The Ethical Stripper | Stacey Clare | TEDxCoventGardenWomen

hi my name is Stacy and I'm a stripper I've been working in the industry now for about nine years and I've worked in a range of places danced in some of the higher and corporate clubs you might have heard of Spearmint Rhino Stringfellow's and I've seen a lot in my time as a stripper I've traveled a lot I've made a lot of money I've met thousands of people I've made some amazing friends and had a lot of fun and then it hasn't all been great you know there's been some low points as well but in general the work suits me suits my personality I enjoy it I've got the body for it and I'm guessing from looking around at some of the expressions on your faces that watching me strut around performing a sexually objectified gender stereotype is producing some uncomfortable feelings for some of me we are in a room full of feminists don't me okay so just let me just take a second right hi my name is Claire and when I'm not being Stacy I'm me I am self-employed and I work freelance I've always had a lot of different jobs and I what do I do so I work in a gallery in central London as a bookkeeper I'm an Events Manager I work for an academic at the London School of Economics I've done care work in the past I've done modelling I've been a pole dance instructor I practice Buddhism I do community theater I pretty much do lots of things that give me a sense of fulfillment and purpose in my life and the reason I gave you that floor show there was to demonstrate to you how I compartmentalize my life how I've got this stripper persona Stacey and I can sort of wheel her out whenever I need her and I know we're not everyone like Stacey and I know this whole talk comes with a caveat because I know that women and feminists all over the world resent the notion that a woman's worth is measured by her hotness I know that when we are bombarded with images like this that women feel uncomfortable and they feel under pressure to conform and men can feel confused and even resentful when reality doesn't match up with these unrealistic expectations and this is a quote from one of my favorite feminists Jean Kilbourne she's a total legend turning a human into a thing is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that well I couldn't agree more with all of this I also relent resent this relentless poor notification of women's bodies for capital gain so what I'm saying basically is that I don't like to see women exploited and I guess that makes me a feminist but I how can I possibly go to work and do a job that involves being objectified more or less all the time how can I be an ethical stripper well I believe that I can and I'm going to explain how by sharing some of my insights with you so when I was 19 I was and when I first did a audition in a strip club I was 19 and I was very precocious and I had these terrible white person dreadlocks and I refused to shave my legs and I just finished the first year of an art degree and I was so broke that I played my guitar in the street for money anyway they wanted to give me the job and as a stripper but they were very cagey about how much money I was going to earn and they they wanted me to change my whole appearance which I wasn't comfortable with so I went got a job as a charity fundraiser instead which taught me about social justice and I got involved in activism and I became this anarchist this political anti-capitalist rebel and I went to anti-war marches and I hung out in squats and teepees and met anarchists and anarchists let me be whoever I wanted to because back then I used to dress up a lot I used to really you know explore my identity and I got very good at performing this way and I was very confident I knew men found me attractive and that was part of myself that I enjoyed because the summer I did summer I discovered sex I sort of transformed from this and awkward androgynous kid into this and like woman who is free to explore sexualized roles when I was fighting for social justice I was kind of drinking a lot partying hard nearly dropped out of art school because I was kind of losing control of my life and among the things I was trying at the time I learned to pole dance and I used to carry a pole around with me to house parties and people just ask me where I worked and then I found of friends who helped me get as a job job as a stripper by this time I was 22 and I was my identity was more in flux so shaking my legs and conforming to the stereotype wasn't such a sacrifice it was kind of a fun experiment and I found that it was generally empowering to be in control of my the sexual attention that I got from men you know at sexual harassments kind of part of my life but when I discovered stripping I could regain some agency or something that I had didn't have control over otherwise and the regular money was a big benefit my sense of self-worth actually shot up and I could afford to pay my rent I cut down my drinking and partying because I didn't need to do it anymore it was my job and I went I was able to concentrate on my degree it wasn't all a bed of roses far from it and the work is not easy it's not fun being surrounded by drunk people all the time and try not to absorb their negative energy and when I first joined the the industry it was at the beginning of the financial crisis so that there was a very unhealthy competitive environment for those of you who don't know strippers have to pay to work so we have to pay a house fee and or a percentage of our income to the clubs and even though we're technically self-employed we are always treated as employees and we have to submit to some very exploitive business practices because we are drugs are not protected we can't take an illegal action so these are these experiences kind of set the scene for me and I could see clearly how the job had the potential to be empowering but because of the working conditions inevitably wasn't so when back to art school and I researched feminism and I devoured text after text of feminist literature and I have found myself aligning with sex-positive or pro-choice feminism just the idea that we are agents of our own bodies and as such sour right my body my choice what to do there now in my final year there was a big fight going on about the strip club industry in the UK the women's rights Lobby were calling for my industry to be eradicated as an integral harm against women and the people who were representing the industry in Parliament in the media were the bosses and the managers not the dancers themselves and this was infuriating because what I saw going on above my head was this circus of opinion and but no one asking current strippers what could be done to improve things and he dances who did speak out were dismissed his victims by the opposition and the law was passed so now local authorities have the power to shut down clubs and limit the number of licenses but nothing has been done about the exploitive conditions so we have some licensing conditions that put the onus on us like in some clubs I have to dance one metre away so I can't make any contact can't me any lap dancing but legally it's perfectly okay for a manager to find me for wearing the wrong dress or for chewing gum so I started to speak to other dancers about this and you know found that plenty of them are just as intelligent and felt just as strongly as me I took what I'd learned from the activist world and I applied it to my choice of work which fit perfectly because workers rights is a cornerstone of social justice so in true activist style I decided something's got to be done so a year ago I invited all the strippers that I know to form a collective and we are called the East London strippers collective we feel our industry doesn't recognize us our worth because we are continue to be financially exploited nearly everywhere we work and secondly we feel very let down by a law that promised to help women but inevitably less left us more vulnerable which we've got less choices as workers so what do we want the law needs to be reviewed our cops need to be protected dancers need the right to take legal action against exploitive businesses if that's what they want to do we want our working conditions to improve we want to be consulted ideally we'd like to create our own working conditions there's very exciting talk at the moment of opening a cooperative venue which would be Europe's first and only stripper worker run strip club we believe what we do is an art form this is a picture of a colleague of mine Miss cheeky love and if this is not an art form I don't know what is this skills of a stripper range from athletic performance to emotional labour and what we do is we relieve people of their and we relieve adults of their stress boredom frustration loneliness and we do this primarily by talking not necessarily dance of taking our clothes off speaking of someone who's done both jobs I can see the parallels between being a carer and being a stripper what we actually do is work and it deserves to be recognized to search and we also want to challenge negative stereotypes because we believe they are harmful and when I go to work as a stripper I conform to a sexually objectified gender stereotype that's my choice as part of my job and I'm comfortable with that but when wider society creates and proliferate this an unhealthy negative stereotype that strippers and sex workers are victims this is a type another type of secondary objectification one that I haven't chosen and where it's the same for buyers and customers when we demonize them as abusers or as sad and pathetic these negative stereotypes are just as and helpful as the media sexism that I spoke about at the beginning of this talk now finally I want to talk to you about stigma specifically the stigma that I face in my work and a good example of the stigma I know everyone here is going to be a stripper or a sex worker but everyone can relate to stigma a good example is the question if it's that bad why don't you just leave or the question what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this and for me the subtext of these questions is what is so wrong with you that you can't escape conditions like this and to be asked questions like this that imply there is something inherently wrong with me but why should be honest beyond me the worker instead of the people in the industry doing the exploiting why should I leave an industry that I've spent leave a job that I spent years getting good at and that I love and I believe a lot of the negative stereo like the negative stigma around our work is this widely held belief that strippers and sex workers are victims of childhood abuse historic childhood abuse and that we are acting out of false consciousness we don't our own minds so I want to reveal something to you now I'm going to do some disclosure if that's ok all right and I am a survivor of abuse when I was a kid my childhood was really unstable and I was really badly neglected and so when I was growing up as an adult my my adulthood has been loaded up with trauma and I've had lots of breakdowns but one thing if anyone if anyone here has had a breakdown you'll know that part of the recovery process is to reclaim your identity we build your identity from in my experience having a stripper persona having this pre rehearsed identity to fall back on when all else failed when I didn't know who I was anymore was an extremely good coping mechanism and I believe that value can be created anywhere especially where they're suffering I believe I regard my job as an opportunity to create value in my life and in others and the idea I want to leave you with is that stripping and sex work can create value but we need to create the right conditions for that to happen and the best way that you can help with that is by seeing me as I choose to be seen thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 100,136

Rating: 4.7306123 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Social Science, Activism, Art, Body, Career, Change, Choice, Compassion, Entertainment, Ethics, Feminism, Gender, Happiness, Identity, Media, Passion, Sex, Women

Id: kZQkIw1MH3E

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2015