Salaries vary from dancer to dancer, from year to year. It depends on scheduling, fickle clientele and location; also whether the club is fully nude or just topless. It’s sometimes said that a stripper can gross up to $100,000 a year, but in my experience that’s rarely, if ever, the case. Most people I know make less than half that.

Whatever we bring home (and there is a lot of under-the-table money here), a pervasive, and frustrating, myth is that dancing pays enough for us to stop complaining — that we get paid enough to be cool with however we’re treated. But that’s not true. One day a dancer could do 20 lapdances — or she could do only one dance and make a couple hundred bucks on her stage show. No matter how large the money wad is, the establishment finds a way to skim from it.

After we’ve played therapist and plaything for pushy, often drunk customers, and the club sees us doing well in spite of these challenges, the “stage fee” that dancers pay can be raised capriciously. When we speak up, we may be intimidated behind closed doors, told to keep quiet or go elsewhere.