A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Tuulia Law – an assistant professor of criminology at York University, and a coordinator of the York University Sex Work and Critical Trafficking Research Cluster – about her new book, Playing the Supporting Role: Strip Club Managers and Other Third Parties.
Law’s book is unique in that while there is plenty of modern social science and public health research about sex work and sex workers, less research is available about strippers compared to full service sex workers, and even less about third parties in strip clubs.
In sex work research, third parties are people who work with sex workers, but are not sex workers themselves. If the sex worker is the first party, the client is the second, and the third party includes everyone from a receptionist at a massage parlour, a strip club waitress, a driver, to security guard. In addition to various staff, third parties also include owners of places like massage parlours, escort agencies, strip clubs, dungeons and cam sites. Sex workers can hire, or get hired by, third parties depending on the working environment.
Third parties at the strip club are club owners or employees of the club, not independent contractors like strippers. As part of this project, Law interviewed 15 strippers and 15 third parties. There was only one female third party, a bartender. The remaining staff were managers, doormen and DJs. All but one stipper identified as a woman.
I picked up this book in hopes of learning more about what motivates strip club managers and doormen to work in strip clubs, how they use their power to enforce (or not) rules given to them by the club owners, and how that power dynamic interacts with strippers’ interests at the club.
It was a fascinating read – I consumed it as if it were a novel. I think what helped was that Law really took care not to bury the subject’s voices under academic jargon. I didn’t feel like I needed multiple degrees to follow along.
Performing gender at work
I spend a lot of time performing gender at my job — I’ve written about this extensively before; but briefly: the vast majority of female strippers conform to a hyper feminine aesthetic while at work, in order to please the clientele, who are for the most part straight, cis-gendered men. This can include things like hair and lash extensions, dieting and exercising to stay slender, wearing push up bras, and undergoing plastic surgery.
I also spend a lot of time thinking and writing about gender, and I was curious to learn more about how men perform gender at the strip club. I’ve considered for example, the body shapes and sizes of doormen and managers, most of them are physically imposing men in some way or another. While strippers’ bodies attract the clientele, the doormen and managers’ bodies act as a deterrent –a visual reminder that if you f*** around, they will help you find out.
Law talks about an example of this kind of performance of gender:
“I remember one manager in particular was talking about how he did that in really specific ways…based on the situation. So he was talking about guys who —we call the wannabe pimps— who try to recruit girls in [their] club[s]. He put on this –what he called– street persona to deter them … And this was this performance of masculinity to achieve this particular end security with minimal violence, or with no violence, that was that was their goal.”
The economy of favours in a strip club
It was really interesting to me when the book discussed the ‘economy of favours,’ an economy that I’ve participated in, but until reading this book, didn’t have a name for.
The economy of favours exists in most mainstream workplaces; you do a favour for a colleague and they “owe you one.” The difference between an office and a strip club is that in an office, nobody pays the favour forward in cash.
In the strip club, though, cash is Queen, and favours can be bought. For example, if a waitress or doorman pointed me in the direction of a wealthy and generous client, I would tip them as a thank you. I’ve tipped DJ’s to put me on stage during prime time on busy nights to attract clients, but also tipped the DJ to skip me in the stage show rotation if I’m busy making money and dancing for clients. I’ve done this a thousand times, it’s part of our informal etiquette, to spread the wealth.
Where things get complicated with the economy of favours is for example, tipping the doormen or manager for helping you with a security matter. It’s their job to keep us safe, it feels problematic to tip someone for helping you if a client refuses to pay you, or has harmed you.
It leaves you with an aching question: will I be safe here if I don’t tip?
Dr. Law believes that if strippers were to stop tipping in these scenarios, it would put individual strippers at risk in terms of safety at work. However, she adds that if strippers were to collectively decide not to tip, it would be “a collective resistance that is comparable to, but a bit lesser than a strike” and that an assertion of workers’ collective power such as this hasn’t happened in Canada, but it would be a good idea to try.
I thought that was really interesting, and it never occurred to me to conceive of a strip club where the economy of favours doesn’t exist until reading this book. It’s like going abroad and finding out that the wait staff don’t expect to be tipped because they are already adequately paid by the employer. And maybe that’s the unspoken truth about the strip club, that owners don’t pay the staff well. So much so that strippers, who pay to work at the club, are also supplementing the income of the staff.
And like all economies, if there is a recession, and clients can no longer afford to come to the club, the whole house of cards collapses.
Pick up a copy today!
Law’s book is easy to read and in plain language compared to books written by other academics. I’m glad that the trend is changing in academia to make research more accessible to laypeople. In addition to the above, the book also touches on stripper labour organizing, and the intersection of labour, class and gender. I highly recommend it!
On Saturday, November 18th, Law will be doing a reading from her book and discussion as part of the Critical Trafficking and Sex Work Studies Research Symposium. There will be other authors who work in the field as well, including contributors of the book, Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex, which I reviewed earlier this year. There will also be a panel discussion on the most recent constitutional challenge case that sex workers launched.
If ever you were curious to hear sex worker perspectives in person, this is your chance!
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