SEXIS WRONG

I was taking the San Francisco Sex Information training and
got complete support from those people. They said, If you
want to do it, do it. You’re not hurting anybody—go for it. It
was the first time I had heard that from anyone. Everybody
had been telling me for years, No, don’t go back. Don’t explore
any kind of sexual issue that I was interested in, anything
that was out of the main stream. And since I come from
a family that’s very dysfunctional and sexually weird—I come
from an incest family—it’s a big concern. It’s a major concern
that I’m going to turn out crazy like Mom and Dad.
So, anyhow, I’m onstage going through all this shit, making
this major deci sion, and there are all these guys around me
jacking off. I always wanted to watch my boyfriends do that.
They always wanted to watch me masturbate, but they would
never let me watch them. So, suddenly, I can watch all these
differ ent guys, and it was really interesting. It was the first
time I could just stare at a man doing that, stare at his body
and his cock. I got very excited. There were definitely customers
who really turned me on.
It was exciting and scary, a major decision, but frankly, it was
really easy.
What criteria do you use in hiring women? ~ The first
thing is, how attractive are they? Second, how comfortable
are they onstage? Would they actually be happy
working here? Do they have good rapport
with the customers? Are they able to look at
these guys? I look at whether they have high
or low energy. They have to be pretty unattractive for me to
not hire them. I think I’ve only told one woman that I couldn’t
hire her, and one over the phone because her application was
unintelligible. I am certainly not one of the prettiest women
here, and I still have a hot show. Looks do count in the business,
definitely, and I pay attention to that. I would certainly
love to hire lots of pretty nineteen-year-old college girls. It
would be real good for the show, but I don’t want people to
just slide on their looks. It’s sexiness that counts.
And I look for people who are intelligent. Women who I can
talk to, women who think about things, who use their intelligence
to question the world around them and do some exploring—that’s
important. I don’t like bimbos, no matter how
pretty they might be. I pre fer having dancers and artists, actresses.
Sometimes women from the financial district really
cut loose.
What do the customers want you to do? ~ Consistently,
most of them—not all of them—want me to show them my
genitals. It’s spread open and turn over so they can see my
ass and genitals. Those are the requests most dancers seem
to get. Sometimes they’d rather see me play with my breasts
or just see my face. Sometimes they come in real depressed
and just want some pretend contact. They’ll put their hands
up to the window and want me to put my hand up so we
touch fingertips. Often I get requests from young guys to do
some kind of insertion, which we don’t do here. “Stick your
fingers in,” or, “Don’t you have a dildo?”
The other night this little, short guy with a baseball cap and
thick glasses, who looked like something out of a Gary Larson
cartoon, said, “So, how much for the back room?” Some
guys hold twenties or fifties or hundred-dollar bills up to the
window. Most of the guys know that doesn’t happen here,
but there are requests for sex. “How much for a blowjob?”
“How much to fuck you?”
They love to see me get wet; sometimes I’ll fake that. I’ll
lick my fingers and touch my genitals. “Oh, she’s getting excited.”
They never seem to catch on. They think, “I’ve still got
it. I turned her on, this hardened woman.”
In your experience are dancers more deprived, abused,
and battered than other women? ~ No way. Not at all.
Women always get harassed, shit on, pushed around, cheated,
and gypped. Dancers are no exception, certainly, but we
don’t get treated any worse. And a lot of dancers make so
much more money than other women and have so much
more fun. In a lot of ways it’s a real healthy job. Physically,
There were definitely customers who
really turned me on.
it’s very healthy. It’s like you’re exercising and get ting paid for
it. At the moment we don’t make that much money, but it’s
still a good, high hourly wage, considering a lot of people in
the financial district or the retail and restaurant business are
making, five, six, seven bucks an hour. Here, it’s real easy to
get ten. In a lot of ways we get treated better, but we have to
deal with the sexual stigma.
Since I was fifteen, stepping out the door, walking down the
street, and being harassed by a group of men has been consistently
a traumatic experience. I’m always loudly evaluated
and aggressively pursued. That’s how women get treat ed in
this culture. I am certainly no more likely to experience violence
than any other woman. That can happen to anybody
anytime within a marriage, a family, a workplace, just walking
into a bar. It’s not women in the sex industry who get singled
out for that kind of abuse—all women are. As far as sexual
harassment on the job, clearly it’s no worse in the sex industry
than anywhere else. Even though you’d think it would be,
it’s not. One time the computer company I worked for hired
a secretary who was an exotic dancer. She had her little dictation
pad and would go in for a meeting with ten guys, and
they would lock the door. When she got out, her dictation
SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE NAKED 203