I’m not someone easily made uncomfortable by my surroundings. After living in five different places, attending six different schools, and eight different houses in entirely different neighborhoods, I pride myself on having a sort of chameleon effect. Rarely do I enter a space feeling it is too daunting a task to convince the people in it that I too belong there. However, when I cautiously worked my way down the plush carpeted stairs of Teasers Mens [sic] Club in Durham, North Carolina, I entered with an acute sense of the fact that I was a fish out of water. The very name of the establishment makes that perfectly clear. Still, when I make my way to the front desk, I’m well-received. I pay my entry fee and am apologetically assured by the heavy-set man flipping through the bills I’ve just handed him that “more girls will get here, it’s just early”. I’m assuming this to mean girl dancers and not attendees. It’s half past seven, not even an hour into the club opening its doors, on a Tuesday night. The location of the club is bizarre, backdropped by the tell-tale signs of a rapidly gentrifying Southern city: a brightly colored ice cream shop, a Spanish tapas bar, a shiny new performing arts center where a medical student in residence at Duke might bring a date to see Hamilton. 

A blonde woman sits on a sofa, in a black dress, scrolling through her phone while I take a seat with the rest of my party. The club is surprisingly small, and so far we’re the only guests. We order drinks at the bar from another woman. It’s immediately clear to me this is not the type of club you hear about in rap songs. Music is playing over the speakers, and lights flitter across the stage, but the stage is empty. Slowly, more women begin to float into the space. They wear leggings and sweatshirts, with long hair piled into messy buns. They carry enormous, wheeling train cases. Some of them even have suitcases. They skirt behind us backstage, not making eye contact.

A voice interrupts the music, extremely muffled like a pilot’s announcement on an airplane, but one word comes out clearly, “May”. The same blonde woman from earlier is off of the sofa and onstage now, wearing the same black dress from earlier that looks eerily similar to one I had worn to a fraternity formal only a few months prior. Seeing one just like it in a very different context, I’m beginning to rethink that choice, while also clinging to anyway I can level myself with the women I’ll meet as the night goes on. 

“I'm a, I'm a, I'm a cool girl, I'm a, I'm a cool girl Ice cold, I roll my eyes at you, boy”

Are the lyrics that pour from the speaker as “May” does what I can only describe as a slow, sultry strut around the stage that for the most part reads as disinterested. Meanwhile, my cousin (and journalistic partner for the evening, mostly against her will) and I are frantically googling things like, “strip club etiquette” or “how much do I tip a stripper?” followed by, “is it rude to stick money in a stripper’s underwear or is that what you’re supposed to do?”.

From the time I learned what I a stripper was- oddly enough I remember clearly when this was- during a televised Britney Spears performance at an awards show- I must have been nine or ten. My mom, in equal parts harsh condemnation and jealousy, remarked, “She looks like a stripper!”. My idea of who and what strippers were would continue to evolve via my parents, with the phrase, “She’s bound to end up in therapy- or on the pole!” frequently slipping out when they disapproved of how their peers parented their teenage daughters. Strippers, as far as I knew, were failed experiments: grown women spawned from meth addictions and trailer parks. Not-nice girls from not-nice families who got themselves into not-nice situations.

This became more complicated when I discovered the internet, spending hours scrolling over Tumblr or the online version of Tavi Gevinson’s publication, Rookie Mag. Suddenly an entirely different narrative was being pushed upon me: strippers weren’t dumb or broke, and they sure as hell weren’t oppressed. They were just masters of a system that demanded their bodies be commodified. In lieu of belonging to a pimp or a club, they belonged to themselves. And once you own something, it’s yours to sell. Women who think they’re better because of the fact that they sleep with guys and dress like sluts for free are the idiots- why do that for free when you can make a buck? Either way, you’re an object.

Both of these narratives to me seemed deeply flawed. Initially, I felt I didn’t have a dog in the fight, and felt it was my job to fight for women in sex work. It seemed like the edgier, more cutting-edge feminist option. But over time, armed with a stronger sense of my own femininity and body capital, I began to question if that really made sense. 

I entered Teasers that night expecting to walk away with a clear answer. My experience would either confirm my suspicions that exotic dancing set up a problematic power dynamic between men and women or prove me to be the arrogant, middle-class white girl with antiquated politics. I wasn’t just seeking an experience or something shock-worthy to bring back to my liberal arts college nearly 500 miles up the road- I was seeking a feminist revelation. 

After finishing her performance, May sits at the bar, making small talk with the bartender. The club is still practically empty, and she looks just as confused as to what her next step is as I am. I sit next to her and we begin to cover the basics. She grew up in Tennessee and started dancing as soon as she turned eighteen. 

“I knew when I was still in high school that this was what I was gonna do,” she explains. “All of my friends who had graduated already were doing it. I just kind of knew.” I press her, asking if she ever had any other considerations, career-wise. I’m desperately trying to avoid patronizing her in doing so, I’m just genuinely curious. She tells me she used to be really into welding, “but that’s more of a hobby. You can’t make as much money”. The most interesting thing about May is that she’s only been at Teasers for a week. “I was at one of the really big clubs in Raleigh, called Men’s Club. It’s a chain, you’ve probably seen one before. I hated it. All the other girls sell cocaine. Like, the guys come in pretending to be clients but they’re there for the drugs. I had so many guys ask me for cocaine and I’m like, ‘No, I’m just here to dance’. So I had to leave”. 

Two more women join, resting against the bar. They both hold cups full of hot, black coffee, which sticks out as odd amongst the orders of spirits and cold beers. They’re both sipping with hands clutched tightly around their mugs. “Is that from Victoria’s Secret?” I ask the peppier, younger looking one, pointing to her chest. 

“Yeah, it is! I got it on sale!” she exclaims. 

“Me too! I have the same one,” I chirp back. Girl talk. We shift gears and I learn both women have been in their line of work for roughly ten years. One of them is a transplant from Elizabeth, New Jersey with thick eyelashes and dark circles under her eyes that remind me of my own. She came to North Carolina in hopes of a safer, more clean-cut environment, similar to May. 

“I don’t just do this, though,” the woman from New Jersey says to me, “I do makeup and hair.” I can tell. She’s fully glammed up.

 I laugh and say, “I couldn’t do hair to save my life. I’m alright at makeup, but hair isn’t happening.” They both laugh. 

“No, your makeup looks good,” she says, earnestly. Like I said, girl talk. “But besides dancing, and makeup and hair, I take care of my son.” The mood shifts. 

“How old?” I ask. 

“Eight.” 

“Does he know what you do for a living?” 

“No, he doesn’t.”

It is in these and other conversations at Teasers that I find a common thread: no one seems to particularly mind dancing, but they would all rather be doing something else. One woman describes the process of becoming a dancer as including “jumping hurdles”. She describes these hurdles as telling family and friends that she’s begun dancing, working bizarre hours, including a 30-minute commute, eating dinner and taking a shower because it’s “impossible to not want to shower after dancing, you feel gross” that has her winding up in bed around 4:00 am. It’s the irresistible pay that makes jumping these hurdles doable. When I ask one woman, “Is the money really as good as everyone says it is?” she answers curtly, “It’s better”. 

After a lengthy conversation with one woman about her still relatively short career dancing, breaking the news to her Evangelical Christian parents and her degree from North Carolina State in Environmental Engineering that hasn’t gotten her any work, she still asks me if I’d like a lap dance. I politely decline. This is the closest I will get all night to the feminist revelation I sought after: realizing that as much as this has to do with gender it has to do with class. I was younger and significantly less wise than the women who danced at this club, but I had money to get in, and I had money to effectively own someone’s attention for the evening. In an essay in the journal, Gender and Society, Mary Nell Trautner describes exotic dance clubs similarly, writing “Strip clubs construct forms of sexuality that are not only gendered but also distinctively classed” (772). While Teasers is not a space specifically carved out for me, it is not one that can deny me, either, so long as I am willing to pay. After all, that is really all that stands between me and the women who were onstage that night. 

There was no revelation or set answer tied up in a bow placed in my lap that evening. What I discovered was so much more nuanced: being a stripper doesn’t make you any more or less of a feminist. I do think it is a job that comes with more baggage than most- the proverbial hurdles described to me. But it’s not the act of dancing itself that should be demonized, it’s the systems in place that leave women without any other options to turn to.