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She has a point. Before dancing, but after I had received my B.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I worked for a couple months in a cafeteria of one of the state buildings downtown. Talk about demeaning: I had to wear a hair net, brew coffee and swallow the bilious attitudes of crabby state workers at the crack of dawn. When I would complain about my job, my friends and I used to joke that "Visions is always hiring."

It really wasn't that much of a leap for me. As an undergrad, I had worked as a nude model for figure-drawing classes, so the nudity didn't bother me. Finally, after flirting with the idea for several weeks, I found myself short on rent. A guy at Visions told me I could make more than $100 for one night's work. When faced with the specter of moving back home, I decided to try it.

The first time I walked onto the stage was frightening, but also exhilarating, and probably the first real thing to pierce my post-graduation depression. Far from feeling degraded, I found it exciting; it was fun. And for the first time in a long time, particularly after a vicious breakup with a boyfriend, I felt sexy. And then there was the money. For the first time in my lower-middle-class life, I had disposable income. I was able walk into a store, and if I liked something, I could buy it. But as anyone who has been poor will tell you, money is much more than clothes or toys; it is health care, cars with air bags, child-care and the freedom to stop -- from time to time -- worrying about money.

I felt tremendous pride over the fact that I was taking care of myself, able to pay my rent and buy a car. It was a lesson in self-reliance far more satisfying than any I'd learned at the university. I felt strong and resourceful.

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But, as with most "easy money," there were consequences. Occasionally, perhaps illogically, I feared repercussions. Although I never took chances -- bouncers walked me to my car each night, I never drank while at work or met with any customers afterwards -- I kept half-expecting to end up like some foolish victim in a made-for-TV movie. If I ended up dead or raped somewhere, wouldn't I have been asking for it? I could imagine my life summed up in a few paragraphs in the paper: Stripper disappears, stripper's body found. It was as though by entering that world, I had consented to any abuse I might get. Although I understood intellectually it was wrong, I couldn't shake the sense that somehow, by entering this world, I was asking for it.

I was lucky. I was able to stop dancing after a couple of years when I went to grad school; I know that most other women I worked with did not have that luxury. But I disagree with those who say I did something wrong, that I degraded myself and other women by stripping. In many ways, taking that step provided me with lessons about the world, about class and sexuality and body image I would never have learned. Stripping isn't the feminist utopia some claim it to be, but it isn't the road to degradation either.

People have asked me, If I had a daughter, would I want her to do this? as if that's the ultimate test. I have to be honest. I've had a lot of different jobs I wouldn't want my daughter to have to do, but stripping wasn't the worst of them.
salon.com | July 23, 1999

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