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A review by zinelib
Neon Girls: A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power by Jennifer Worley
5.0
Have you seen the stirring documentary Live Live Nude Girls Unite? Neon Girls is a memoir of one stripper/unionist's experience working at the Lusty Lady. Worley is a queer grad student eking out a thin salary at a publishing house in the East Bay when she sees an ad for strippers at double her current hourly wage. 1990s San Francisco Bay Area feminism embraced women taking control of their sexuality.
It's when the strippers realized they didn't have total control that they began really questioning their labor conditions. Some of the viewing booths have one-way windows--to provide the customers with anonymity--which obviously they take advantage of by filming the dancers without their consent, robbing them of their privacy and ability to make a living.
There are other or more significant issues, depending on your positionality. The Lusty had rules about how many "exotics" could be onstage at any given time, and how many performers could have small breasts, which meant lots of shifts for curvy white women, and the ability to take extra shifts, and the shaft for women of color. Same went for private rooms. A white dancer needed just to ask for a shift in the more lucrative booth, where a Black dancer was given a "wait and see" to their request.
As an academic, Worley provides history, placing the Lusties on a continuum from 1970s sex workers in France and San Francisco and to the more recent EDA: Exotic Dancers Alliance. The EDA had formed due to even worse conditions at other San Francisco clubs, where dancers had to pay stage fees and hustle lap dances while offstage. She also relates a new-to-me term that only gets about 1500 hit on the Goog, snarxist, which she uses to describe the union's "minister of propaganda."
The union has triumphs and tragedies--some of the most reliable tear bait for fans of fighting The Man. There's one story about the queer/burlesque community showing its support that is positively gleeful. Same with other union members supporting the picket. That is some feel-good solidarity, at which San Francisco excels.
One caveat: I would like to read a BIPOC dancer's narrative to center and better understand their struggles, as they are referenced, but not fully articulated in Worley's story.
It's when the strippers realized they didn't have total control that they began really questioning their labor conditions. Some of the viewing booths have one-way windows--to provide the customers with anonymity--which obviously they take advantage of by filming the dancers without their consent, robbing them of their privacy and ability to make a living.
There are other or more significant issues, depending on your positionality. The Lusty had rules about how many "exotics" could be onstage at any given time, and how many performers could have small breasts, which meant lots of shifts for curvy white women, and the ability to take extra shifts, and the shaft for women of color. Same went for private rooms. A white dancer needed just to ask for a shift in the more lucrative booth, where a Black dancer was given a "wait and see" to their request.
As an academic, Worley provides history, placing the Lusties on a continuum from 1970s sex workers in France and San Francisco and to the more recent EDA: Exotic Dancers Alliance. The EDA had formed due to even worse conditions at other San Francisco clubs, where dancers had to pay stage fees and hustle lap dances while offstage. She also relates a new-to-me term that only gets about 1500 hit on the Goog, snarxist, which she uses to describe the union's "minister of propaganda."
The union has triumphs and tragedies--some of the most reliable tear bait for fans of fighting The Man. There's one story about the queer/burlesque community showing its support that is positively gleeful. Same with other union members supporting the picket. That is some feel-good solidarity, at which San Francisco excels.
One caveat: I would like to read a BIPOC dancer's narrative to center and better understand their struggles, as they are referenced, but not fully articulated in Worley's story.