First date's reveal some upsetting home truths

So I've recently been on my second date with a gorgeous and driven city type, and whilst it was in many ways a success - he's been texting me since, he looked me in the eye and said he liked me (!), and we had a kiss or two - the experience has left me confused and wanting.
Firstly, a bit of backstory.  I'm fairly inexperienced in the world of dating.  I tend to meet guys when drunk or high at one of the myriad of house parties and club nights that I find myself at, then take them home with me that night.  I have no time to fanny around (excuse the pun) with the first-dates-lets-meet-for-coffee-malarky, as my free evenings are sacred to me as a lapdancer who works nights.  On top of this, as a hustler, if I see a man I want, I get him, right there, right then.  It's in my DNA now.
And when I have a man I like, I've always embarked on an intense relationship, where we are practically joined at the hip, our two souls and bodies deeply intertwined, our dreams shared.
However, a couple of months ago I got my heart broken, in one of those unexpected moments that life throws at you - one day we were planning Valentine's, the next he'd come round to tell me that it was over.
Just like that.
The feelings of depth and abandonment overwhelmed me so completely I felt like I had just stepped into the pages of a Twilight novel - suddenly I was Bella Swan, alone, abandoned, and utterly rejected, staring into space and all food and pleasure turning to ashes in my mouth.  I drank, I cried, then I drank some more, until eventually my friends and family pulled me  out of it and I returned to normalcy.


Several months have passed now, and so I've begun to look at men again, feel the familiar stirring in my loins, flutters in my stomach - my capacity for love has returned.  So I've been on a couple of dates with the one guy in London I currently find even a little bit cute - with unexpected results.

• Age and Experience has made me picky;  I don't seem to fancy anyone.  At all. Even though I meet lots of guys at the club, many of them hot, rich and successful, and we have brief erotic experiences together.  I get chatted up everyday too - by the guys working in my local cafes, people in the pub - I even got chatted up in Waterstone's bookshop the other day.  But whilst I'm flattered by the attention, nobody excites me - whereas before many of them would of.
• I'm horny, but want it on my own terms.  I've been reading the Fifty Shades of Grey
  trilogy, and totally empathise with one of the main characters.  No,  not the lily-livered Anastasia Steele virginial type, but the dark and tortured Christian Grey.  He doesn't like to be touched - a boundary I have to keep to every night I stride into a booth to give a lapdance.  He wants to fit his sexual experiences into alloted time slots - as a busy working girl myself, I would love to slot 'sex time' into my diary.  He wants to control and manipulate the situation so that he doesn't get hurt or abandoned again - feelings which mirror my own so exactly, so perfectly, yet still push the spine-tingling sex scenes to excess.
• I'm a bit of a nut that try's too hard.  My work personality is only so many shades of grey, if you will, from my normal persona.  The thing is, I do try hard to make sure the person, or people I am with, are happy - I'm a naturally generous and sociable young lady.  However, put me in a situation that I feel uncomfortable in, and I will start over-compensating in order to hide my nerves.  Imagine you are at a dinner party, and the conversation moves out of your depth by a person you are trying to impress.  Your voice might rise a few octaves, you start slavishly insisting on a moot point - you generally become a loud, crazy bore.  That's basically me.  On our first date, I chatted about wine with the waiter, thinking that my few grains of vinery knowledge would impress the guy - who simply smiled, as he casually mentioned that he liked wine too - his family owed some vineyards....  
• I drink way more than the average person.  It's very hard to match your drinking to the other, especially when you are nervous. Especially when they are on beer and you are on Martini's. Either I need to switch drink preferences or I just accept that at heart I am a Geordie Shore lass on the lash.  
  
•  I must be careful not to fall under the 'damaged stripper' stereotype.  Yes, I'm currently damaged goods, and yes, I'm an exotic dancer, but I must be careful that I do not come across as the embodiment of that old Hollywood favourite - the damaged stripper. See the Spearmint Rhino chapter in How To Be a Woman by Caitlan Moran, a brilliant modern feminist writer who documents a visit to the megalithic temple  of nudity; Spearmint Rhino on Tottenham Court Road, and whilst she has a good time, leaves feeling that many dancers come from abusive backgrounds. I certainly don't, but I've just had my heart broken, so until it mends itself or new-found love heals the tear with a warm and fuzzy sticking plaster, I have to keep in mind that my real inner feelings may be taken out of context.

Well, that was fairly cathartic just writing that post - a spot of self analysis can be good sometimes. This is is obviously one of the perks of being me - I can blog and write about my experiences and life under the veil of anonymity, and use the process so that both I and current and future readers can perhaps get a better grasp on what's going through that lapdancer's head.  I've dedicated the past month to posts about dating a lapdancer,  chatting up a lapdancer, and our love lives - please explore and comment.

It's a fairly difficult time for me at the moment, with a sense of my myriad identities being in a state of flux.  I sometimes fear that I have too many faces that are simultaneously on show; my dancer self, my blogging self, my real self. 

But that doesn't mean that I am not happy, and in many ways I am doing well at the moment - work is steady, I have lots of friends at the club, more readers on my blog, and another date on the cards......

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Stripped - too right there!

So I've been pouring over the recent book by `Jennifer Hayashi Dann & Sandrine Levique'
on the UK lapdancing industry- and its ties with the sex industry in the UK in general.
As I mentioned a few posts ago, I was worried it may be harrowing stuff which put me off my profession, and you know what? It is.

Score of women have rolled up to give their two bob bit and I empathise with so many elements of their problems its scary. I'll be posting a review later this week, but so far? It's scarily food for thought....
I already feel worried enough turning up to strip - what if a manager or co-worker found out I had this blog? Would I be seen as a bad influence - a whistle blower? Would I get sacked? I don't know if I am prepared to lose my job for a few scribbled down words.  As regular readers will know, I don't shit-stir, I don't name-drop, I don't moan in explicit detail about my nights at work, the guys I get naked for, the girls I do it for or the managers I tip out each night.  I just generally try and use this as an outlet for my little pieces on the stripclub industry - hell, the sex industry in London in general - I am classed as a sex worker by the government after their ruling a few year back now - anyway, I just like to write on what it is like to be a stripper in London and my thoughts on London's sex industry.
Still, the book Stripped: The Bare Reality of Lap Dancing
paints such a negative picture of exotic dancers and the attitudes that they are faced with that I am glad I have this blog, because in its own miniscule way I can be a voice for all the lap dancers out there who enjoy their jobs, who work in nice clubs, and feel that they are doing a service to mankind itself.
There, I've said it.  I'm a girl providing a service of full-blown, 5 star entertainment.  I'm a stripper. I get your rocks off.  For money. So there.
Just please, if you are my boss, don't figure out who I am and sack me.  I'm not a dancer with a malicious bone in her body - my bones are rather flexible, and tanned and trim at that.  I'm just a girl, who like anybody else, has days where she loves her profession pathway, days where she hates her job, but please don't get scared by my stripper diary.
It's as harmless as a single lapdance..... you can always have one... no1 will notice....

Realised a home truth tonight

Stripping is fairly cliquey - well it's a bunch of girls after all - and naturally I've always strived to be part of the 'in-crowd'.
Despite years of trying, I've always been on the sidelines.
I used to think that I wasn't part of the in-crowd because I wasn't pretty enough.
So I changed my look, imitated the cool girls.

That didn't work.

Perhaps it was because I wasn't funny, generous or stylish enough?

I memorised jokes, shared my sushi, carried a monogrammed designer bags, wore boots & juicy couture velour tracksuits.

Still the conversations were just in passing.

But tonight I saw a girl trying soooo hard, and succeeding, with the in-crowd, when it struck me.
I wasn't defunct in some way
It's because I don't make enough money from guys.( I've never been the best hustler, truth be told.)

To them, I'm a liability.

The smoking ban is tres annoying

As a smoker (occasional, social, whatever), I didn't really mind when the smoking ban came into London a couple of years ago.  Clean air in pubs would be a novelty, although I was dreading going to a club - as soon as I get wasted, I start to chainsmoke. (This is true of many of my friends, but the government hasn't seemed to notice yet that the majority of young smokers only really start a fag session where they get through the first couple of vodka tonics, and then before you know it, the packet of 20 Marlboro's is empty. They seem to think all smokers are blowing smoke into babies faces, or couples desperately have those babies).

But the smoking ban has affected me in another, weirder way that I hadn't originally foreseen.  You see, a lot of the men visiting my club are smokers, and due to the new rules they have to go outside for a cigarette. Outside!  But I can't reach them when they are outside!  I can't hustle them, talk to them, or convince them that the thing they really, really need right now - more than any fag, may I add, is ME!
Even worse, I'm losing count of the number of guys that I manage to win over, and then, just as we are arranging to go, suddenly say;
"We'll have a dance just after I've gone out and had a cigarette."
But the ultimate worse is when the guy and I have decided on a dance, are just excitedly getting up off our seats to go find a booth so that I can give him his four minutes of absolute sexual delight in nudist form, when a voice calls across from another of his friends, "Ere mate, fancy coming out for a quick smoke with me?"
I've yet to meet a man who turns his mate down.  Nicotine addiction is obviously, tragically, more powerful than the call of a beautiful woman.

The rammifications of this go further.  The journey from the front door of the club to his table is a hazardous one, where he will be accosted by many predatory dancers before he gets back to me for the 'promised' lapdance.  Whilst we are (mostly) friends backstage, in the frontline we are out for what we can get.  And the entrance to a stripclub is about as frontline as you get, as all the dancers congregate there, hoardes of 10, 20, 30 women greedily eyeing you up as soon as fresh meat enters their line of sight.  The only thing stopping him from going off with another woman is his sense of decency and loyalty - so not much then!

Of course, a lot of dancers smoke.  I did some research and this article  in the Coventry Telegraph made me laugh.  Who knew that the provincial papers would be the only source of journalistic merit on an issue which affects me personally each and every shift?  It basically says that the council had been receiving complaints about a stripclub called 'Heat' (how ironic) after scantily clad dancers had been lighting up outside the club (surely lighting up in front of Heat is a canny promotional move?)  The really funny bit comes at the end, where the bar opposite complains that the free ogle-show was affecting their business.  Now if I was having a fag across the road from some sexy women in bikinis,  I'd probably finish the packet, hence spending lots of time at said bar.  Why pay the entrance fee when you can watch from 20 yards away for free?

In the West End if you are a stripper wanting to smoke, you have to put on these hideous long jackets, which are clearly a) second hand and b) in a man's size and c) are probably the bouncers rejects, and go outside to smoke in those.  They always stink, the buttons are all missing so you have to hold them fast with one hand, and they are always taken by one of the other girl, so there is usually a queue.  Oh yeah, and you HAVE to wear one of the regulation jackets, even if you have a perfectly serviceable demure long jacket of your own.

I'm shocked at the length of this post! I must really have a secret festering issue with so many aspects of the smoking ban.  I should, of course, rise up and protest, which I will, as soon as I've had a nice cup of tea and a fag....

It's my time of the month - to make money!

You would be forgiven for thinking that when a lapdancer has her time of the month that she takes a few days off work - after all, we are getting our pussies out.

Well you'd be wrong.

Getting a period is good for business!

My tits swell up like juicy soft melons. The water bloating just makes my full ass sexier - unlike jeans, tummy rolls can be carried off with aplomb in the right lingerie.
Weirdly, the men seem to sense it - I must be emitting some sort of sexual pheromone, because my takings are always up when I'm on. Other dancers have corroborated this with me so it's not like I'm talking like a weird freak here.
Mood swings happen so often in the stripclub world that they don't seem unusual to my fellow staff.

And what do we do with the string? Tuck it up us, of course, and be sure to check and change regularly!

Dazed and confused

I will always argue that my work persona - the girlwho is the stage name rather than the girlwho hides behind it - does not affect me oin a day to day reality basis.
But then I have a normal night, and the gulf that lies between me and us seems to be a bit more flexible.
I hang out with a load of old pals, for the past decade or so, and yet I feel detached.  My behaviour, my clothing, my points of conversationalreference just seem off .
F***knows why, darlings....
 
The worst thing that this job has ever given me is a serial short term memory.
It's either because;


a)  I want to forget (sorry to convention, but thats just not true.  I long to recall in HD detail)

b) The drinking, the drugs, the partying, the grooving and the talking, endlessly night after night, have rewired my barin till its all one big blur)

So anyway, why do I feel left out?
Even amongst old friends, a shadow of my former self?

I will tell you why,    it's beause, earnings wise, I am simply a shadow.

I am on the breadline compared to the financial freedom I enjoyed until even just a few months ago.

At first I was afraid, I thought it was me - I was too fat, too blonde, my hair was all wrong, my outfits were like a sack of potatoes.

But tonight I shared my problems, and an old, bestest friend of mine pointed out -

"It's not just you - the whole world's in trouble"

So next time you hear me complaining, just remind me of today's post!!