The Novice and the Stripper, what the hell do I do?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a problem that I’m not very sure on how to handle because it involves my best friend, or rather, one of them. To save space and time, I will make it brief here. He’s a nice guy in his 30s, single, never married, very shy, under treatment for depression and Traumatic Stress Disorder. The depression comes from two failed love affairs and contributes to the TSD which was created by his working at a thankless job for 8 years where he did most of the work while the others made fun of him and capitalized on his results.

He works elsewhere now and makes good money, lives by himself in a good apartment complex and is one of my best friends. Well, we’ve been going to bars now and then as he, who used to be more conservative, decided to try to spice up his life some, and we hit strip clubs. So, against my advice, he’s gotten involved with a stripper and while she is absolutely as pretty as hell and even turns me on when she performs, I know strippers when they find suckers. I know what she is doing when she gets home late at night, because I’ve good contacts among the bar set that, upon my request, have kept an eye out for her. They also filled me in on her history, having enjoyed her wares now and then in the past and if I tell him, he’s going to probably come apart at the seams.

I’ve tried to tell him that she cannot afford her rental home on the beach by herself on an average strippers earnings, but he figures she can because she frequently rents rooms to a couple of girls at a time. That excites him because he has never dabbled in this type of life style before and everything is new and exciting and I understand the fantasy of having a stripper actually want you instead of any of the 30 other better looking guys in the audience, but he’s starting to look glassy-eyed every time her name is mentioned, he’s cutting down on seeing his friends and is spending more and more time with her and gifting her with a lot of gifts that are not exactly cheap.

He is absolutely confident that she is no longer spending time with other men, either in the parking lot at work or in hotels afterwards, but I refute that. She knows me and she’s not real happy with my influence on him and I just got a few comments from my friend mentioning negative things about me that she discussed with him. She hinted that I just might be a bit homosexual because I’m around him a lot!! Not likely, but I’ve stuck close to him ever since he tried twice to kill himself last year! --The doctor said they were not serious attempts, just cries for help but the slicing of his wrist was vertical, right along the artery, not horizontal, across the wrist, like most will do, and required 20 stitches. I personally think that was a real serious attempt because you tend to bleed faster that way. –

So how to I tell him that the prettiest and sweetest little, demure angle of his eyes is taking him for a ride, has no intentions of marrying him and is whoring on the side without having to watch over him 24/7 for a few months to make sure he doesn’t kill himself or go into deep depression?

I know none of you are professionals, just like the Board warns us of, but I’d like some opinions on how you’d handle the situation. I can expose her in any number of ways, but showing him a video of her screwing some guy on the hood of a car isn’t letting him down easily and she knows he’s sick too. That’s what makes it so bad.

2

If this guy went to a strip club looking for fidelity and chastity, he has more problems than depression. :rolleyes

You can’t save him. He can’t save her. She can’t save him. There might be survivors, though.

I know a stripper who married a virgin five years younger than she was. He was an art student; she was posing at the school where he studied. He didn’t find out about the stripping part for nearly a year. They gave each other a lot of heartaches. Eventually they got married, and had two kids to add to her one kid already.

They were still married, last I heard, after about 12 years. They still have a very unusual relationship. I could not have survived what either of them has done to the other, but they keep it up. I am glad I didn’t try to talk either of them out of it. She still tends bar, although the twelve years and two more kids pretty much ended the stripping thing. He doesn’t even drink. He does design work, part time, and starves at art part time. She makes more money.

You and I should stick to picking mates for ourselves. We probably are not any better at it, but we will not be quite so hard on ourselves for screwing up a good thing, if we are wrong.

Tris

“What you cannot enforce, do not command” ~ Sophocles ~

3

Considering that I was a dancer who married a man I met WHILE working, methinks I should refrain from telling you what I really think of your attitude.

After all, this isn’t the Pit.

Having said that, I don’t doubt that she can afford her rental on the beach without any extra curricular activities. Dancers make most of their money under the table and anything related to dancing (clothing, tanning, gym memberships, fake nails, implants, etc) can all be deducted as business expenses. It’s a lucrative job while your body still makes the cut.

Had there been video cameras around,I bet you could find tapes of me getting screwed on the hood of a car too. Heck, I still occasionally get screwed on the hood of a car. Ditto for blowjobs in the parking lot and in the bathroom of bars, but I certainly didn’t get PAID for it. (My husband may argue differently :stuck_out_tongue: ) People have sex outdoors, it doesn’t mean it’s illicit.

Finally, you do seem to be taking an abnormal interest in this situation. I realize this man is your friend and somewhat mentally instable but what’s your point? To what purpose and what end are you protesting this relationship?

What if they DO end up getting married, do you think your friendship is going to survive that? In that situation, who’s a man going to choose…the wife who is screwing him silly or the “friend” who tried to sabotage the relationship from the start? The wife will win every time.

Your best bet, as a friend, is to just let him go. Be there if the relationship fails and be there if it doesn’t. That’s what good friends do, support you through the best and worst of your decisions.

I hope it works out for them, I sincerely do. I also hope your attitude changes. Strippers aren’t bad people, the vast majority are just trying to make a living

4

C’mon Tris, that’s just a bad attitude. Virgins aren’t likely to be dancers but to imply that all strippers are unfaithful is just wrong.

We’re here to dispell ignorance, not encourage it.

5

That is a good point. Many years ago, I once did some volunteer work for a welfare agency, which included helping out a prostitutes union with a legal working paper.

The people I dealt with were a pretty hard but honest bunch. Some were strippers, and some were prostitutes. I felt sorry for some of them. Suicides were apparently not uncommon in their ranks. Some of them had an outrageous sense of humour which I really liked. They were on the whole pretty decent people.

I’ve never knowingly met a stripper socially, but I’d never pre-judge someone for it.

6

I’ve dated dancers twice in the past and have nothing but fond memories and I still had my wallet very much intact when it was over thanks very much.

Your attitude really betrays your hangups and your narrowmindedness. If this was a girl he met on a bus would you have been asking people to do backround checks on her ?
I dont think so. You are making assumptions. You claim to know this woman and the nefarious deeds she get up to … I wonder about that.

The nice little cardigan wearing libraian sort you seem to think he’d be better off pursuing could just as easily suck donkeys off for fun every weekend and you’d never know.

What happens between them is between them. Your buddy is 30 and in your own words was looking for something different. Im sure he’s capable of making his own decisions. Your duty as a friend is to be there when he needs you not to start mapping out his life for him. He’s got his own place , a job and seems to know what he wants…let him be.

That “enjoyed her wares” comment is totally off. Are we now to assuming that all these barstaff are perfectly above board , honest decent people who have no agendas? You claim to know sc barstaff …I wonder if that’s so true if you make a comment like that. If they get the benefit of the doubt shouldnt you at least give her a shot?

If this girl tells you that you can take her over a fence for $50 then you might have something to go on , innuendo , rumours and baseless accusations are nothing that you should be basing your decisions on. She might even have a deserved reputation but you dont know what she might feel for your friend.

“the prettiest and sweetest little, demure angle of his eyes” you dont know that that is not exactly what she is.

Let him do what he will, you try to guide his life and he will wind up resenting you.

7

There are strippers out there that are just trying to earn a living. There are also strippers out there that prostitute on the side. This stripper could be in either situation. Maybe she’s not whoring around on him. Maybe she is. We really don’t know. As in any profession, there are those who are good apples and bad apples.

RdBl2, your concern for your friend is genuine. Not many people would have the concern you have for your friend. The best you can do in this situation is to keep the lines of communication open and let your friend know you are there if he needs you. Then be there when he needs you.

8

If this is not a loaded question, then I don’t know what is. I don’t like the implications at all, but then, out of every crowd of people, one just has to be a pain.

I know strippers also and very well, I might add, both the good and the bad and while not all are bad, this one is a user. She has a history of prostitution, which I knew about before he got entangled with her and of drug usage. She likes the occasional bit of crack, though she mainly sticks to pot and now and then, some uppers when she needs a boost to dance. I tried, without being too obvious, to discourage him from her intense attentions, because I know what she does. I mean, folks, I know. You get it? I’m not with him every day and so he would go to the joint when I was not around and that’s when she managed to get to him.

Unfortunately, I have to work and often need to put in long hours. A buddy of mine, who is a cop, pulled up her arrest record for me and the damn thing is 20 pages long! She has been arrested for darn near everything, including lots of solicitation, drug possession, theft, suspicion of theft, assault, possession of a concealed weapon, battery and everything, it seems, except for murder. She’s been in jail four times, but never for a stint longer than a year and mostly for 30 day terms. Charges were either dropped on a lot of her arrests or insufficient evidence was found to convict her.

I don’t know where some of you come from, but I believe in loyalty towards my friends and I’ve talked extensively with his therapist and I know that if he gets his legs knocked out from under him before he gets better, he might just quietly go and off himself. Others in our circle of friends are concerned as well and have been helping out, but he has this fantasy fixation on this girl.

I kind of blame myself because I failed to realize how emotionally exhausted he was and desiring a change in his lifestyle or else I’d not have taken him to strip clubs. I even paid the girls to fawn over him at first to make him feel good, but looking back, I think that might have been a mistake. This girl made an obvious play for him and it worked but people I know say that she is still working the lot between sets at night from time to time and her current room mates are known prostitutes who dance.

Yes, there are good strippers and I have known some, but this dancer doesn’t seem to fit into that category.

9

Sorry Sue,

But if you expect me to believe that strippers as a group or more likely to be chaste, or monogamous than are women in general I stand by my statement.

It’s the same phenomenon I notice in women, who go to bars to meet men, and are surprised that so many of these guys have drinking problems. No, that doesn’t mean that every guy in a bar is an alcoholic, it simply means that if you want to find non-drinkers, you go where there isn’t any drinking. Sex as a business (and stripping is sex as a business) is not likely to attract crowds of people that are primarily chaste and faithful. It is not proof that you are not if you are there, but it doesn’t represent a good hunting strategy to go there looking for innocence.

The OP is about a person who has a strong attraction to a woman who is a stripper. I submit that it is not unreasonable to assume that the sexual element of her work is part of that attraction. It might be true that he expects that she is otherwise a chaste and faithful person, but it is not the only explanation of his attraction. If those character traits are the most important to him, and this is where he comes to meet girls, then he has problems. However many sweet young virgins there are up here strutting their stuff in the buff, it is not impossible that a slut or two slipped in under the door. The Deacon of the Dance floor cannot be absolutely sure of the pure hearts of every dancer.

I wasn’t judging every stripper to be a slut, and I won’t judge every one to be a saint either. They are just young women. But I have serious reservations about any man who claims to have come here seeking a chaste and faithful woman. I ain’t buying it.

Tris

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung ~