I Worked In A Gentlemen's Club. Here's The Uncomfortable Truth Many Married Women Won't Face.
When I first applied for a job in the adult entertainment industry, I was two states and hundreds of miles away from my hometown. As I sat there, waiting to be interviewed, one of my sister’s childhood athletic coaches walked in. Once hired, seeing men I recognized from outside the club as customers was not uncommon. From fellow university students to the owner of the restaurant where I also worked as a server, I had discovered a secret male world.
Even though women were the foundation of the entertainment, everyone in charge ― of the music, the drinks, the doors, the schedule, the money ― was a man. The women danced or cleaned and waited tables. The door to the women’s dressing room was either missing or left open, and if customers angled themselves opportunistically, they could see into the only bathroom stall, which never had a door.
Even though men were in charge, without women, there would be no money coming in the doors. However, the men treated women as expendable. If they fired someone, it didn’t matter. More than once I walked out. I remember a manager yelling, “You’ll be back!”
It was good money. Working in a restaurant in the late nineties, it was a good night when I surpassed $5 an hour. In the early 2000s, in a bigger city, I could make $14 an hour between tips and my $2.13 hourly rate. Waiting tables in the clubs, I routinely made $25 an hour between tips and an hourly rate of more than $5. Some dancers regularly made hundreds of dollars a night, even after payout to the house.
I learned many things working in the industry, including discretion. Like fight club, I learned to not talk about strip clubs outside of the club. It was something I needed to keep quiet about if I wanted to be seen as legitimate in the other spaces I was in. These were separate worlds. Once, when a man entered the club, a dancer who was a parent hid and begged to leave early because she recognized him as her child’s principal.
Fifteen years later, after I caught my fiancé cheating, I found solace in communities of betrayed women. These groups had little tolerance for sex workers. It was as though because of their jobs — because they were sex workers — they could not be betrayed the way other women could be betrayed. Many wives blamed sex workers more than their husbands for infidelity.
Negotiating these two identities — that of a betrayed partner and also that of someone who had worked in the adult entertainment industry — was tough. I could ignore my experiences working in so-called gentlemen’s clubs and receive support, or I could out myself and speak up for sex workers and be attacked as unworthy. I blocked many people during this time. I couldn’t help but think about how to bridge this gap.
As a sociologist, it is easy to argue that marriage is the ultimate form of sex work. A general rule of marriage in heteronormative patriarchal society is that men are the breadwinners and women provide sex. If men don’t uphold their end of this ideal, they are penalized, both with separation and less sex. Until the 1970s, nonconsensual sex in marriage was considered legal. Since then, many states have made spousal rape illegal, although loopholes still exist. And non-consummation of a marriage can be grounds for annulment, even in California. Of course, sexless marriages exist, and sex inside of marriage doesn’t have to be work.
And still, there have long been differential and gendered associations with sex. For example, virginity before marriage is seen as a benefit for women but a stigma for men. Pornography geared toward men captures a significant share of the internet and online searches.One popular site gets 100 million viewers a day. Boys use apps to generate fake and naked images of their classmates. Meanwhile, we criminalize and shame adult sex workers.
These hierarchies of sex work privilege one group of women over the other. The sex work that married women do is seen as legitimate and sacred. Marriage is highly sought after; weddings are a billion-dollar industry, and expected to grow. There are auxiliary benefits to a marriage, including financial benefits, housing and alimony.
Conversely, the work that sex workers do, also for exchange, is devalued and seen as problematic, profane and rendered outside of polite society. Further, the exchange rate for this less socially acceptable form of sex work can be difficult to negotiate. Men typically have the money and power, and sex workers can lack legitimate means to ensure payment; they risk punishment, danger and sometimes death.
If we recognize the commonalities between marriage and traditional sex work, we can see that when these two groups are pitted against each other, women’s work is undervalued and men, as a category, benefit. Women may fear that their partners will have more opportunities to betray — to break up their homes — if sex work is decriminalized. However, men, including married men, have access to sex while adult women are criminalized for supplying it.
The American Civil Liberties Union has long worked to decriminalize sex work. In 2022, California passed the Safer Streets for All Act, which decriminalized sex work-related loitering. However, we can go further. We can, as a society, fully embrace the idea that consensual sex among adults is always legal and up for negotiation in a free market.
Both married women and sex workers are safer and have more freedom when sex work is decriminalized. For example, if sex work is decriminalized, there can be more transparency about who is paying for sex. During my time working in the industry, billing went through a generic merchant company; the women at home did not see the often-crass names of the clubs that look better in neon than on a bank statement. When we decriminalize sex work, the billion-dollar sex traffic industry will be reduced.
Now, as a single mom and only parent, I wish it were easier for women to thrive without a dual income. Women’s work is largely underpaid. The median income for women is still only 83% of that of men. And, 40% of births are to unmarried women. Eighty percent of single parent households have a woman as head of the household. And the poverty rate for these families is high. I understand why some educators choose to subsidize their income with OnlyFans.
It is time we remove the benefits men receive when some sex workers are pushed under the rug. The majority of women support abortion rights. And women are rallying to promote the expectation that we — and not the majority-male government — are the rightful decision-makers when it comes to our bodies.
We should also be able to choose what job we do with our bodies. If we can exchange our labor for all sorts of terrible and dangerous, mind-numbing work, we should be able to exchange sex work for profit. When we marginalize sex workers as not worthy of naming their price, we endorse a sexist status quo that allows men privilege at our collective expense.
The double standards need to be eliminated. To do so, let’s do what we can, including voting, to decriminalize all forms of sex work. If we don’t act soon, bots will be recognized as legitimate sex workers before we are.
RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, has a 24/7 hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673) and a chatline at online.rainn.org.
Megan Thiele Strong (she/they) is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San José State University in California and a Public Voices Fellow at TheOpEdProject. She holds a doctorate and has 20 years of experience teaching a breadth of courses, including environmental sociology. She researches at the intersections of social and environmental justice, mental health and education. They know we are meant to queer the status quo in order to be diverse, equitable, sustainable, creative and inclusive.
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