clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:

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saint-genet:

so my neighbor recently told me about what he called a “worthwhile experience” at a vegan strip club in portland. he told me that all the dancers there are “highly educated and make a shit ton of money.” he described the atmosphere to me and some of the acts that the dancers performed. one of these acts included a woman being sexually molested on stage by a customer with a dildo. to this, i said, “how humiliating” (a reaction that you may understandably think was judgmental). he was annoyed by my reaction. “i promise you she wasn’t humiliated,” he said. he promises me she wasn’t humiliated. i told him about some news stories i’d recently read about sex trafficking at portland strip clubs and other stories about dancers being prostituted or otherwise abused around the united states. mockingly, he says, “I guarantee you nobody is being abused or forced to do anything at the club i went to.” yes, after spending three whole hours at one vegan strip club, he guarantees me that nobody is being abused or forced to do anything. he’s seen it all. he knows everything. nobody is crying. everybody is empowered. freedom. choice. consent. case closed.

so when i googled “vegan strip club abuse”, i obviously expected google to ask, “did you mean vegan utopia of female empowerment?” but instead, this was the first result:

Portland’s Vegan Strip Club Is Being Sued for Allegedly Mistreating Its Dancers  by Tara Burns   January 21, 2015 

here’s some excerpts:

“If you love being assaulted on stage for a dollar or less, this is the club for you,” reads one stripper’s 2011 review of Casa Diablo in Portland, Oregon.

(the rest of that review reads: “If you like basically working as a prostitute for insanely low earnings, this is the place for you. Everyone else, avoid this place like the plague.“)

She’s not the only one who has beef with the world’s first vegan strip club, the official slogan of which is: “Vixens on veal, sizzle not steak, we put the meat on the pole, not on the plate.” Casa Diablo and its proprietors are now being sued by two strippers for $208,276 in back wages, return of unlawful fees, and damages for battery.

Jessica, a Portland dancer who has heard seven years of dressing room gossip about Casa Diablo, says, “It is well known that Casa Diablo has a really unique auditioning process compared to [other clubs]—you have to give full two-way contact lap dances to… Johnny, which is really unusual in this industry.”

Matilda Bickers, one of the dancers suing the club, likewise said new dancers have to audition by giving Zukle a full-friction lap dance. During the dance, Bickers said, “[Zukle] would grab your nipples and be like, ‘They can’t touch you here, or on your crotch,’ and then he’d pat your crotch.” (Apparently touching these areas is now allowed during lap dances at Casa Diablo, but wasn’t three years ago when Bickers first auditioned.) Bickers added that bouncers regularly touched, groped, and untied dancers’ outfits, even after the dancers complained. If dancers touched the bouncers, they could be fined $100.

Dancers I spoke with complained of unreasonably long hours, scheduling insanity, and a pattern of dehumanizing behavior by management that ranged from throwing away a dancer’s non-vegan food to non-consensual groping and spanking. Most recalled some form of sexual harassment and Zukle making fun of emotionally vulnerable dancers. Several mentioned the large self-portrait Zukle painted of himself as the devil that hung in the club, and one shared a heartbreaking story of Zukle ridiculing a young woman for having an abortion.

“I want people to know, and I especially want strippers to know,” Bickers says, “that [these conditions] are illegal.“

Allegations about Zukle’s character aside, all but $20,000 of the lawsuit is for back wages, fees, fines, and related damages. Bickers and Pitts allege that the club failed to pay them minimum (or any) wage, and that Bickers paid the club $64,094 (and Pitts $53,545) in unlawful fees and fines.

in another article about the same case, bickers and pitts list some additional offenses:

The women say they were constantly harassed by the club’s bouncers and management.

“I had one particular bouncer who would just grab my boobs and untie my outfits or spank me,” Bickers said.

Pitts and Bickers claim the owner would ask them to come home to have sex with him or his wife.

“I guess some people would be like ‘Haha, he was just joking,’ but after that incident, he cut my shifts,” Pitts said.

The dancers say, 30 percent of their income would end up being split between the club, the bouncers and DJs. Dancers could also be fined.

“You were fined if you were late. You were fined if you canceled. You were fined if you no-showed,” Pitts said.

The women said dancers would also be fined if they didn’t take their underwear off quickly enough on stage.

“When I just finally decided that I couldn’t go back to work anymore, I think I owed $400,” Bickers said.

“Vixens on veal, sizzle not steak, we put the meat on the pole, not on the plate.”  

“we put the meat on the pole, not on the plate.”

WOMEN ARE NOT FUCKING PIECES OF MEAT but this is a well known “animal welfare activist” strategy, compare women to animals or animals to women and use that comparison to make a misogyny fueled point. (to be clear, I also think animals deserve to be treated well and we do need animal welfare reform but that reform should not be married to misogyny and a lot of the time it seems to be)  Some other examples where animal welfare activists use women’s bodies and explicit misogyny to make points: [x] [x] [x] [x] (NOT ALL OF THESE LINKS ARE SAFE FOR WORK)

This strip club, like every other strip club, operates on the belief that women’s bodies are commodities, are pieces of meat, that they can sell to their customers.  This one has, apparently, the added disadvantage of not even paying out to it’s performers.

Hi! I’ve already responded to OP and told her about some of Casa’s other (sti/staph/hygiene) issues, but I wanted to respond to this too because it’s frustrating to me that a lawsuit about human and labour rights is being used by prohibitionists as fodder for the exact opposite.

So first of all, strip clubs don’t pay their strippers. That’s the main point you need to understand. This lawsuit isn’t only about Casa, it’s also one more building block in the fight to get illegally classified independent contractors (that’s strippers, yes, but also uber drivers, fed ex drivers, nike workers, yoga teachers, and most of the workers at new startups in the bay, just for an example) the rights of employees which greedy and stingy business owners thought to deny them thru the contracting loophole. It’s a little complicated but we can talk more about it if you’re interested.

I appreciate the fact that OP is immediately willing to look closer at the dynamics of cash, coercion, financial exploitation, &c. So often customers walk into the club and they believe–because it’s a part of the performance, right–that by being in the space of the strip club, by being in bikinis and smiling, we’ve already consented to everything. Like OP’s neighbour, they believe because they WANT to believe we’ve given boundary less, and because it would hurt their enjoyment to remember that it’s a very limited consent that happens for specific financial remuneration for a specific period of time.

Strip clubs are predicated on this facade f consent because the common understanding is that people (mostly men) don’t want to be reminded that this is transactional, that will inhibit their spending. So dancers are stuck with this performance of consent that forces them into navigating boundaries and financial talk, performing invisible emotional labour in which the WORK of what we do is hidden behind a performance of enthusiastic consent in order to get paid. If we make it look like the work it is, if we show our distaste for drunken boorish behaviour, if we enforce boundaries without placing the blame on an outside presence and seeming apologetic about it, if we show impatience or boredom or anger, we lose out on the possibility of being paid.

And it extends to club employees too. This reality isn’t as stark everywhere as it is at Casa, most places don’t have bouncers outright assaulting dancers (but most places don’t hire bouncers and barbacks from the customer pool either) but you have to get along: people laugh at the idea of it being possible to sexually harass strippers, loose boundaries are normalised (which is workable if you’re dancers and like each other but is a problem if bouncers are more intimate with one dancer but take the same liberties with all dancers and that one dancer says “I like it, what’s your problem,” which they do constantly) and without employee protections dancers have to constantly navigate pleasant accommodation. Your shifts depend upon getting along with other people: sometimes these other people are stupid, gross, unethical, sneaky, have incredibly inflated egos, like to grope you, like to talk shit about everyone, drink too much, are sloppy drunks, &c.

You make compromises when you don’t have any rights and you need to get by and make money. You get along with people, you smile when you don’t want to, you figure out avoidance tactics. This is true of everyone who has to work with other people but it’s really especially true for workers who don’t have any rights or often even a contract, who depend on the good will of the (men) in charge for pretty much everything: for shifts, for fundraising if we get sick or hurt, to protect us, &c.

Employee rights wouldn’t change all of this: they wouldn’t change society wide misogyny and make entitlement. But they’d give us a baseline from which to push back:

A baseline amount of money we would never leave without, no more leaving in debt, and also a pad against boundaries bending just to make sure you leave in the black.

A clear standard of behaviour for other employees and managers when interacting with us.

And even more importantly, the knowledge that we have rights and that we can seek redress if our rights are violated. The knowledge that we MATTER and that people are invested in protecting us.

There are a lot of problems with Casa, clearly. I effing hate that place and I can’t wait for my money and I can’t wait for everyone else to be inspired to sue him into bankruptcy as well.

And the problems with Casa are basically endemic to strip clubs, to a business format that depends on the uncompensated labour of a work force almost entirely composed of young women [one of the most sneered at and disrespected groups in society, who become even more mocked and disrespected when they take on the weight of “stripper”] and scheduled and controlled and profited off of by older men, in a misogynist society that largely still buys into the permissiveness of rape culture and which totally devalues any kind of feminised labour but ESPECIALLY emotional labour. So that dancers have to perform consent whether or not they’re into it, in the hopes of getting paid.

What I’m trying to say is I think the problems at casa are inextricable from the strip club in its current form.

That doesn’t mean I think dancing or the sex industry needs to be removed as an option. We need rights and better protections, we don’t need the loss of our incomes.

I would not be better off if I had never worked at Casa; if it was made illegal and forced to close. Neither would the other 100+ women who work there. When I started dancing again I HAD a legit job at a daycare, I started dancing again because that job didn’t pay enough for groceries and gas money, let alone my rent. Casa quite literally kept me from being homeless.

What would have helped me at the time and what would help other women is having access to and knowing that we can call upon real and tangible protections. I can’t even tell you how much that would eventually carry over: if we were allowed to have jobs that gave us enough to survive and not just survive but live in a manner that’s enjoyable and not the constant grinding boredom and bleakness of poverty? And if we didn’t have to trade our safety and our right to respect to do it? If we knew that other people still believed we had boundaries to enforce and consent to give and would support our right to that without requiring us to give up our source of income? If men knew that they couldn’t treat US with impunity, the most disposable of the disposable–that would ripple everywhere.

We need rights, not rescue.

You may say “ABOLISH!” if we reach your capitalism-, imperialism-, racism-, misogyny-, and patriarchy-free utopia. Not before.

My personal life and struggles are not a rallying cry for my further oppression and marginalisation. You do not get to use me as an argument for the further criminalisation and oppression of sex workers.

SWERFs are the devil