I became a stripper and married Desirability. I want a divorce.

reflections from making rent money with my tits <3

I fully fell in love with stripping and I am breaking my own heart, but I have to go.

I do not want to paint stripping or sex work like a giant, oppressive force that ruined my life. That was graduate school. Stripping was, honest to goodness, keeping me funded and sane. My first home club was phenomenal and had so much space, architecturally and socially, for people to be as excellent in being unusual. Folks were weird. You could be any type of way and it was lovely. We had a couple giant static poles that were twenty, thirty feet easy— literally all the way up to the ceiling. Tall enough to fall and break your neck, most definitely. More than tall enough to scare the bejeezus out of me (who was still working in the quintessential clear six-inch pleaser). I watched my coworkers climb many (many) feet in the air and routinely blow my mind. A bitch was green. I so rarely covet. I do not get jealous easy— not of other people’s money, or other people’s bodies, or anything. The club is generally a field of work where it’s best to mind your own.

Listen to the essay right here!

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Watching pole work as a stripper is different. Not only do I know what it takes now, I know you personally. We see each other naked on the regular. We kiki and share smokes and you know about my bullshit boyfriend and I fawn over pictures of your kid. You had the audacity to be regular with me and then there you are, up there, defying gravity. It was awe, reverence, and jealousy all broiling at the back of my throat. I didn’t know how to do shit and I hated that. I started to climb the pole.

Something about the physical demand of stripping meant that I never felt bad about weaponizing my desirability for money. I was addicted to the adrenaline of gambling my safety. I was so deliciously, feverishly, in my body. I love the physicality of being and embodying sex. I love that people (men) could not tear their eyes off me. I love what the discipline of pole did to my sculpture and my psyche. I love the pain. I relished the pain. I know that’s probably something I should bring up with my therapist, but it’s still true. I loved the total, somewhat delusional faith I put in my body to endure continuously. Spin pole has ignited something in me; I have never trusted in my body like that. Not in track, not in ballet, barely in gymnastics. I never even practiced pole outside work. I would get cross-eyed in the bathroom, waltz on stage in eight inch heels, and swing my shit around. She knew what to do every time. As dazzled as everyone else was on stage by me, I was in equal awe of myself. I was pulling tricks out my ass, I was watching myself alongside the audience fly for the first time, I was upside down feeling the orgasmic qualities of weightlessness and seeing it rain dollars, half a bottle of champagne in. My body had me. The rush is dizzying.

It’s an easy life to be addicted to.

I also knew I was wrong for asking all that of her, my body. I used to be a sober stripper. I used to be excited to go to the club and make money. I used to think, sincerely, it was the best job in the world. I don’t have any problems with substance use at work (of any kind); I personally had a relationship with my body that used to be reciprocal. It’s sort of banana nuts to demand that much physical, practical labor of my body and then also be cocaine skinny*. My groceries were rotting in my fridge because I did not have the physical or mental strength to cook them. In the last six months of dancing, I watched myself bend my body to my mind’s will with no aftercare, no gratitude. When I still loved the club, I loved to stretch. I loved to roll out. I loved to take an hour after work to massage my body and stretch and tell her thank you. I never forced her to do anything she did not want to do.

And then I was. It was by force. The upkeep was brutal. This period now, the time I am writing all this down confessing all my inconsistencies, is the first time in many years I haven’t had a pedicure. I actually forgot what my feet… look like on their own accord. The new club, while lovely and still diverse, was not weird at all. It was very fucking corporate and I was suffocating. The gender dysphoria alone. Alone. I would look at myself transform into a Black Barbie and taste bile. Lord. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t on Drugs but there was substance use happening to cope—way more caffeine, way more sugar. All this restless, creative, grief-induced energy. The grief, in large part due to death of loved ones, was exacerbated by my various deaths to self; the little shuffles I did to my body, mind, and circumstance force the open pursuit of Beauty + capital to make sense for the person I was. For the Politic that keeps me alive. It never did. Never for a second did it make sense to put my most important bits in eternal hibernation so I could make more money than I need.

Never for a second did it make sense to put my most important bits in eternal hibernation so I could go make more money than I needed.

Briefly, before I close out, I want to explain my use of pronouns here. On the internet, I cite they/them pronouns to let people know I am genderqueer (and more importantly, that she is an incorrect assumption). In real life, all pronouns are appropriate. My body is a she and can usually happily coexist with the he of my psyche. They are, in fact, in a desperate and clandestine love affair, my body and mind. When we (we three, Body, Mind, and who you are speaking to now) made the decision to pursue stripping, my body took it upon herself to make some business deals with Desirability. And he was fine. I’m such a sucker for rich men with pretty ass teeth, and Desirability was looking at me throwing fat cash night after night after night. She started fucking him. Aaaaand she… didn’t clear it with the rest of us because she knew we would say no, and Psyche and I said nothing because we did not want to wake Politic (who was taking a nap after the summer of 2020). So, with no real accountability (and really bound to my mind in any enforceable way), she up and married Desirability. She considered offers to be a rich housewife. She trained herself to always arch, always flex, always pant, always point in ways that were most suitable to the people that wanted me the most. She performed for the check and loved it. Commas in your bank account taste so good. So. She decided to commit to the consistency of loving something bad and lying about how much it costs you.

Preening for the gaze of desirability is now by rote. She grooved it into her muscles and so now we all drip sex basically always. Even when we three do not want to or do not mean to. And true, none of us really knew just how damaging the changes she made were. We all watched it happen and said nothing, or if we wanted to say something we instead did drugs (all of us. happily). I will tell you: I rarely feel jealousy, but my mind is ego driven. He was pissed. He felt forgotten, because he was. I always say “I stuck my brain in a jar, then jar in my locker, to go to work.” And that is true. They stopped making love. I stopped reading. She repressed him so he worked her to death— and I, the narrator of this story and they in between them, became a miserable insomniac. We missed each other and were too mad to say so. We three hated the club. Pole work became the only part of the job that I looked forward to, until one day I was Thinking While High at work and I saw the way rich, rich men were tossing literal dollar bills at us and I… couldn’t deny the dystopia. Politic popped its eye open and took one look around at the mess we made of our life starting screaming. I had to go. Imagine every time you go to work, something starts screaming at you. I’m making my last stand dancing for profit in the month of September, in the year of 2022.

This is not a critique of sex work or sex workers.

You can miss me with that shit. Not everyone moves through this world like I do and nobody else needs to; I am already here. Stripping was not always this disharmonious, and I don’t believe it always will be. I don’t believe that I needed to make these trades to make the money that I did, or the money I needed. But I did. And so for now, I am too fractured. I am filing my divorce papers. I have to go. Whatever it will be in the future, it can’t continue like this.

these were such a shitty pair of first heels too lmfao I only really wore them recreationally. Ellie as a starter shoe?? those thin ass ankle straps? BFFR

a love letter to myself, entitled “the death of a baby stripper.”

well, girl. goodbye.

this is the first and only time in your life where you have been chipper and it was honestly such a cute look. no wonder you have such faith in general humanity!! there were at least four times I can think of off dome that you could have been a dead hooker, you beans for brains lovergirl. i love you. i’m not half as brave as you and never will be again. you astonish me. thank you for your tenacity. thank you for feeling proud of yourself always, even when you left the club in the negatives. thank you for making the pilgrimage from your car to your front door at 4am. thank you for the tea you drank and the leaf you smoked nursing yourself back into reality after every shift, in your tilted kitchen, no heat, bullshit landlord apartments (until we could treat ourselves to some stainless steel appliances). thank you for allowing yourself to make what you knew was The Wrong Decision just so you could taste life for yourself. my nigga in christ, you have truly lived a life already. thank you for leading with your generosity. in fact, extra thank you’s for never allowing the crusty and unending stinginess of men stop you from being generous as fuck. thank you for your open exhibitionism and your dedication to keeping your sanity and for learning to let go of this body. you made a fool and a dancer out of us both. I don’t know where i’m going now but I will never forget you. I will carry you with me.

always.

love and love,

ismatu <3

*this is a joke. :)