"This whole country is a strip club. Someone's dancing, someone's throwing the money." - 'Hustlers', 2019
I worked for investment bankers during the day then hustled them at night. If you've recently seen the movie Hustlers, just know that I worked in that exact kind of club environment. I now spend a great deal of time in the capital of New Jersey. It's a tiny township that was devastated by the 2008 financial crisis. It doesn't look like it ever recovered in 2019. Did the big corporations ever get brought to justice for ravaging an entire country? They did not.
It was the early aughts. I was fresh out of my fancy university with two degrees. Being a young performer in NY meant having many flexible jobs. A "culturally ambiguous" name to put on a resume and training in Linklater standard American speech didn't hurt. The look on their faces at the big banks when I walked in was always priceless. As a temp, I was Executive Assistant to C-Suite Executives in several of the big banks in NY. In old New York, the degrees allowed me to learn well as a young, single person.
As a young woman in corporate America, I was often ignored or spoken to with insolence.
People would have entire conversations as if I was transparent, filled with details that I should not have been privy to. Apparently, I was invisible unless I was being patronized by men in the higher positions. In response to one particular boss, initially, I'd just do things like forget to make his travel plans until the last minute. Eventually, I reported him to HR. Finally, I emphatically informed him that I was more educated than he was and even if I was not, I deserved to be treated with respect like a person. Then, I quit.
At night, letting almost everything they said slide off was the gig. It can be hard to constantly have the proverbial smile and nod while simultaneously avoiding being touched beyond your boundaries. Shape shift, life of the party, flirt, sift cash from pockets, shimmy, wash (or baby wipe) and repeat. If the way these men spent on corporate accounts was any indication of how they conducted business in general, I see why we went into recession.
Even paying for a stripper's time, the high of having a life that meant you could have anything that money could buy, seemed like their real addiction. Masters of the Universe who hounded their assistants to get reimbursed for lavish "business dinners at steakhouses". They spent money like it wasn't real every night and I got to be rushed to finish expense account reimbursements. Unlike my assertive real-life self, my stripper persona was whatever it needed to be to make the most money. It's not as easy as showing up, getting naked, and going home with bags full of cash. Although, as if invisible, I'd hear conversations about business deals I'm sure I shouldn't hear. I wasn't there to be acknowledged. I didn't care. I was there to work.
At the end of a good night at the club, I felt properly compensated for my labor. At the end of a bad night at the club (leaving owing money to the club), I'd question every life decision I ever made. But every single morning without fail, I'd cry in the bathroom stall before heading to my cubicle. I'd grin and bear my day away. It was made extremely clear about my low rung on the corporate ladder. I stopped temping in Corporate America. I chased good nights in clubs for a decade instead. I, too, left my upstanding job.
Hustlers did a great job of showing the backstories of the women. How does a nice girl like you end up in a place like this? Because America is a place where you can work forty hours a week and not be able to pay all your bills. Every one of us has a unique life story. Hustlers shows that strippers don't just exist in a vacuum of spandex, stilettos and stages. People seldom consider the life of someone in sex work beyond the stigma, judgement of morals and the fact that they get some level of naked for a living. When I heard that the film hired the lovely Jacq the Stripper as a consultant, I was excited! She's someone who has actually done the job and speaks up for sex worker rights quite audibly. There are nuances that feel like inside jokes only other strippers will get. That gave the movie a nice authentic touch.
Then, watching the interview on 20/20 with the real life hustler, I hear that the story was made despite Destiny (played in the film by Constance Wu) turning down a lowball deal to sell the rights to her life story. This is how marginalized and stigmatized groups become silenced and made invisible. To profit from the lives of these women without permission or compensation falls right in line with experiences women have when working in the mainstream culture at large.
Asserting myself in corporate America gets me fired (or quitting first). Submitting to an exoticized fantasy of myself gets me paid well. However, the true value of the whole human is never acknowledged. A filmmaker can be shouting women's empowerment while simultaneously silently stealing from the same women she's profiting from.
I love that there is finally a strip flick that goes beyond the stereotypical telling of the industry. I'd also be lying if I said that I don't love a good underdog-getting-over-on-the-man story as well. In the end the "bad guys" get their due. However, it should not be lost that the women whose lives Hollywood is profiting from will now have to hustle to get properly compensated for their own life stories in other ways, if at all. Destiny is working on her memoir. If the others don't create a way to leverage this moment, they get nothing from this theft. According to The-numbers.com, Hustlers has made $66,260,645 nationally, $9,800,000 internationally and $76,060,645 worldwide in box offices [at the time this article was written]. Payback? Do the masterminds of this crime spree deserve to be compensated for a film about it?
I frequent a community that is filled with abandoned houses, neighborhoods devastated by unchecked and unpunished criminal-level corporate greed. Would you be mad that someone got to keep their house because their stripper loved one paid it off? Like Destiny in the film, many of us have the ten-year gap on our resumes. Are you hiring someone with a ten-year lapse in work experience? I haven't danced for about a decade but consultant after business consultant has warned me not to talk about my stripping past. In 2019, shame and stigma are weapons of legalized discrimination towards certain groups.
Stipppers and sex workers like, returning citizens, like sexual assault survivors, like those managing mental health, like immigrants, Native Americans and the LGBTQIA community (especially Black trans women), all exist in this world. It can feel like living on the outside looking in as society happens all around you.
Hooray for making a film where strippers are people, complex and flawed as all people typically are. But do better not to take advantage of people who are not in positions of power. There's no way to make drugging and stealing from people justifiable. There's also no way to make the greed-fueled capitalism that sunk this country in 2008 and continues to run this country today, defensible. There's no way punishing one and not the other could ever possibly be right. Hustlers film should duly compensate both the women whose lives this is about, dancers they did research from and the displaced workers of Show Palace in Queens where the film was shot. They were out of work for two weeks.
What would be amazing is if projects like this helped to remove the stigma from stripping and sex work versus profitting from dancers like they're a diregarded co-worker in the room you condescendingly underestimate and devalue. The director of the film is now hustling backwards, claiming she'll spend money at the club whenever she is in town and will donate a percentage of the film's earnings to SWOP. All an afterthought. Reminds me of working in good ole Corporate US of A. where what you provide is useful but you are dispensable. Is the character Destiny wrong when she says: "The game is rigged and it does not reward people who play by the rules"?
As long as they don't get caught, that is.
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When your needs aren’t met, you will serve someone else's standards while neglecting your own. This is why it is so vital that we take inventory of our relationships and assess if they are relationships that honor our needs, our boundaries, and our truth.
1. You allow yourself to build more intimacy in your relationships.
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Nevertheless, a healthy relationship does not mean a perfect relationship, and sometimes we need to assess and address what's working in our relationships and what may need some fine-tuning. When we are open to learning, growing, and developing deeper bonds with our loved ones, we invite them to preserve our relationship through open dialogue centered around honesty, love, respect, and safety.
2. You are choosing yourself and are being honest with yourself.
When you consider spring cleaning your relationships, you offer yourself a token of love. You are communicating that YOU matter, and your feelings, energy, and the overall health of your relationships matter. Spring cleaning your relationships allows you to be there for yourself.
When we choose ourselves, we advocate for ourselves.
So many of us are starting to realize that we have every right to advocate for ourselves, even if the environment we grew up in did not support our emotional or physical well-being.
Now that we can advocate for ourselves as adults, we get to choose our relationships, not from a place of obligation or fear but from a place of reciprocity, love, and respect.
3. It can help you to get clear on things you may have suppressed.
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Nevertheless, with honesty also comes vulnerability with yourself. Maybe you have been unhappy in certain relationships for a while, but it was too painful to address, or maybe you have been suppressing how you feel because that is what is expected of you in your relationships.
Although concealing your feelings may protect you from experiencing them, keep in mind that the body stores all of our emotions. There can be serious long-term side effects of emotional suppression, such as physical ailments linked to autoimmune disease.
Our mind, body, and heart are all interconnected, so assessing your relationships through spring cleaning not only improves your overall wellness but can also prevent anxiety, depression, and other chronic illnesses.
4. You can reflect on how you’re showing up in your relationships.
This one is my favorite! Spring cleaning your relationships gives you an opportunity to see yourself more clearly. If you are going through an imaginary checklist of what everyone in your life is doing wrong, you may be a part of the problem. Spring cleaning your relationships is not about what everyone else is doing wrong; it’s about accountability.
Take this time to reflect on how you show up in your relationships.
Are you kind and respectful to your loved ones? Do you honor their boundaries? What can you do to improve? How can you become a better listener? A better communicator?
Use this time to put a flashlight on your heart and take inventory of the places you love people from. Relationships are co-created, meaning both people play a role in the dynamic. Assess your role in your relationships and be the change you want to see.
5. Setting boundaries will reveal the health of your relationships.
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When you learn to set healthy boundaries and you start communicating them through your season of spring cleaning, allow your boundaries to reveal the health of your relationships. This may come with a sigh of relief, or this may come with immense grief, but I once heard someone say, “Struggling with the truth is much better than being comforted by a lie.”
Let your relationships reveal themselves to you so you can form healthier bonds, repair broken bonds, or release connections that no longer serve you.
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Originally published on March 24, 2023