by MEGAN THIELE STRONG
“The double standards need to be eliminated.”
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.
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