Another really cool thing about working in a strip club is not just the money that you make, but the traveling the money can afford you (uh, yeah, my brain has to rationalize this way in order to build up the positive side of my pro/con list- "more available cash" would be another example... let it slide). I recently returned from over a year abroad where I was able to work a meaningful job as a writer, live comfortably and enjoy myself thanks to Third World prices and a strip club piggy bank. Now I'm home and able to slide right back in to get myself city situated again. Thank you service industry!
So I moved to the Middle East a couple years ago after busting my ass through a busy season at the first strip club I bartended at; took the money and ran, as they say. It was in my last days upon leaving when I was working one of my lucrative VIP shifts during the early dinner rush and the owner approached my bar as he had habitually done over the past year or so. I got him a white wine, I'm sure, and we got to chatting. How I hate to waste my charm in these places! Eventually I was relieved by a visiting minion or ass-kisser or someone and my boss said to him about me, "Can you believe this girl? She's leaving us! Going to the Middle East." Then he looked me in the eye and went on, "They hate women over there."
This guy. Who is married with grown children and grandchildren, and spends every day after work in his club with his stripper girlfriend, his best buddies and their own exotic dancing mistresses-AASLUTSCHOOOO! - sorry, excuse me. This guy who eats a big bloody steak, buttery and cheesy side dishes, drinks alcohol and smokes weed, and has sex with a prostitute every night. This old man who had a family party at the same club he cheats on his wife in- parties where his toddling grandchildren roam a place with poles and glowing pictures of fake breasts and jewelry in ass cracks on the wall. Curse the creators of Viagra! How is this old man still alive?
Am I giving myself too away here?
It just gets me thinking. When This Guy said that to me it stuck. Who the hell was he judging?But you 'love' women, is that it? Of course I just smiled and pretended to take him seriously as always. Stifle the opinion! And then I moved to a conservative country where I saw a whole other kind of screwed up. It made me truly realize how men and women are messed up all over the world. Crazy can look like many things. Some women stay virgins until they marry a man they don't love. Some have hymen repair surgery to trick a husband into believing they're a virgin when they're not. Some take their clothes off for money. Men want sex and women find many ways to deal with that- EVERYwhere.
The major languages of the club I'm in now are Spanish and Russian. English isn't popular in the dressing room. Although I'm American through and through, my father's strong Eastern European blood shows up so much on my face that girls are constantly asking me things in Russian. What's most interesting to me is how there was also a reputation that preceded Russian girls in the Middle East. Don't tell me you weren't picturing girls from the pages of Russian Mail Order Bride catalogue too. In Arab countries they were the call girls disguised as belly dancers or the dates for the traveling, rich Gulfie men. They must be the poorest white girls in the world- that's the only rationalization I can get out of that: laws of supply and demand. Stereotypes grow from a small but very real seed, I believe.
Of course I think many things are what they are and happen for a reason. They better- otherwise my good girl reputation was a huge waste of time and I've lost critical hustling years!
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