Dressing in 6-inch high heels and wearing revealing outfits, some female students are not getting ready to attend a Halloween house party.
Instead, two students at the University of Wyoming don expensive lingerie and shoes to work as exotic dancers – commonly referred to as “strippers” – in the Wyoming and Colorado area to earn their tuition money.
Photo: Edward Timmons. A dancer and customer at the Cheyenne based club "The Den."
“I’ve been doing this for 5 months now,” Suzan, a theatre major at UW, said. “I couldn’t afford school anymore and so I was working every day of the week and it was not cutting it close at all for what I needed for school and I was like ‘[screw] it’ and…I googled strip clubs.”
While both students were willing to go on the record under their stage names, for the purpose of avoiding any potential recognition, their names have been changed to “Suzan” and “Fiona.”
Fiona, a math major at the university, discovered her interest in the profession through a different route.
“I went to Amsterdam with a former boyfriend and participated in an amateur [stripping] night while we were there,” Fiona said. “It was a lot of
fun and I thought ‘I can do this back home. It would be great.’”
Sex work is often subject to stigmatization and stereotyping, depicting those working in the exotic dance industry as “whores” or worse.
“It is a reality that some women see sex work as a form of liberation,” Susan Dewey, assistant professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, said.
Dewey, who wrote the book “Neon Wasteland” on her research with topless dancers, works with a group called Sex Workers Outreach Program, which works with sex workers in the Denver area.
Dispelling stereotypes, Dewey teaches classes on sex work on campus. She defines sex work as a continuum and a form of labor, she said.
“Think of sex work as a continuum ranging from complete choice to complete coercion. The reality is that many men and women who engage in sex work are somewhere in the middle,” she said.
Dewey referred to sex worker activist Carol Leigh who defined sex work as a liberating force in her life and a feminist choice “to use her body in a way that’s very empowering,” she said.
While money was a motivating factor to the two UW students, they said that dancing became about more than the monetary value.
“I think I’ve always been this, we’ll call it open-minded, person and stripping is nice because I meet girls who are just like me,” Fiona said. “Before, I was the crazy one of all my friends. I was more open-minded than they were and I was like ‘yeah, I’ll do that.’ And now, when you’re stripping, you meet girls who are exactly like you are.”
The dynamic of dancers both on stage and behind the scenes is one of camaraderie and competition.
“There is definitely a line of seniority that is respected beyond all believe,” Suzan said. “You don’t [mess] with this line.”
“When I was a new girl, you would not talk unless spoken to,” she said.
And while both girls had to earn their spots among the other dancers, the customers presented their own rewards and challenges.
“What’s funny is that I’m super confident, but the way I was raised I always have had some self-confidence issues,” Suzan said. “After working [as a dancer] those all went away, because you are dancing for 9 hours a day [and] you have people telling you how beautiful you are all the time.”
When it comes to dancing on stage and during private sessions, the dancers have full control, the students said. Any physical contact is only initiated by the dancers, or with consent of the dancers, giving them a high level of control over the customers.
But there are also “the creepers, the 50s, 60s – the truckers,” Fiona said.
“A guy comes in, gets a soda and tells me to tell him how much I love taking my clothes off. I get a lot of those,” she said. “Lots of guys … all they want to do is talk about sex and what they would do to me and blah, blah, blah, but they buy lap dance after lap dance so you say, ‘Yeah baby.’”
While both students work at establishments that have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to prostitution, or “hooking,” both said it does happen.
“Some girls do make that leap,” Fiona said. “Maybe 10 percent of the girls make that leap at some point.”
Both said that they have never engaged in the act or would ever want to.
“I mean we are in the sex industry, but there is different positions within that,” Fiona said. “We are not porn stars. I don’t know if I could ever do porn. And definitely no hooking.”
Work can follow the students home in other ways. One example is when dancers become so familiar with certain customers that they become their “regulars.” Customers will ask dancers for their phone numbers, to which dancers ask the customers to leave their numbers with the bar tender. When dancers feel comfortable enough to exchange numbers, they then have the option to text or call the customer.
“Regulars are a lot of work. So much work,” Fiona said. “Most expect you to call or text them on a daily basis.”
The benefit of keeping such relationships with regulars come in the form of more security in pay.
“If you’re having a slow night, you can text your regular ‘come see me’ and you make $500 that night,” Fiona said.
She said that the line between a relationship with a regular and a romantic relationship can become blurry.
“It’s a fine line, because a lot of the girls that are single meet guys in there and they become their boyfriend. It’s a grey area,” she said. “If you want to keep it over the phone that is fine, or you can grab coffee or go out to dinner — you can take it as far as you want to. You can take it to a physical, intimate sort of level [but] that will get you in trouble.”
Suzan said that she had coffee with a regular before, but would never do dinner.
“I have to drop a lot of them, especially when they realize that I won’t go home with them,” she said.
Suzan said she did not want to date while working as a dancer.
“I had a relationship when I started stripping and we weren’t doing so hot as is, but as soon as I told him on a trip, ‘hey I’m going to audition at [strip clubs]’ he looked both of them up and said that if I was at one club we could still be in a relationship but it wouldn’t work if I worked at [the other place],” she said. “So then I picked [the latter place] because you could probably make more money there and so we just kind of faded.”
Constant obstacles the students face are their families finding out about their employment.
“My family will never know, unless it gets out somehow, which I don’t think will ever happen,” Suzan said. “I mean it’s not like they’re helping me out with bills, so they couldn’t take away money from me, [but if they found out] I think half of my family would just be really angry and the other half would be really sad.”
Fiona would face monetary consequences in addition to familial stigma.
“I would be disowned,” she said. “I have a lot of inheritance money coming to me one day and it would be gone.”
Dewey said that this form of privacy and lack of unified sex worker movement is common internationally.
“Many women who are doing this kind of work [under that] stigma don’t want their families to know; don’t want their loved ones to know,” she said. “Then there are other women, like the street workers I’m working with in Denver, who don’t think of this as a form of work. When I say the [term] ‘sex worker’ to them, they’ll look at me like I’m crazy. To them, considering prostitution as work is crazy, because that’s how social norms tell them to think about it.”
Dewey also said that stigmatization over the years led to misconceptions regarding the difference between sex work and sex trafficking.
“Now what’s begun to happen in recent years is… that trafficking has become conflated with sex work,” she said. “I have many students who will use terms prostitution and trafficking synonymously, interchangeably. This is very, very problematic because when you say to someone ‘you do not have the right to do something legally’ that’s one thing entirely, but when you say to a person ‘you think are making a choice but you’re actually not, because no person with self-respect would make that choice,’ that’s a real problem.”
Fiona and Suzan plan on continuing their work as dancers for the rest of their time as students.
“[I think the stereotype] is funny, because I look at what we do every day and I’m like ‘it’s not that bad,” Fiona said. “I mean I do much less than the slutty girls at the club.”
