Stripped Awake

Los Angeles, January 2025

This is the thing about reality — it’s all perception.

If you can convince someone else of something and change their perception, you have control over them. If they form their own perception, you are powerless over them, and they decide their own way of looking at the world. 

In the case of dancers and club customers specifically, it’s mutually beneficial. Both parties feel empowered and get what they want. Whether it’s healthy or not is a whole different story.

Dancers experience abuse and assault at the hands of owners and managers while being too powerless to do anything about it , because they control our livelihoods. 

In the shadier clubs, there’s not much choice. Violent customers don’t get thrown out if they spent a lot of money. If you can’t handle their aggressive nature and sadistic tendencies, it is your fault, and the managers will tell you it’s your fault, essentially blaming you for the abuse that happened to you. If you don’t cater to the customer, they’ll be given to another dancer. And if she’s your friend? Well, then whatever suffering she experiences also becomes your fault.

Because in this industry, women are not people, we are objects of desire. And it is our job to keep the men spending money, to make sure they have a “good” “positive” experience — even if what gives them a positive experience is to violate the basic fabric of human decency.

There’s a certain level of prolonged grooming, mind manipulation, and repeated abuse that has to occur in order to get someone to sell their body over and over.

We, the dancers are paid in “funny money” and taxed 10% by the club in order to exchange it for actual cash. Our payment is held at the club for weeks, and paid out to the dancers in rations, requiring us to work a shift in order to receive $500 at a time, of the money we already made weeks ago.

That’s if we even get paid out at all.  This is how power is maintained, and dancers are kept in the business.

Suddenly, you are not existing anymore. 

When someone else controls your mind and your body, are you really free?