The high cost of selling a fantasy
Memoir about life as a stripper ‘stunning’
There are memoirs galore these days, but few match this gripping account by a young woman, tired of low-paying jobs, who embarks on a new career.
The scene opens as two friends nervously enter a strip club in London, Ont. At this moment, the world of strip clubs is new and undiscovered territory, not only for our two novices but also, we assume, for readers unfamiliar with the underbellies of Ontario towns where our narrator launches her career as stripper, lap- and poledancer.
Michelle — her professional name, chosen on the spot — initially feels awkward and a little frightened by the club world. But what a powerfully astute guide and observer she proves to be. Asked the usual questions — Why are you here? What’s your real name? — by male clients, she creates an instant back story about having an art history degree from Western. Meanwhile she studies the experienced girls, approaching tables of customers “fearlessly, a full-frontal attack of hair, tits and ass, coupled with intimidating laughter and luxurious charm.” Their spell-casting energy allows “any guy walking in off the street to become a client, their wallets opening and closing like gills.”
Such clinical powers of observation make Michelle a quick learner, despite some early and gross missteps in what, without irony, these clubs call their “VIP rooms,” where higher-paying sexual encounters are on offer. And pay, after all, is what this job is about — at least from the dancers’ point of view. Making her rent, able to buy a “beater” of a car, Michelle feels a childlike thrill. Just looking at her spending money results in this memorable image: “thick with green bills, peppered with an occasional red or golden brown, like I’m growing a garden of roses.”
Her affinity for the natural world and her lyrical ability to evoke its charms seem at odds with stripping, however. “Sex work requires a master’s course in endurance,” is one of Michelle’s pithier observations. And the theme throughout this book is that this job needs to be legalized, that workers deserve safe, secure, acceptable working conditions, free from racial and other forms of discrimination.
In real life, Michelle identifies as part of Canada’s queer feminist activist community, although not completely averse to cis-men. She quickly learns not to share her views on capitalism with clients, since her job, clearly spelled out on one club’s wall, is to sell “a fantasy.” But fantasy costs everyone. Feelings of triumph about flexible hours and easy money — as if she’s pulled off a heist — fade with experience. Evolving from novice to knowledgeable stripper — a guide to new girls — she grows increasingly ambivalent about a job riddled with uncertainties and frequently performed in gritty, demeaning surroundings.
Though the case for legalization is clearly presented, Michelle’s tale is far more than polemic: electric with eye-opening episodes that detail a stripper’s road trip across Canada, bright with adventure, new friends and a refreshingly supportive lover. The club scene can sparkle, with deft performances and glamorous costumes, but dancers’ lives are dogged by danger amid a mishmash of confusing rules. What is the personal cost of learning to approach old, desperate men rather than young braggarts, who boast that they can get what she sells for free? That garden of roses inevitably withers in what is neither an easy job nor an easy world. Percocet becomes a friend.
As the questions Michelle is asked — who are you? where do you come from? — begin to nag at us too, Brunet skilfully, gradually, draws back the curtain on the real person behind the invention. It’s a puzzle. This perceptive small town girl who dreamed of becoming a paleontologist became — and is — a gifted writer. This is not the sex worker formula, if indeed there is one. Maybe that’s the point of this stunning memoir.