What You May Not Know About Strip Clubs in the Daytime
By: Erin Taylor
Tags: Work, Sex Work, Feminism, Equality, Sexuality

At 11 am, there is usually a group of regular daytime shift girls near the back door entrance, waiting to be let in. Some daytime girls work only daytime, but not all of them. Some, like me, would jump between day and night shifts, tweaking the formula to find out which shift made more money. Daytime shifts meant less competition, but it also meant less crowds, so we had to push our luck either way.

But I know many people assume the club at 11 a.m. is empty anyway — that there’s no way dancers make money during the daytime. Who goes to a strip club during the day, right?

Why would there be girls eager to strip at 11 am?

Well, in case you need reminding — and I’m happy to do it for you — most strippers lead very regular lives outside of the strip club.

Some daytime strippers are moms who can only work the hours that their children are in school.

Jasmine, the mom of 4, was a total MILF if I’ve ever seen one. She was tall and blonde with a tiny waist and a gorgeous smile. I always loved how her face lit up when she showed me pictures of her kids’ school art on her phone; her babies were her favorite thing to talk about. She was just an ordinary mom with a not so ordinary job — but she made it work, and she was bad-ass because of it.

Some strippers are college students who have class or school events in the evenings.

Cinnamon, the pole-dancing expert, was always the first to leave the club at 5 pm. She had evening classes three times a week to finish her psychology degree at the university in town, and she needed to work and sleep a regular schedule to maintain her scholarship. “If I work a night shift and drink myself dumb, I can’t concentrate in class or do homework the next day. I work dayshift for my own good,” she told me.

I admired Cinnamon for her honesty because other college girl strippers I knew refused to strip during the day because “dayshift girls are not as pretty as night shift girls”. They’d work nights only because of a stupid and incorrect stereotype, and then sleep in past 1 pm, missing classes and lab assignments until they were dropped from their classes.

(No, dayshift girls are not prettier or uglier than nighttime girls. For the most part, clubs boast an eclectic mix of girls, no matter what time of the day or night.)

Some strippers work during the day to keep up with the lies they tell about what they do for a living.

The truth is, a vast majority of strippers can’t tell their friends, family, and colleagues about working at the club, so they work normal business hours to keep up with their “office-job” appearance.

I was once the stripper who fit this stereotype.

After finishing my MBA, my conservative parents asked about the firm where I had been doing a paid internship.

“Are they going to hire you full time?” my father asked. “Of course they’re going to hire her,” my mother said. “She’s the total package.”

I smiled and said a competing firm offered me a job which wasn’t a lie. They had. I impressed them with my work, and my mentor recommended me for a promotion with a fancy title. But I turned it down. I don’t regret that decision, but sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I had taken that job.

But in that moment, I was scared to tie myself down to one place. I was looking for a different life. I wanted to explore the world and my sexuality. I wanted to be free.

Stripping was my ticket out of normalcy.

I loved it, but I couldn’t tell many people about my unconventional job. As I’ve written before many times, becoming a stripper means becoming an outcast in our society. When people hear “sex work”, they assume you’re a broken person with no other job prospects or dreams, and they feel sorry for you.

I didn’t want any of that, so I kept my new exciting job a secret.

And I worked day shift to maintain my professional appearance; I told anyone who asked that I was working at a new firm during normal business hours. And it worked. I was free for dinners and evening get-togethers without suspicion. It was hard to lie, and I hated doing it, but it worked when I needed it too.