Sure, everybody knows that strip clubs are fun… once in a while. Especially with a group of friends and super-especially if you can rely on the part-true/part-false wisdom that the strippers are not as smart as you, and therefore, not as subject to the awful psychic suck that you would suffer from if you were doing this job. Think of it: It’s not light work, stripping, especially when you have a brain, a sense of irony, ambitions beyond stripping, and well, we could go on. And since we’ve always wondered, “Just what is it like for the stripper with a brain?,” we’re totally riveted now that we’ve found Hostile City Jane. Meet Jane. That’s not her real name, duh. Jane recently moved to Philly, and one way or another, found herself in the employ of Philly’s light sex trade: Stripping, cam shows and so on. Like most strippers, she’s doing it for the money. But along the way, she’s also learning (and sharing) the incredibly dehumanizing situations your average stripper finds themselves in again and again and again:

Last night was so embarrassing. I was working a VIP party and I was on the ground legs spread eagle waiting for money to be thrown at my vagina. I look up and every single man attending this party is walking out the damn door. I am appalled, embarassed and my soul is shaken. In my most vunerable position I am walked out on. A fucking metaphor for life.

But oh no, there is more. There is always more:

[...] tonight was much worse. My trip around the tip pit sucked in the first place, people were being assholes and offering pennies to me after watching my show. Then I got to the end of the line a there were a bunch of girls with a bachelor party. The girl asked me to bend over…usually it’s one in the front, one in the back and I thought I’d give her a break because she was female and pretty. Well turns out her personality was terribly, disgustingly ugly. As i bent over to touch my toes, she shoved her finger and a dollar into my asshole. This pissed me off in the first place and I got a bouncer and assumed she would be kicked out as she essentially sexually assaulted me. If I though I would have kept my job I would have decked her. But she didn’t get kicked out. All they did was move her to the back of the club, while I had to continue to feel completely uncomfortable for the rest of my shift.

But through it all, Hostile City Jane finds ways to talk about things that are not corrupted by the total and utter darkness of the human soul. The blog is heart-wrenching, sure, but Jane is smart (when at one point on the blog she finally says “I’m too smart to be a stripper,” you’re like THANK GOD YOU FINALLY SAID IT!) and funny — she’s just plagued by a bipolar disorder and the wrong line of work. But there’s gotta be Hollywood ending here. There has to be.
[Photo credit: Jonathan Slingluff/Studio 2728]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 4:30 pm.