What's the deal with strippers, anyway?

I believe that people are more similar than they are different. All kinds of forces in modern society are at work to make us believe in an us-vs.-them mentality. Conflict fuels consumption.

Today I have interviewed two dancers / strippers from a Salt Lake City strip club to find out more about this hush-hush segment of society. These ladies have a surprising amount in common with your mother who works at the school district office.

First, a few interesting “figures”…

Strippers earn more when they’re ovulating
Strippers make an average of $30 per hour more when they are ovulating than when they are menstruating, according to a study by the University of New Mexico. Women on the pill — who generally do not ovulate — made significantly less. Researchers said this was proof men react to female ovulation, a claim that had some critics scoffing. But, then again, maybe “a stripper who feels sexy gives a more tip-worthy lap dance than one who feels uncomfortable during her period,” said Sharon Begley at Newsweek.

Some say they make as much as lawyers…
How much money does a stripper typically earn? According to a new study from the University of Leeds in the U.K., it’s around $74,000. That’s approximately as much as an American attorney,according to salary experts PayScale. “I congratulate the women who make more money than I do out of a job they say they enjoy,” says Katy Guest at the Independent. But that doesn’t mean I don’t “viscerally object to lap dancing.”

… and are quite happy with their jobs
According to the same study, strippers reported very high levels of job satisfaction. The researchers found the women were overwhelmingly motivated by “career and economic choices” rather than drug addiction or coercion. “These young women do not buy the line that they are being exploited, because they are the ones making the money out of a three-minute dance and a bit of a chat,” says study author Teela Sanders.

Sweden is being shortchanged by strippers
The Swedish government is cracking down on online strippers for failing to reveal their assets. Internet stripteases are legal in Sweden, and the government says that strippers may be dodging up to $5 million in taxes. “The bottom line” here, says Andrew Swift at Foreign Policy, is that “the Swedish tax authority has apparently never heard of the phrase ‘not safe for work.'”

Canada has a stripper shortage
So few Canadian girls are willing to strip that Ontario strip-club owners were forced to hire legal consultants in 2008 to find a way for get foreigners to staff their clubs. Until 2004, the Canadian authorities would give foreign women visas allowing them to strip in the country — but a crackdown prompted a widespread stripper shortage that continues to this day. “The government’s putting a real squeeze on the industry,” said Tim Lambrinos, of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada. “It really is affecting our ability to find dancers.”

http://theweek.com/article/index/206640/5-surprising-facts-about-strippers

Strip Club Statistics

Global strip club annual revenue $75 billion

US strip club annual revenue $3.1 billion

California strip club annual revenue $1 billion

Number of strip clubs in the US 4,000

Estimate number of strippers employed by US strip clubs 400,000

City with the most strip clubs per 100,000 residents (Springfield, Oregon) 9.3

Average yearly earnings for a stripper $125,000

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Adult Video News Media Network

Date Verified: 9.13.2012

http://www.statisticbrain.com/strip-club-statistics/

11 eye opening statistics about strippers:

One-in-three strippers really *are* putting themselves through college. It’s an old joke that every stripper says she’s just doing it to put herself through school. Even the really old one who’d even Gabrielle Carteris would look at and say, “Yeah, no way she’s college age.”A study found that 33 percent are, in fact, telling you the truth: It’s college by day, stripping by night. (With no time left over to fight crime. 0 percent are confirmed superheroes.)

The most common reason for getting into stripping is… wanting to dance? At least that’s what they say. “I just wanted to dance” beat out “I wanted to make more money” or “My job sucked or, uh, didn’t exist.” I guess there aren’t that many jobs for the dance majors of America, but exotic dancing seems like a liiitle bit of a stretch. A dance major getting a job in their field by becoming a stripper is kinda like an Italian major getting a job in their field by working at Olive Garden.

About one out of 10 strippers is married. And only 13.5 percent have kids. And yet…somehow the one you get a lap dance from always falls within percentage, and always wants to tell you about ’em.

About one in eight get health benefits. And somehow, four percent get vision coverage too. (Although based on the binomial distribution of handsome strip club clientele, being able to see clearly isn’t always a good thing.)

There are wild swings in earning potential. The pay at the end of a night is extremely variable — it depends on the city, the club, the cut the club takes, the prices, the customer turnout, and how many people are really just there for the $11.99 buffet. The website Payscale had strippers taking in anywhere from $20,000-a-year to $122,000-a-year.

Some strippers have been in it for decades. The median age is between 23 and 24… but some strippers slug it out WAY longer than that. The five-year mark is usually the point-of-no-return of stripping… get out then, or buy stock in a company that manufactures nine-inch heels.The breakdown at any given moment in time is about 12 percent of strippers are rookies in their first year… 55 percent have been there one to five years… 19 percent have been there five to nine years… six percent have been there 10 to 20 years… and eight percent of grizzled old veterans have been there more than 20 years. Twenty years! By that point you’ve probably inhaled a bushel’s worth of glitter AND could identify “Cherry Pie” on “Name That Tune” in two notes.

One-in-five female strippers has dated a customer; as have three-in-four male strippers. The most surprising part of that? Three-fourths of male strippers have found a woman willing to date them after seeing them hairlessly dance around in a shimmering gold banana thong-ammock.

There are more than nine female strippers for every one male stripper.The industry checks in around 92 percent female, eight percent male. Essentially the opposite ratio of Google+.

86.3 percent think stripping is a legitimate line of work… eight percent think it’s prostitution. But that’s not to say it’s a different eight percent. It’s not out of bounds to think prostitution is a legitimate line of work. It’s at least as legitimate as being a life coach or personal shopper or storage unit flipper.

Eight out of nine strippers would recommend stripping to a friend. For all the hype about how horrible stripping is, the dominant majority really seem to like it. Unless this is one of those “I’m miserable, come be miserable with me” recommendations. Like being a tour guide at the University of Iowa.

89 percent were raised in a religious home and 91 percent are still close with their parents. So religion isn’t a magical anti-stripping elixir. If you really want to keep your kid from becoming a stripper, the only guaranteed solution I can think of is to follow the Mr. Belding Buddy Bands axiom and make it uncool… by becoming a stripper yourself. So get on out there and dance.