Like many students Poppy needed a part-time job to pay her way through university. Unlike many students, her job involved dancing naked in front of strangers for money.
“The most difficult part is flirting with people who make your skin crawl. But if someone comes into a shop and you don’t like them, you still have to serve them and be nice to them. It’s just like any other job in that way,” says Poppy, 21.
This idea of normality comes up time and time again. When asked why, unlike other dancers, she didn’t switch between clubs she says: “I had my own locker and my own spot in the dressing room. I felt comfortable there.
“Everyone thinks of stripping and thinks of drugs and prostitution and while it does go on it’s not something the majority of dancers have anything to do with.”
Poppy (not her real name) never thought she would work as a lap dancer. She describes herself as “a nice middle-class public school girl” and moved to Cardiff from Ireland during her gap year to find work. She went for a bar job at strip club For Your Eyes Only but crossed wires meant they thought she was applying to be a dancer.
Talking with the managers, and especially with the other girls working there, she came round to the idea that this was something she could do. The clincher was the money on offer. Working three to four nights a week, dancing topless on the pole and doing nude private dances, Poppy would take home between £400 and £600. If there was a big rugby international at the Millennium Stadium, she could take home double that in a single night (although even strip clubs are not immune to the credit crunch)
Poppy is not atypical in combining studies with stripping. Jamie Willison, general manager of the Fantasy Lounge on St Mary Street, has eight full-time students among the 40 dancers on his books. If you include further education of any sort, that figure rises to 20.
Of course there are downsides. Poppy wants her real name withheld as she hasn’t told her family about it.
“Three or four of my friends cut contact with me when I started doing it. They thought it was disgusting and told me as much. One girl I’d been friends with for seven years hasn’t spoken to me since, she’s appalled by it.”
Several people have accused her of letting down her gender, a charge she articulately rebuts.
“I identify myself as post-feminist. I am all for empowered women but I am for using your sexuality to empower you.
“Besides,” she laughs, “There are many feminists out there who would find it hard not to be swayed by that much money.”
Hear Poppy’s story...
Then there’s the preparation. “It’s an ordeal to get ready. If you’re paying £30 you don’t want a girl with stubbly legs.”
Club owners are quick to point out if a girl has put on weight, or needs to wear more make-up. “The girls understand it’s a glamour industry,” says Mr Willison.
It’s clear that the hair, the make-up and, paradoxically, even the skimpy dresses place a barrier between dancers and clients. It’s not Poppy dancing, it’s a stylised, doll-like part she played for the evening. “It’s pure fantasy,” she says.
Mr Willison agrees. “The girls are very far removed from it. It might be about sex for the punters but it’s not about sex for the girls. It’s about money.”
The extent to which lap dancing clubs are about sex was discussed last month in Whitehall at a surreal hearing of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. A current overhaul of the licensing laws proposes to upgrade lap dancing clubs to “Sex Encounter Establishments.”
Councillor Ed Bridges, Chair of Cardiff Council’s Licensing Committee, says he would welcome the change if it meant people had more of a say about what went on in their communities.
“We wouldn’t necessarily agree with the moral arguments put forward by those passionate proponents of the change,” he says.
When councillors leave morality aside in this way, then arguably formerly unacceptable activities are losing their stigma. These two articles reflect the tensions caused by this process of social evolution.
Kate Nicholls, secretary of the Lap Dancing Association, hopes attitudes are changing. The LDA was set up two years ago expressly to offer lap dancers an alternative to joining the International Union of Sex Workers.
She says: “It’s important to differentiate our members from sex workers. Our girls see themselves as entertainers. And the idea of sex encounters is anathema to most club owners. It’s not what they see going on in their clubs.”
Poppy agrees. Since breaking her foot a few months ago she has stopped working as a stripper but she is adamant she never had a great moral dilemma about it. If anyone overstepped the mark security were always swift to kick them out.
“I think a stripper provides a good service, the same as a taxi driver, a doctor or a fireman. They fill your needs, you pay them and everyone’s happy.”
She wouldn’t consider what she did as sex encounters. “I wouldn’t want anyone touching me, no amount of money is worth that. It’s the difference between selling your body and selling your soul. That’s quite poetic!”
Strip clubs in South Wales
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