So what's your real name, in color

I've been a lot of time playing around with photography recently. I haven't been writing blog posts recently, which also explains my blogs non-existent traffic. To give my self a goal I've decided to try to create some stripper meme images. My first attempt is to capture what a dancer is thinking when you ask "So what's your real name. let me know if you like the images or which one you like best. Please ignore the white balance problems, these are only rough edits.

Trivial Pursuit

Nobody likes to be trivialized. So I wasn’t too surprised at the Strippersphere’s level of irritation at the Miley Cyrus performance at the MVAs. I saw a lot of dancer tweets that ranged from snarky to genuinely angry. Personally I could care less what Miley Cyrus does on stage. I never watched her show, never listened to any of her music. I’m not even sure how relevant MTV is. As the joke goes, the last time I watched MTV they still played videos.

Twerking is heavily associated with stripping. Dancers regularly tweet they are going to “twerk”. They post video clips of themselves Twerking. I’m not exactly sure what constitutes “Twerking”. Is Twerking a subset of booty popping or vise versa? It doesn’t really matter to me. It does to dancers though. People who's ability to pay rent depends on it. 

I don’t think it’s specifically Twerking that upset people. I think it stems from the larger misconception that it doesn’t require any real skill to be a good stripper. All you have to do take you clothes off, strut around stage then collect your bucket of money. It ignores all difficult parts the preparation it takes. How many other jobs require that you either trim or shave off every piece of hair from your eyebrows to your ankles on weekly or daily basis? Then throw in walking around in seven inch plus heels for hours just so you can make less than minimum wage on a slow night. Not to mention the all too real risk of sexual assault.

To have Miley Cyrus prance around on stage mimicking stripper moves badly is insulting.  It trivializes what they do. Yes, there are dancers that do nothing more than take off they clothes and walk around stage. But they don’t collect buckets of money at the end of their sets. Stripping is like every other job. There is a direct correlation between how much effort and skill a girl has and how much money she makes. Add to that the down turn in the economy and it can be really a tough job.

Personally, I get really frustrated with all the people who think they are experts in computer programming. I don’t even consider myself a programmer. I’ve had a couple of projects where I had to write about 15,000 lines of code. I wasn’t very good at it. When you compare that to code monkeys, who crank out thousands of lines of code on a regular basis, that’s a small amount of work. I get really irritated when some goof who took an introduction to programming class proceeds to tell me how I should have written the code or what development system I should have used. When you write software there are literally thousands of logic and hardware problems you have to solve to make it work correctly. None of which anybody will ever notice unless they have actually done something similar. They just look at hundreds of man hours of effort and nitpick some trivial issue. Then you want to kill them.

Ten years after

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It takes all kinds.

I work with a lot of different professions and, generally speaking, you can make some assumptions about a person by their occupation. Engineers are typically good at math. They like gadgets and are usually socially awkward. Accountants are organized and thorough. However I am always amazed at the wide variety of people who become strippers. In my opinion you cannot make any real generalizations about who becomes a dancer.

The first time I ran into a dancer who said she was working her way through college I didn’t really believe her. I figured it was the typical sale pitch. If she won’t tell me her real name, why should I believe anything else? I had a lot to learn then. While I don’t know if that particular girl was really in college or not, I have met a lot of dancers who really are working their way through college. It’s pretty easy to tell if a dancer is really going to college or not. Just check her schedule. During finals week she’ll be gone. Just before the start of the term when they have to buy books and pay for tuition she’ll be working like crazy.

Most people don’t associate strippers with intelligence. I know I didn’t when I first started hanging out at strip clubs. Diablo Cody won an Oscar, yet she still is referred to as a former stripper.  As if being a stripper is some sort of enormous handicap to be overcome. The media makes it sound like a stripper getting an award for writing is like a paraplegic growing a new pair of legs and learning to walk.  This is just an unfortunately stereotype the general public has about dancers.

If you drop your preconceptions and really talk to a dancer, you discover a lot of them are smarter than you. Not only that, a lot of dancers are very ambitious business people.  The general public’s stereotypical view of a dancer is somebody that doesn’t get out of bed before 2pm, their net worth is whatever they happen to have in their purse, and have no idea what they are going to do once they are done dancing. I’ve met some that have started their own very successful businesses. Dancing gave them the ability to make the money to support themselves while they got started and the scheduling flexibility to work when they needed to. I’ve also met some that doesn’t get out of bed before 2pm, their net worth is whatever they happen to have in their purse, and have no idea what they are going to do once they are done dancing. Most fall somewhere in between.

I’ve also met a lot of dancers who are on the other end of the spectrum from the type A business girls and college graduates. These dancers have nicknames like ‘train wreck’ and ‘psychobitch’. These girls represent the minority of strippers, but they seem to get the majority of the attention of the press. The minimum requirements to be a stripper are pretty low. I’ve met some dancers who are really out there. One dancer absolutely believed she could modify DNA with her mind. She really believed she alter somebody’s genetic structure just concentrating really hard. Except for some rather bizarre beliefs about physics and biology, she was pretty smart. I asked her to fix my DNA so my scalp would grow hair again. She closed her eyes and waved her hands over my heads for a couple seconds then pronounced me fixed. Then she charged me $20. So far it hasn’t worked, but I’m holding out hope (not). I’ve decided her new stage name is now Rogaine. This also may be a case of her being a lot smarter than me.

And I’ve also met a few dancers that weren’t the brightest bulb in the stage lighting. The topic of world war two came up once with one dancer. It was an odd conversation:

• Her:  “Did we fight the Germans in world war two?”
• Me: “Umm, yeah, did you ever see the movie Saving private Ryan?”
• Her: “Yes! I loved that movie, I saw it three times”
• Me: “All those guys trying to kill private Ryan, they were German.”
• Her: “Really? I thought it was something all made up. I’ll have to watch it again and check”

I wonder if she new Hitler was a German? I don’t know if she went to college or not. If she did, I don’t think she was a history major.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a typical stripper, probably because the girls are stripping for so many different reasons. Some are just trying to survive. Some are just trying to make some extra money. Some are professionals who make a career out of it, other strip because it’s all they can do.  Like everything else, it’s what you make of it.

The weather report

Living in Oregon you learn a lot of different terms for rain. It only rains once a year in Oregon, it just starts in September and ends in June. Since its always raining you need to ways to identify how much rain. It’s pretty much an art form all residents need to master in this state. Using my learned skills in advanced rain identification I decided to apply it to the strip club variety of rain.

Different types of strip club rain:

• Rain - $75 or more distributed on to the stage in a steady stream of dollars
• Showers - $50 or more distributed on to the stage in a steady stream of dollars
• Scattered showers – Less than $50 thrown with breaks when the customer looks around to confirm how cool he is.
• Isolated showers – Customer walks up with a stack of ones, throws $25 and stops. Spends the remainder of the song at the edge of the stage pretending he is strip club god. He fails.
• Scattered showers – Customer takes $25 and spits it up between two or more stages
• Drizzle - $5, customer acts like he just launched $500. Fail
• Sprinkle – less than $5
• Cloudburst - $100 or more, probably mechanically aided with a credit card. Will cause extensive damage to relationships when the credit card bill arrives.
• Deluge - $150 or more. Increasing rare event do to global warming and a crap economy.
• Hail – dollars bills wadded up and thrown on the stage. Not cool.

10 Internet things to let you know you are spending too much time at a strip club

1. You check out your favorite club on Google earth and spot your car in the parking lot (Not sure why I was there in the middle of the day.)
2. Your Facebook "People you may know" list is mostly strippers.
3. Your Instagram feed contains at least one picture of somebody's ass every day. 
4. While at work, you never ever check Snapchat at your desk.
5. You can tell which clubs a dancer has worked at by her Facebook friends.
6. Only your family posts on your Facebook time line before 11:30am
7. You immediately delete any picture meme that begins with "Bitches be like.." without reading further. Seriously, that meme can die now.
8. When you log into your Amazon account at work and a pair of 7" Pleaser clear heels shows up in the recent history section.  (No more Amazon wish lists) 
9. You have four different names and five numbers for one dancer in your phone contacts.
10. At least a quarter of the people you follow on twitter have the word 'glitter' in their handle.

I am not a criminal

I’ve met you. You sneer at from your car as I walk into the club. You roll your eyes when I talk about my friends that strip. You shake your head in disgust when talking about strippers. You decided that I am some sort of deviant because I go to strip club. To all you folks that feel they can judge me because they are morally superior: Fuck You. You are not. You are ignorant.

I am not a criminal

I pay my taxes. I donate $1000 dollars a year to the humane society. I’ve done jury duty twice. I pick up litter. I recycle. I don’t speed. As a matter of fact the last time I was pulled over by the police Ronald Reagan was president.  I also like to look at naked women.  I’m pretty sure 99% of the male population likes to look at naked women (or men, depending on their preference). There is a multi-billion dollar industry built around this aspect of human nature. So why am I ostracized for doing what the rest of the world spends billions of dollars on. I just prefer to see naked women in person.  I am the same person in the club I am at work, at the store, at home. I’m not altered or corrupted by the club.

It amazes me that people will make a value judgment on this and ignore everything else. If I were to tell you I have a friend who is in their early twenties, self employed, and making good money you’d probably be impressed with them. Most people in their early twenties are struggling to get by. Mention she is a stripper and somehow the money becomes tainted. If you don’t think stripping is a something people should do. That’s fine, that’s your opinion.  Not liking something is not a valid reason to label it immoral and condemn it. If it is truly something terrible then let the facts demonstrate that, not an emotional reaction. Out of all the world’s ills is stripping really something that we should be focusing on?

I am not a misogynist

I don’t hate women. I don’t want to own them. I’m not a puppet master trying to bend people to my will with a twenty dollar bill. I am not part of a grand conspiracy to suppress women. Most dancers I know aren’t victims. They weren’t smuggled into the country on a container ship. They aren’t being held hostage in the back room. Everyday they wake up and make a decision to work at the club. If things had gone perfectly in their lives would they being stripping at the Dolphin? Probably not, but life is seldom perfect.

Is there some corruption bout stripping that is so completely ingrained that anybody associated with the industry will be destroyed for life? In my opinion, no there isn’t. Any job can be exploited. The strip industry hardly has the lock on that. I used to work as a gas station attendant. I spent eight hours a day working with toxic chemicals and moving vehicles for three dollars an hour (OK that was a while ago).  The job sucked. But it was my decision to do the job. At that point of my rather less than perfect life it was the best option for me. If it wasn’t I would left. Maybe a dancer can’t leave because she can’t make that kind of money elsewhere, but would it be any different if she was an accountant?

The only thing that is fundamentally flawed is people’s perception. The dancer does not do anything she does not want to do. She isn’t being picked up by her pimp.  The idea that women are being sold off as chattel is simply wrong. It's simply insulting to assume all these women are helpless victims.

I am not an animal

I am not a slave to my impulses. I would love to run through red lights when there is no traffic. I’d love to eat nothing but beer and pizza every night. I’d love to take a shot of whiskey, scream, and smash things when I get frustrated at work. But I don’t. I’m part of larger society. My actions have consequences to other people. There is nothing that I can see at a strip club that is going to make me not act like I live in a society. Compared to what I can see on the internet with a click of a mouse, strip clubs are tame. In Missouri (ironically nicknamed the show me state) It’s illegal for uncovered areolas, exposed labia and alcohol to be located in the same bar. Do people really have that little impulse control? Does this law really make a difference?

If you are going to judge me, judge me on what I’ve done, not on what your prejudices think I might do. To be willingly ignorant is the greatest failing a person can ever have.