Talking to your Family About Stripping

I got an email today from a sweet young woman named Dallas who recently started learning about becoming a stripper.  She is having a problem deciding what to tell her ultra-religious mom what she is doing for cash.  I am blessed (and cursed) to have a mom that could honestly care less what I do for money, but I know exactly what I would do if I weren’t.  I do have a couple of adorable grandparents who would never, ever understand and so far white lies have worked for me.
I don’t think it’s OK to lie to your family, really, even if you think she should be ok with your decisions.  In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to, but in this case I think a white lie might be the best policy.  Hopefully you will live to be one-hundred.  Hopefully less than 10 of those years will be spent being a stripper.  You only have one family and you need them.  They need you. You can’t build a new one, and sometimes you can’t mend something once it’s broken.  It will be less than one-tenth of your life that you spend on the pole–If you will break your mom’s heart and risk your relationship with her by telling her you dance, just don’t.  Why would you?  You wouldn’t sit down with her and tell her about that time you tried anal, or acid, or a threesome.  It’s not lying, it’s editing yourself for your audience.  You don’t need to talk about your mom to your customers, and you don’t need to talk about your customers to your mom.  If she doesn’t understand, she will blame herself.  She will think you are degrading yourself and it’s because she didn’t teach you any better.

Sometimes dancers think they need to be 100% real all the time.  It’s a thing that we do to protect ourselves-we puff out our chests and say, “Fuck you if you don’t like me.” In the real world, that doesn’t have to be the case.  You can be real.  You can be close and honest, but you don’t need to be transparent. There are truths that you are allowed to keep private.

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