I thought I had a pretty good handle on the ways that British strip clubs exploit strippers—in particular, the fact that strippers have to pay the club to work. But reading The Ethical Stripper by Stacey Clare has been eye-opening. (Clare has worked as a dancer in the UK and abroad for ten years.)

One worker, for example, was selling a lot of ten-minute nude dances for £100—until the club realised, and instituted a new rule that all nude dances had to be in the VIP room, where the ‘ten minute package’ costs £70, of which the club takes twenty percent, leaving the dancer with £55. If a client pays on card for an hour in the VIP room he’ll be paying £720, but a combination of card surcharges and ‘room rent’ means that the dancer gets less than half of that.

Notice that ‘room rent’? Yes, in addition to paying to work at all, dancers often have to then pay again to work in the VIP room, which is—you remember—where they have to go to sell nude private dances. They are paying to work twice over. If they are a few minutes late out of the VIP room, the dancer will be hit again for additional ‘room rent’. (A dancer who questioned this confusing profusion of ways for the club to take money off workers was suspended for two weeks—without pay, obviously, because as we’ve established, the dancers aren’t paid.)

Maybe you’re thinking that the lack of workers’ rights must suck, but £350 for an hour’s work doesn’t sound too bad. Perhaps, but bear in mind that with all the costs and fines that dancers are subject to, it is easily possible for a dancer to leave work in debt to the club—especially as the system where dancers pay to work mean it is entirely in the interest of club management to fill the club with dancers even on quiet nights. Instead of losing money on wages, as they might in another business, the club is still making money on quiet nights because it is charging the dancers to be there—while the lack of clients means the dancers are competing over scraps. When the pandemic came, bar staff, security workers and managers could all access furlough pay, but of course dancers were excluded on the basis that they are self-employed.

These conditions are not inevitable. The Ethical Stripper does a good job of showing how they are produced by various policy decisions around stripping—particularly the 2009 Policing and Crime Act, which brought in ‘SEV licenses’ (SEV stands for ‘sexual entertainment venue’). In an incident where the DJ was found to be stealing from the dancers, and was caught on CCTV doing so, the club owner chose not to report to the police, because such a report would threaten his SEV licence. I feel sceptical—as does Clare—that the police would respond ‘well’ to a crime against strippers, but it speaks to the way sex workers are made vulnerable by the law that there is implicit pressure on bosses not to report (pressure that doubtless gets passed down to dancers), as to do so might threaten the venue license, and by extension, everyone’s jobs.

Clare talks about a stripper-run monthly night, where, because it was run by the dancers themselves, they could decide the conditions. The dancers decided who to invite, what the rules were, and—most importantly—no dancer was skimming money off any other dancer for fines, ‘room rent’, or anything else. The dancers arranged it so that there were many more clients than dancers, meaning all the dancers could easily make money—the opposite to how standard strip clubs operate. This worker-run night was shut down when the SEV licensing system came in, as the pubs which the dancers used as venues could not navigate the expensive, complicated licences.

One of the most shocking parts of the book details the experiences of dancers who have been filmed by undercover investigators as part of licensing stings. These investigators, who are often former police officers, are sometimes hired by rival strip club bosses and sometimes by feminist groups. Laura, who was filmed as part of such an investigation, was deeply disturbed at how much personal information on her was gathered in the sting: ‘He included my age, where I’m from, where I live now, he described how I look, he talked about how I’m an activist for sex workers’ rights…’ This is, of course, in addition to the video taken of her covertly and without her consent, dancing in an intimate context. (Elements of this sting approach are reminiscent both of the spy cops scandal and of revenge porn.) The council investigation into the footage lasted seven months, and the council meeting discussing the investigation lasted over three hours, but at no point in the process was Laura contacted or invited to give her perspective. She felt understandably humiliated. Worse, the outcome of the investigation was that the council called for her to be punished specifically (‘the council expects appropriate disciplinary action to be taken against the dancers concerned’). Laura was suspended for two weeks.

That the SEV licensing system worsened working conditions should be of no surprise: neither the law nor the Home Office guidance on the law shows any interest in the working conditions of the dancers. (By contrast, questions as to how visible the club is—its advertising, whether it has patrons queuing outside, the character of the area it is situated in—get a lot of attention in the guidance.) However, the feminist groups who campaigned for the licensing system consider it to be, broadly, a success, because it allows councils to impose a ‘nil policy’: i.e., to have zero strip clubs in their jurisdiction.

This lack of interest in how the law they campaigned for has made dancers’ working conditions worse makes these campaigners’ frequent use of dancers’ welfare in their case against the clubs seem rather cynical. (And concern for the dancers is barely skin-deep: scratch the surface and you instantly find disgust. The feminist group who were responsible for the undercover filming of dancers sneer on their website at ‘women who are empowered by taking their clothes off and wrapping their implants round the nearest pole’.) That the tactic of covert filming of dancers is likely to result in punishment for those dancers is seemingly not of any concern for those groups—and indeed it wouldn’t make sense to be worried about women like Laura losing their jobs for two weeks when the whole aim of the campaign is to make women like Laura lose their jobs permanently.

Criticism can sometimes be too scorched-earth, and I want to make clear that my issues here don’t detract from the fact that I think this book is an immensely valuable examination of dancers’ working conditions, but there are parts of the book that I didn’t like. My first difficulty is with the title—The Ethical Stripper. To me this title unavoidably implies that a key problem with the strip club industry is that the strippers themselves are insufficiently ‘ethical’. Clare is riffing on The Ethical Slut, and indeed quotes a section from this book calling non-monogamous people ‘sexual philanthropists’. Whatever one might think about this framing for recreational sex (personally, I think it’s bad), it is a terrible frame for the sex industry because it implies that the sex worker herself has power over the client—she is the philanthropist and he, presumably, is the charitable beneficiary of her sexual performance. This is, to say the least, both a distortion and an inversion of the real power dynamic between worker and client.

In some places therapy-speak unfortunately displaces political analysis. Clare writes that anyone denied their rights at work is a victim of ‘gatekeeping’ and that managers must have ‘narcissistic traits’. To me, the way managers behave is better explained by thinking about the structural power they have over workers, especially where those workers have very limited recourse due to gig-economy-style ‘self-employment’ and lack of union support. We are told that ‘merely reducing the male population to latent aggressors does nothing to address the underlying social and psycho-emotional circumstances of trauma in which abuse occurs’, which seems to displace a more productive analysis of patriarchy.

Elsewhere Clare writes that ‘disregard for the lived experience of sex workers could be seen as narcissistic gaslighting’. I completely understand that disagreement on these issues can feel traumatic, especially when the stakes are so unevenly distributed (some people in the conversation don’t like strip club advertising; other people are at immediate risk of losing their income). But I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that disagreement is in itself actually abusive (a là ‘gaslighting’). However perhaps I’m invested in saying that because I’m about to do some more disagreeing!

The section on the movie Hustlers (2019) is the weakest chapter in the book. Clare is highly critical of the film for a number of reasons (she writes that watching it was ‘slow-motion carnage’), but her criticisms reflect priorities that I struggle with. We are told in an outraged tone that the dancer who trained Jennifer Lopez for her role has never been a stripper—something I find hard to get worked up about. This is tied to the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’, with Clare writing that she disliked Hustlers because the film turns ‘sex work culture into something to be consumed’. I don’t think it makes sense to conceptualise stripping in these terms: after all, the performance is, by definition, for sale. That’s what makes it sex work, as opposed to sex fun.

The mainstreaming of social justice perspectives means we are having a bit of a cultural moment of grappling over where and when it is acceptable for art to depict traumatic events or to show marginalised people behaving badly. Sex workers are rightly sceptical of the screen trope of the nameless, disposable hooker, typically murdered to kickstart a story about other people—you know, people that actually matter, like cops. But reading The Ethical Stripper makes me wonder if backlash to that trope is in danger of leading us into opposing any cinematic depiction of bad things happening to sex workers. On Hustlers, Clare writes ‘we are lacking tales about sex workers who don’t get arrested’, and says of male managers that they ‘get away scot-free; club bosses are virtually absent from the story’—but then adds that this is may be a good thing: ‘who wants to hear and see male characters in positions of power any more?’ In this view, it is the more feminist option to gloss over police violence and exploitative management, which seems a weird choice both for realist cinema and for the sex worker rights movement.

But the overarching issue Clare takes with the film is that showing strippers drugging and robbing clients will stigmatise strippers in general. I have sympathy with these anxieties, but I also have misgivings about the idea that art should only show marginalised people ‘behaving well’. To me, the protagonists of Hustlers are classic anti-heroes: yes, maybe if they were being their ‘best selves’ they wouldn’t behave the way they do, but we find ourselves rooting for them despite their flaws, their mixed motives, and their imperfect choices. In The Ethical Stripper these mixed motives are seen as a problem or even an incoherence in the film, whereas I find them to be a realistic and sympathetic depiction of human life.

In a context awash with clever little Didion-quoting memoirs, I like that The Ethical Stripper is perhaps a little messy, not a memoir, and that there are no Didion epigraphs in sight. Bad cultural criticism aside, the central argument of the book is solid and convincing. Like other gig economy workers, dancers are organising and getting wins. Clare’s book is a testament to her years of hard work in the service of improving dancers’ working conditions, and to a vital sex worker rights movement.