How Young is Too Young?

ROOKIE STRIPPERS, HEAR ME OUT!  Unless you are in a dire situation that you absolutely need to get out of, in my opinion, there is no reason to strip if you are under the age of twenty two.  A beautiful sense of immortality often accompanies youth, and though there are many reasons teenagers shouldn’t strip, the “it can’t happen to me” attitude is number one.  When we are young, we assume that everyone’s intentions are pure, we are blind to red flags.  We learn how to be adults from falling on our faces, looking around and seeing these flags, strategically placed around the areas in our lives that we have hopelessly flubbed.  In time, if we are perceptive, we stop falling on our faces because we learn to see the flags as our warning.  If you haven’t learned what to look for yet, how can you keep yourself safe in the fast pace of the strip club world?  The traps at strip clubs are worse than the traps in the normal world.  If you haven’t learned how to keep your eyes open for super sketchy situations, take your time.  Once you start red flags pop up  around other people and especially around your own behaviour, that’s kind of a decent indicator that you will be able to keep yourself safe.

Starting stripping too young won’t make you grow up faster either, even though that’s what people who know nothing about it will tell you.  Being a dancer can actually stunt your growth or stop it all together.  I know strippers who are fifty years old who dance because they have no other choice, and I don’t mock them when I say that.  There are of course some women who stay working into maturity because they like the work, or that it’s still lucrative and it is supplemental or funds their passions.  Those are different stories.  I am talking specifically about women who never learned another way of life and have been kept stripping or escorting for much longer than they wanted to be.  In a normal setting, a person moves past that ‘whatever’ mentality as they mature.  They get accolades and responsibilities that give them pride and purpose.  You’ll never have that in a strip club.  This industry enables and encourages irresponsibility and immaturity.  There is a lot of money to be made off of young women in this world, and the longer you stay in, the better you get at making sales, even if you aren’t fresh and nineteen anymore.  If you start working in an environment that encourages (and profits from) your recklessness before you learn your own personal limitations, it restricts you from making that adjustment into the life you want.  Your goals at eighteen are so set in fantasy, you haven’t tried your hand at them yet.  No matter what your age is, if you’re unsure, start by getting a different job at the strip club, like waitress, door girl, or bartender.  Start having a little bit of contact with the girls and customers, but not too much.  See how it makes you feel first, and take your time making the adjustment into dancing if you like it.

I Remember that I only speak from personal opinion and experience, and of course all things are objective, but I believe that most young dancers are unprepared to make such a life altering decision, even if they are emotionally mature.  One of the recurring themes of this book is habit and pattern. The likelihood of building abnormal habits around love and sex are all too real if you spend the years that you are building a concept of normalcy in a strip club.   Sex should be at least somewhat sacred, and when you put a dollar amount on it, that can be really confusing to a newcomer to the adult dating scene.

More unnerving than the weird things that can happen to your sex life based on habit is the negativity that can come from trauma in the line of duty.  There are most certainly predators in this environment who consciously target young and inexperienced girls and prey on their naivety, and the outcome can be devastating.  They aren’t always customers, either.  Some of them work with you and are very good at hiding their snakelike intentions.  To young people interested in the adult industry, I always say, “We’ll be here in five years.”  I know many of you nineteen year olds are reading this and shrugging it off, but I can’t stress it enough.  Sometimes I wish I had those extra five years of income, but I would have wasted the money anyway. Nineteen-year-old girls rarely invest in their retirement funds or spend their cash on tuition. If you’re young or unsure if you’re ready, I’ll tell you that I did fine as a waitress and bartender.  It is most certainly generous wages and bottle service waitresses crush most strippers in annual income.