Some of the best conversations I’ve had have taken place in strip clubs.
Having worked as a stripper in London as a student and aspiring writer, I can tell you the club floor, the private dance rooms and backstage areas foster all manner of strange, hilarious and confessional exchanges.
Something about the atmosphere, the blacked-out windows and the exposure of flesh seems to give way to intimate revelations.
These endlessly entertaining, poignant and downright surreal interactions were something film-maker, photographer and fellow former-stripper Bronwen Parker-Rhodes and I wanted to bring out in our new book, Wanting You To Want Me: Stories From The Secret World Of Strip Clubs – a collection of stories shared with us by strippers themselves.
After moving in the same circles for years, Bronwen and I began talking properly in 2018, when she asked to take my picture as part of an ongoing project documenting women she’d met in the stripping world.
It became apparent very quickly that we shared a desire to preserve the voices, stories and portraits of the extraordinary women we met during our time working in this industry.
I worked as a stripper while doing an MA in literature at King’s College London, while Bronwen started while at London’s Slade School of Fine Art.
While we started gathering material for the book four years ago, the true origins of the project lay in our collective years of shared experiences and the fevered friendships formed over long periods of time spent in this unusual world.
Our favourite discussions have, without a doubt, taken place in the changing rooms – those chaotic, private spaces that no one from outside the dancer community could ever enter or be part of.
Here, the frankest and funniest of talks take place against a frenetic backdrop of costume changes, animated phone calls, blow-drying, eating, make-up, showering and some of the most deeply personal ablutions you can imagine.
Chiqui, a dancer, explains: ‘There’s no way you’re not going to relate to these women somehow, because it’s a striptease of everything… It’s very coven-like when women get together to play with the energy of sex, money, desire and therapy.’
‘I feel like everything’s heightened,’ another dancer, Amélie, told us. ‘It’s the same with your relationships with other dancers. It’s such an intense environment that if you get on with someone, you really get on with them, and if you don’t get on with someone, you really don’t get on with them.’
The stories we gathered together encompass reminiscences of debauched shifts, the candid confessions of male customers, bleakly hilarious tales, advice on hustling and creating formidable stripper alter-egos, alongside reflections on sexuality, objectification, gender, female friendship and desire.
But the scope of the stories isn’t confined within the walls of the venue. In their role as ‘fantasy technicians’, dancers are in a privileged position to gain incredibly unique insights into so many aspects of the world around us.
‘People have amazed me over the years with the stuff they’ve come out with,’
says dancer Bex. ‘When you really get a customer, that’s when they start telling you the intimate details of their entire life.’
Strip clubs embody such a range of contradictions and are so shrouded in misconceptions about what kinds of interactions take place inside, what kind of men frequent them and what kind of women work in them.
Another dancer explained how many people often have a presumption about the job, ‘Like, “You must meet some real weirdos?” And it really irritates me… Why have we got this thing that strippers must be damaged or without choice and that customers must be broken rejects?’
Wanting You To Want Me doesn’t attest to one overarching, shared experience of being a stripper. Sometimes the tales contradict each other or reveal very different perspectives, creating a portrait that is complex and, at times, ambiguous.
Ultimately, the stories in this book might take place in strip clubs but they have a much wider resonance – that of real human connection and experience.
Extract from Lorelei’s story: We’re fantasy technicians
‘It’s a world. It’s a fake world. But the longer you work there, the more you understand it. You get to know the people more, the regulars. They’re the ones who create the world in their minds more than anyone, we join in because it’s how we make our living.
‘We’re fantasy technicians. That’s what it is. I do believe that. I wouldn’t lie but I would spare parts of myself, like having a partner and stuff. They’d be like, “I bet you partied yesterday.” I’m not going to tell them I just got up early and went to do a gym class or took my kid to nursery.
‘People used to come and ask me, “Where are you from?” and I’m like, “Hey, where do you want me to be from?” And I’ll go with it. It doesn’t matter.
But yeah, I think that job did teach me a lot about the world of men. In the beginning I thought, “Oh, it’s all about big boobs and blonde hair”. But I have learnt over the years it’s a lot because they are lonely and they want to talk to someone.’
Bronwen Parker-Rhodes and Emily Dinsdale’s Wanting You To Want Me: Stories From The Secret World Of Strip Clubs (Hardie Grant) is available now.
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