Strip Club Shenanigans: What did the women look like?

In the introductory post of this series, I mentioned how it was a former friend who convinced me to work at a strip club. There were a couple of reasons why I was hesitant, and one of them was because I did not want to work for an industry that put forth a very specific image of what the "perfect" woman looked like: blonde (European descent, of course), lots of make-up, big breasts (thanks to plastic surgery), and whatever. From my observations and what I have been told, I feel comfortable saying that I am at least reasonably attractive. Over the years, I had learned to accept my face and body for what they are, so if I worked at a strip club, I figured I could get by. I was not worried that my self-esteem would plummet, but that by working at such a place, I would give credence to a very culturally subjective definition of what makes a woman attractive. The friend assured me that the women at strip clubs come in all shapes and sizes, and to prove a point, he brought me to one.

The city I worked in was, at least during the time I was there, one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. I have seen people online say that strip clubs are a good representation of what many women look like (as in they come in an array of body types), except for cities like Las Vegas where the dancers are expected to look a certain way. As I have never been in a strip club outside of Texas, I have no idea about the veracity of those kinds of statements. All I can say was that I was surprised with the variety of women who worked at the club I was at.

Funny enough, many of the advertisements I looked at for this establishment showed the very kind of woman I expected them be full of. I would laugh to myself because there was not a single woman who worked there (of those I had seen) that looked like that. Because of the location, most everybody who worked at the club were Latina/Hispanic. There were a few black dancers. It wasn't very racially diverse. Ya know, I am not even sure if I knew of any white women who worked there - there were a few dancers and waitresses who were ethnically-ambiguous and could have been white, but I'm not sure.

Maybe they just took a white-passing dancer and threw this onto her head.

I have noticed that when traveling, strip clubs and escort services tend to display busty (from implants), white blonde women in their advertisements, but I wonder if that image is representative of their workers. From experiences of my own and from my friends', probably not.

Not only did looks vary at the club, but so did age. I guess I didn't expect (what I thought was) the average age to be so high for dancers - probably in the late-twenties. There was a woman who was probably in her forties (who worked there with her daughter) and was probably the best dancer in the entire joint. Personally, I did not think many of the workers were attractive, and I had some customers complain to me about that. Nevertheless, I didn't observe the more attractive dancers making more money than the lesser attractive ones. (This is a topic for a whole new post.)

One aspect I really liked about working at the strip club was that I got to see women of various body types owning their sexuality. Whether they were young and supple, had recently given birth, or "past" their physical prime, they worked with what they had. As an admirer of the human body, I really liked working somewhere that upheld tenets of body positivity. It wasn't like the cheesy graphics you see on social media, but real life, with real women using their bodies for practical purposes.

My work doesn't support itself! (But one day, I hope it does...)

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