The Life of a Stripper
» Professionals
Success - in the more comprehensive sense that you feel good about it as well as prosper financially - in sexually themed work depends much on the psychology of the individual worker of performer. If you have too deep an attachment to societal norms it will damage you with guilt.
And there’s the complicated juggling act of trying to maintain a relationship with family and friends who simply cannot understand.
Sociologist Bernadette Barton has written Stripped: Inside The Lives Of Exotic Dancers an examination of the lives and status of women who work in strip clubs.
“Imagine,” Barton says of the second camp’s theory, “you are standing on a stage, being told you are beautiful and making a lot of money doing it. That’s empowering for some girls.”
She also found that dancers usually harbor a sense of guilt and remove themselves from friends and family.
“At first they are vague to mom and dad and their friends,” Barton says. “Eventually mom will get suspicious about the lack of boyfriends or girlfriends and the amount of money they seem to have without a job.”
Exotic dancing comes with a lot of psychological baggage such as impossible expectations of beauty, parents’ and friends’ disapproval, sexual double standards, and being insulted by clients. Barton says she found the closer a dancer examines the negative baggage, the more likely she will be able to cope and even prosper in the sex industry.
Barton calls this developing a “critical perspective,” which is nurtured by other dancers at the clubs, and is a survival response common to other marginalized groups such as gays and lesbians, and soldiers in combat situations.
