Successful stripping is all about customer loyalty, PhD contends
Some prefer to excite the patrons, while others play up friendship
MONTREAL • What are the keys to a successful career as a stripper?
If you think it’s all about bump and grind, think again.
A Montreal sociologist recently studied nude dancers at two bars and concluded it’s all about marketing and communications.
Shirley Lacasse earned a PhD last year at the Université de Montréal for a thesis based on 300 hours of interviews and observations at a no-touching strip bar in Montreal and a suburban contact dance club.
She was drawn to the subject after some strippers protested in 1995 against the shift toward contact dances, opening the door to previously banned fondling.
Known in Quebec as the danse dix ($10 dance), and often practised in secluded booths, it has become the rule in most Montrealclubs since it was legalized by a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in December, 1999.
The top court said community standards are broad enough to encompass fondling in strip bars while excluding contact with genitalia and penetration.
Ms. Lacasse set aside the view that servicing men in this way is exploitation — an approach that is challenged by a Montreal feminist and a University of Ottawa sociologist who take issue with the study’s underlying assumption that so- called exotic dancing can be studied without looking at such issues as women as sex objects.
Ms. Lacasse looked at lap dancers, more than half of whom were supporting families, as “self-employed workers who set the conditions in which they provide services to customers.”
Nine of the 31 women to whom she spoke were married, but none was troubled by the nature of their work, she found.
“It’s not the sexual dimension of the work that made them unhappy. It was not making money some nights while others made lots,” she said in an interview.
Ms. Lacasse ended up trying to answer the question: Why did some leave at the end of the night with $50 in their pocket and others with $500 or $600?
“I soon realized the dancer’s age or physical appearance had little to do with her earnings,” said Ms. Lacasse, a teacher at CEGEP Bois de Boulogne.
At the bars, Ms. Lacasse noticed the busiest dancers were those who gave customers the soft sell.
“The direct approach — asking a client if he wants a dance — is the least successful.”
The highest-earning dancers were those who developed “customer loyalty.” Regulars tended to keep the dancer busy longer.
“It’s the same strategy for selling goods and services in the marketplace,” Ms. Lacasse observed.
The stripper, however, also must manage her emotions — “like the flight attendant who has to smile to all passengers, including the disagreeable ones.”
The successful dancer has to play to a man’s need to be seen as “seductive” or “interesting,” Ms. Lacasse said.
Each dancer will “personalize the relationship” in her own way, she added. Some will stress exciting the patron, while others play up friendship.
In the meantime, dancers who demonstrated against lap dancing were right about the threat.
Of the dozens of Montreal- area strip clubs, “ you can count on one hand those that have no-contact dancing,” Ms. Lacasse noted.
Yolande Geadah, author of La Prostitution, un métier comme un autre?, a study of the sex business, challenges the idea that sex work is “ a trade like the others.”
“ You have to look at what it does to society when women are used as sex objects,” she said.
“It makes it more difficult to defend principles of equality between men and women when men can buy a lap dancer.
“This is prostitution, not just a performance, and it changes men’s views about women.
“ They have to see an awful lot of men to make $500. What does this do to their sexuality and selfimage?”
Richard Poulin, a University of Ottawa sociology professor, said he, too, cannot accept that nude dancing is “just a job.”
“ Women are there for men’s pleasure, period,” he said.
Claire Thiboutot, director of Stella, which lobbies on behalf of sex workers, said she was pleased Ms. Lacasse examining stripping from a sociology- ofwork perspective.
“She made interesting links between sales techniques, developing customer loyalty — techniques taught in schools — that women use,” Ms. Thiboutot said.
“ It helps demystify their work.”