn in public (which seems like a sound choice to me) but who still want the illusion of interaction with a woman.

As for the need of club physicality, that would be an interesting question to ask a sex club customer. After working in sex clubs for five years I still don't get the appeal of going to a public place to have some stranger grind on your lap, or, at the Lusty Lady, flash their genitals at you from behind a pane of glass. Most of the men arrive alone and ignore each other. If it's a male rite of passage, it's not a comradely one. But whatever is happening for the customers is enough to keep them coming back.

Though I don't believe men are from Mars, etc., and I think we have more in common as people than we have differences, I do think a tough line of disconnection is symbolized by the lip of a stage between someone dancing naked, and another watching, clothed. Projections fly across it. To customers, I know I'm the depraved whore. I'm the one "gone bad," so they get to feel unashamed, even though they're three feet away and we're participating in the same event. As a dancer, I project too. I endow customers with my aggression, my hypocrisy, the part of me that wants to use others carelessly and just not give a shit.

This kind of drama is probably harder to play over cyberspace. I think live nude girls will be around for a long time to soak these feelings up.

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What are you doing now; interested in; working on? or wish to comment on?

I'm working as a web coder and on the sequel.