A new scam

I ran into a new stripper scam a couple weeks ago. It wasn’t a very good scam but I’d never seen it before. I haven’t run into many girls trying to scam me recently. This is mostly because I only talk to dancers who have been working for the club for some time. Dancers who try to rip off customers usually don’t last that long. 

There really isn’t many ways dancers can blatantly rip off customers. Either they flat lie about the number of dances or the try to min-max a dance. A min-max dance is where the dancer does absolutely the least amount of work for the maximum amount of money. Typically she’ll start the dance halfway though the first song. Then end the last dance halfway through the last song. In between she’ll do as little as possible, mostly just posing. If it was possible to take a nap while doing a lap dance, she’d do that. This girl had a new strategy. She got to pay for all the dances up front and then tried to get kick out during the first dance. I'm pretty sure she'd keep the money, for her troubles. 

I normally wouldn’t have even approached this particular, but the waitress told me I should really get dances from her. The dancer was her friend and really cool, she also was having a bad day too. I don’t know why but it never ends well when a waitress tries to set me up.  Maybe it’s just confirmation bias and I only remember the terrible dancers. In any case they always seem to end up being a bad experience. But a few shots of Jack Daniels had pretty much erased any reluctance I had at that point, so I asked the waitress to invite the dancer over.

I recognized her when she sat down with me. She had been a pretty high profile performer about five years ago. You couldn’t open a copy of exotic magazine with out seeing her in an ad. Apparently her post stripping career had hit a bump and she was back dancing again. We chatted for a bit. She seemed a bit drunk, but I really couldn’t tell how much. Some people are better at hiding it then others. She asked for some dances.

She asked me to pay for the dancers up front. I’m fine with that. As a customer I’m guilt till proven innocent. Until I build up trust with a dancer she’s best served by treating me as a deranged psychopath. I paid for four dances. She started out by breaking a several club rules about what to wear and other things. Like I said, I’m guilty till proven innocent so I keep my hands at the 10 and 2 o’clock position by my side. If she wants to break the rules then that’s her business. She did a quick check to see where the bouncer was.

I’ve been going to the club long enough that the bouncers basically ignore me. I don’t have any special privileges but in the scheme of things I’m the least of their problems. I don’t drink too much, the dancers like me, I spend money.  As long as I don’t cause any drama they are happy to spend their time on more important things. The bouncer was else where in the club.

The dance progressed on normally until the bouncer returned. Once the bouncer was close she grabbed my hand and pushed it into an inappropriate location. I tried to pull it away but she was keeping where it was. It would have resulted in a pretty obvious tug of war so I left it where it was.  It was the least conspicuous thing to do. Also, I’m a nice guy but not a monk. The bouncer still ignored us and turned to walk off. The dancer then began to slap her ass really hard with her free hand and kept my other hand in place. She kept leaning back trying to get the bouncers attention. The bounce walked off anyway.

Once the bouncer walked away she let go of my hand. I put my hands back. As the second song started the bouncer returned. The dancer tried again to relocate my hands. This time I just kept my hands where they should be. She got frustrated. She was basically trying to get me kicked out for having my hands where they shouldn’t be. Unfortunately for her, neither I nor the bouncer was going to play along.

Eventually she switched to a more straight forward method. She just got up and walked off. I didn’t object. It wasn’t worth going after her for the money. After that day I never saw that dancer again. I suspect the bouncer probably knew what was going on the entire time. I’m pretty sure she got kicked out after trying that scam on a few guys. I probably should have said something if the dancer is scamming customers. It’s easier to keep my mouth shut. I’m just trying to relax and have a good time.

My own misconceptions

You see the world through the prism of your past experiences.  How I’ve come to view dancers has changed dramatically since I first started hanging out in strip clubs. I’ve probably changed more than I realize. It’s difficult to really see yourself, everybody has blind spots. I’d probably shock myself if I could go back and time and interview me after my first time visiting a strip club. I recently reread some of my older personal journal posts that reflected some of my early misconceptions. I don’t keep a formal journal, but I often write about things. The process of writing forces me to look at things differently. It’s harder to lie to myself when I’m writing. I’ll usually delete the entry after I’m done writing it, but I’ve kept a few of them in my personal files. Here are a few of the misconceptions I’ve hard about dancers over the years that I saw in those early posts.

Strippers are stupid

Obviously nobody would get up on stage and take their clothes off in front of a bunch of drunken strangers if they had a real education. Right? Wrong. Of all my misconceptions this was the one that was dispelled the quickest. I tend to listen a lot more than I talk. It didn’t take long to realize a lot of dancers are very, very smart, in both scholastic and practical ways. I think a lot of folks can’t get past their preconceptions of dancers. They want to believe dancers are dumb. I’m not sure if it’s to build them selves up or to reinforce their stereotype. I’ve experienced intellectual prejudice. I worked as a gas station attendant while in college. People assume if you’re filling up cars to make a living you are probably just slightly smarter than the gas pump you’re standing next too.  People can be really condescending. I was told a few times “What do you know? You work at a gas station”.  And they were sober. I can’t imagine what drunken insanity dancers deal with.

Strippers are heartless

I used to assume all dancers had utter disdain for their customers. Customers were just walking wallets to be harvested. This may be true for some dancers, but not for a lot of them. I think it’s easier for me as a customer to feel this way as well. If I say or do something rude to a dancer it can just write it off as “it doesn’t matter, she only wanted my money”. For either dancer or customer point of view it can be pretty dehumanizing. When I fainted at a strip club and ended up in the emergency room I was really surprised to find out a dancer had spent her Saturday night in the waiting room to see if I was OK. That really floored me. I never expected a dancer to do that. I figured once I was rolled out the back door they’d go back to business as usual. I don’t go into clubs assuming that every dancer is going to be my friend. But I don’t expect them to all be heartless vultures either.

Strippers have no ambition

A girl becomes a stripper because she doesn’t want anything better for herself. The logic of that sentence is hopelessly twisted and flawed. I’m not sure why I even had that idea. This is mostly me imposing my own social preconceptions on somebody else. I’ve met dancers will all sorts of different levels of ambition. Some are the cliché dancer who only works enough to cover her next set of bills to other dancers who accomplish more things a month than I do in a year. It makes me tired just following them on twitter. This is true in any profession. I know engineers who only do enough to keep from getting fired, others who are trying to reinvent the world. It’s people not the profession that make the difference.

Strippers have no morality

Again this is me projecting my Iron Age witch burning puritan Anglo-Saxon ethics I was raised with on somebody else. I was raised in a society where public nudity is bad. Playboy was a “dirty” magazine, kept hidden behind special racks at the store. You had to be 17 to see an R rated movie. Taking your clothes off for money was not what moral people did. This fallacy really faded quickly when I came to grips with the fact there wouldn’t be strippers without strip club customers (me). The fundamental hypocrisy of that idea is painful. Am I that blind to my own imperfections? I’m as integral to the strip club world as the strippers. Without guys spending money dancers are just broke naked women standing alone on a stage. Talk about throwing stones in glass houses. The larger issues is exactly what about stripping is bad?

Most of this post stems from conversations I had with a spokes model at a CES show a few years ago. She was hired to present the products I was supporting at our booth. We were staying at the same hotel and had the same schedule. We hit it off and I sort of became her older brother. She was strikingly beautiful. And she was constantly hit on by conventioneers, I mean constantly. I calculated she was propositioned once every fifteen minutes. When I was around it at least slowed guys down some. 

One day at lunch she was telling me about her trip to a strip club one night. It was the usual stranger in a strange land kind of experience. She just couldn’t believe a woman could do that for money. We got into a lengthy discussion about how her job compares to stripping. I’m pretty sure I changed her opinion of dancers for the better. I at least convinced her that not all dancers are train wrecks.

Her (and my) misconceptions are really are just really different as aspects of a larger one. The misconception stripping is bad and if somebody is doing it they must have failed somewhere. This is just patently false. If you described a typical a person as in young, self employed, making enough money to comfortable you’d probably be impressed. Most people that age are struggling to make ends meet and probably still living with their parents. You add the word “stripper” to that same description and everything changes yet nothing has changed. They are still the same person.

I’ve think there are four categories dancers fall into when it comes to why they are dancing. Obviously they are dancing to make money but they’re larger situation is much different. Most girls are dancing not because they are morally bankrupt its their situation that determines it. This is a breakdown as I perceive it. Most dancers don’t fit exactly into a category but they generally fall into one.

The Professional Stripper

This is what she does for a living. She isn’t going to school or waiting for something better to come along. She is happy to strip for a living. Most professional strippers I know are college educated. She chose to do this as a living.

The Lifestyle Stripper

This dancer loves everything about stripping except stripping. It would be a great job except for the customers, the sleazy management, and other strippers. They like the money and the huge flexibility the job gives them. The like working in a bar, the late nights, and their friends they work with. However, they really don’t like the stripping itself. It’s just a necessary evil they have to put with to get the other perks. Stripping isn’t the perfect job but it is close enough to keep doing.

The Best Option Stripper

The girls dance because it’s their best option at the moment. The job provides enough income and flexibility to accomplish what they want in life like going to school or raising their kids. Most would quit stripping in a heartbeat if they could find another job with that let them accomplish the same things. Unfortunately most of society doesn’t see stripping as a best option.

The Only Option Stripper

These are the train wreck girls who strip because it’s they only thing they can do. Whether its drugs or personal problems they can’t function at most jobs. One perk about stripping (at least in Portland) is it’s virtually impossible to get fired. Even if you do get ‘fired’ you can go work at another club down the road. These are the cliché strippers you typically see in the media. They make for entertaining reading. Sadly, they end up representing what most people think strippers are like even though they are, in my opinion, the smallest percentage of dancers.

I think most folks would find this odd, but I’ve probably grown as a person from hanging out at a strip club. I’ve had to confront some of my deep seated biases about other people. We all have blind spots when it comes to ourselves. I hope I always have the desire and courage to try and find mine.

Customer Support

I try to avoid making general assumptions, but generally speaking, dancers are way more open and honest about their sexuality then most other women I know. Conversations I couldn’t imagine having with my female co-workers wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow with dancers. Add some alcohol and you can get some really interesting phone calls.

It’s not uncommon for me to get text messages at 3am from dancers. They are just getting off work and most of their friends are still up. I’ve turned off the text chime on phone so I can sleep. They can text away all they want. I’ll read them in the morning when I get up. I rarely get phone calls, when I do it’s usually a butt call. If a dancer calls me, I’ll just let it go to voice mail. I’ll check the voice mail with the text messages in the morning.

So I didn’t answer the phone late one night in February. I didn’t pick up when it rang again five minutes later. When it rang a third time I picked up. If somebody is going to call me three times its probably important. Caller ID helps too, there are a lot of folks I’d just turn the phone off if they called me in the morning. My initial thought was she was stuck some place and needed a ride. I was wrong. Here is the conversation as best as I can remember it. I’m sure I got minor details wrong here and there, but the gist is of the conversation is correct.

Me: Hello
Her: I need your help!
Me: err, umm, What?
Her: I need you help.
Me: What’s wrong?
Her: My vibrator is broken.
Me: What?
Her: My vibrator is broken
Me: Are you serious?
Her: Yes, I’m serious
Me; You’ve got to be kidding. Is it like stuck some place or something?
Her: No, don’t be an ass.
(About this time I notice she’s slurring her words)
Me: Are you drunk?
Her: Doesn’t matter, can you help me?
Me: Just buy a new one
Her: I don’t want a new one, I want this one.
Me: What? You’re hammered.
Her: This one is special
Me: Special? That’s seriously stupid. Just buy the same model
Her: No, I’ve had this vibrator longer than most of my boyfriends
Me: Is this something to be proud of?
Her: You’re being an ass. I want it fixed, can you help me?
Me: Now?
Her; No, not now it’s late
Me: No shit, why did you call me then?
Her: I need to know, can you fix it?
Me: The vibrator?
Her: Yes the vibrator. What do you think I’m fucking talking about, I thought you were smart?
Me: Not at 3am.
Her: So can you fix it?
Me: Maybe, depends on what’s wrong. What does it do?
Her: Nothing
Me: Does the on/off switch feel normal.
Her: It doesn’t have a switch, it has a dial
Me: OK, so does the dial feel normal?
Her: Yeah, I guess. I don’t know
Me: Does it make any noise when you turn it on?
Her: Nothing
Me: It’s just dead then?
Her: Yeah
Me: I dunno, I might be able to fix it, depends on what failed. If the motor burned out you’re screwed. If the dial or a battery contact broke I can probably fix it.
Her: Batteries…………Oh, shit
Me: You’ve got to be kidding…. (call ends) …You didn’t replace the batteries?

I don’t think she remembered much of the call when she sobered up. Next time I talked to here she acted as if the call never occurred  For the technically curious this wasn't Savannah from the Good Vibrations post. I guess I can go to work as customer support for a sex toy company if I ever lose my job. It’s always good to have a back up career.