I think a dancer would refer to themselves as a dancer when the context was already clear. A dance instructor referring to themselves as a dancer while in a dance class is a lot different from them referring to themselves as a dancer during small talk at the bar.
Lots of people work two unrelated jobs. One for love, the other for money. I’ve certainly done it. As did the woman in my prior post upthread.
That’s a very different thing from labeling yourself as the promotion you hope to have some day.
One of my complaints about American society is that if someone you just met asks “What are you?”, many people will respond with their occupation. IMO an occupation is just a job, a way to earn necessary money. I might like or even love my job, but it isn’t my essence; it isn’t what I am.
An actor / teller is far more likely to *be *an actor even though they spend 10x as many hours a week performing teller work. One is what they are; the other is what they do to eat.
I once saw a t-shirt which read
I saw it on a young man who was indeed in an MFA program as an opera singer. And who was bringing me my lunch in a restaurant near campus. The irony was especially ironic in that one.
Just “dancer” without any other adjectives, is going to be “Exotic” (read: erotic) Dancer.
“I teach dance” or “I do interpretive dancing” or “work in a dancing school” will be used simply BECAUSE “dancer” will always be assumed to mean “stripper”.
And: if you are even close to attractive, stripping is easy money.
An old maxim: “Many young women have put themselves through Grad School on their backs”.
Stripping is not as lucrative as turning tricks, but at least you don’t need to worry about diseases.
I knew (vaguely) a woman who I was told did stripping. I was chatting with her in the Union building while a middle-aged man was renting a room. He very nervously motioned her to follow him. They headed back to the room.
Her rent was earned that evening.
Welcome to reality.
Saying that your vocation is ‘actor’ when it’s really ‘waiter’ is exactly labeling yourself as the promotion you hope to have some day. And yes, I and a lot of other people don’t think highly of people who claim that their job is ‘actor’ when it’s really ‘waiter’. And I have no earthly idea why you talked about people working two unrelated jobs.
The one that they do to eat is their vocation, the other one is not. Remember the title and OP of this thread, this is about someone who identifies their job, not their general identity or aspiration or whatever else.
My aunt was a dancer. The kind who took dance classes, gave performances in community theater, and made her money another way. I don’t know how she self-identified her profession to others. Even now in her 60s, you’d look at her and think, “dancer”. She just has the posture and bearing.
I wouldn’t assume anything just going by the word “dancer”, unless she was giving off other signals that you haven’t communicated.
Always? Because like half the people in this thread have said they wouldn’t assume that.
That’s not “an old maxim”. It’s an incredibly shitty thing to say because it undermines educated women both by implying that they are likely whores and that they had an easy path that was not available to men.
I am really convinced that the whole “tricking/stripping your way through law school” thing is that a lot of men would feel weird knowing that a woman is only fucking them to feed her kids, or because she’s a miserable addict who hates her life. That’d almost be like exploiting someone. So they just decide that she’s just some bitch taking the easy way out on her way to being a lawyer.
Though, of course, men can be whores, mostly to other men, but no one suggests that turning gay tricks is “easy money”.
It would depend on context, but the thought that she may be a stripper would at least cross my mind unless context indicated otherwise.
Suggesting that women learn to exploit sexuality is hardly controversial.
It does not demean in my eyes.
Another old maxim: “Do not take offense when none is intended”.
You denounce the Grad School saying, but through in Law School? Isn’t Law School a Grad School?
Knowing that a woman once turned a few financially viable tricks does not make her a “whore”.
Huge difference. A really, really critical difference.
And: I can’t imagine a john being concerned with the reason she is there.
For meeting Mr. Right after turning a trick a month for 4 years? I really don’t think most would ever find reason to suspect.
A quick fuck is a quick fuck. College students are notorious for them/ If some of them pay incredibly well, so much the better.
If you can’t imagine a hooker who does not meet the stereotype of junkie with bad teeth and an abusive pimp, I feel sorry for you.
Virginity is pretty rare in Grad School. So? What’s new?
Many strippers are qualified as dancers. Maybe not for the ballet, but just as well as a dance teacher, chorus girl, team dance squad, etc. There are a lot of strippers who are just women who take off their clothes, but there is still an art form of stripping that requires skill and training. So while ‘dancer’ has become relatively synonymous with ‘stripper’ in an unqualified sense, and the growth of strip clubs has created a lot of unskilled performers, let’s not simply disregard every dancer in the adult entertainment business as just an unskilled woman taking her clothes off.
See, in Houston or Dallas, it’s the other way around. Enormous cities with lots of titty bars, and precious little in the way of fine arts universities or professional dancing opportunities.
I’d guess the strippers probably outnumber the others by quite a bit, especially if aggregated over some time period.
IME the majority of young women working in strip clubs will, if asked, claim they’re working through school to be a nurse, a teacher, whatever. IOW, something “respectable”. I have no idea whether that’s the honest truth, or they’re saying that to salve their own conscience, or they’re hoping to play the sympathy angle for more money from the customer. IOW, that I’d be willing to tip better for a good cause like education, but not if it’s just going to her next crack fix.
Years ago I ran a small business in Las Vegas with about 20 women working for me. Ordinary low-wage office drone work, nothing “interesting”. It turned out one woman was a stripper as well. She was married, had a kid, was stable and conscientious and was one of my best workers. Really had gone to (junior) college and started stripping then. Just kept it up a couple nights a week for pin money. There was nothing skanky about her or her husband. They were workin’ class folks with workin’ class sensibilities. But so were the rest of my non-stripping employees.
I thought it wouldn’t be quite right to go to her club when she was working, so I never did.
Which is not to say I haven’t seen some strung-out skanks in the same line of work. It takes all kinds to make a rodeo.
Ref the gathering kerfuffle above …
I see a vast difference between stripping and selling actual sex. I also think people ought to be free to do what they want without needing my or anyone else’s moral imprimatur.
But suggesting that there’s a wide moral divide between a crack ho walkin’ the street and a college woman selling an “arrangement” is IMO misguided. Sex for cash is sex for cash is sex for cash.
I agree.
I don’t think anyone who’s spent as much time on this board as you have could possibly qualify as having lead a sheltered life. 
I had a roommate once who was in vet school and stripped for money while she was in school, and she spent an awful lot of time reading veterinary medicine books with no audience if it was just a cover story. I have known several other people who stripped for money back in their college years, and I think that plus things like doing camshows or do custom erotic videos are becoming more common. None of the people involved look especially ‘skanky’, and their current lifestyles range from crazy to white picket fences.
I don’t actually see them as significantly different in the way that I think you mean, though I also don’t have a problem with either. Oddly, from what I’ve heard the most financially successful strippers make their money from absolutely not selling actual sex, but by leading men into thinking they have much more of a connection than they really do. It’s a very manipulative thing and the people that I know all said they couldn’t stomach it, but apparently getting a well-off middle-aged guy ‘in love’ with you could be extremely lucrative if you’re willing to lead him on for months or years.
Yes, but I’m old.
IIRC there was a Doper who was an exotic dancer/stripper.
That must have made class more interesting.
Vulgar curiosity - how did you find out she was a part-time stripper? Did she list it on her resume, or did it just come up in conversation?
Regards,
Shodan
From outside America — and most of the rest of the world does not have much of a strip-club/gentleman’s club scene, at all ( the USA probably does following on from 19th century dancing saloons, improved by Playboy and the West Coast in the 20th ) — I would think:
a/ Shipboard entertainment as on cruise ships, and the same thing on land.
b/ Ballet.
c/ Ballroom Dancing.
Yes, thinking the first is downmarket compared to the other two, but that’s the one job adverts usually mean.
And in America, also those tall Las Vegas and Follies Bergère type dancers ( who could knock a man out cold if mistaken for prostitutes ). *
- Plus, as well as strip-clubs and Las Vegas, America also has much of a monopoly on the recently revived Neo-Burlesque scene. Which is basically girls in corsets.
( But doing it ironically. )
Hah hah, very funny. My bad for serving up that fat one.
All the women worked at open desks in a couple big rooms. And of course they chit-chatted to pass the time. Over time everybody got to meet everybody else’s husband, kids, BF du jour, whatever. A regular hen party it was all day every day. So naturally when she went to leave for her evening job folks wanted to know what it was. Remember this was in Las Vegas, where being totally cool with *outre *stuff is just expected of all locals; it’s in the water.
So she told everyone. In the same matter of fact way she might have said “I waitress at Denny’s” as one of the other gals did. And everybody went “Oh, cool.”, “How much to do you make?”, “What does Rick think?” etc. IOW, a total non-event.
A yearish later she was turning 30 and her stripping income was failing as her look aged out the top of the demographic. Then she got pregnant. Once she started showing the growing baby her income zoomed up. She said she had a cast of regular admirers and they came through in spades (and Jacksons) for the baby. She finally quit both jobs at about 8 months. We went out of business before she tried to return. But I’d have taken her back gladly.
Gosh I miss those gals. We had a good gig going until we suddenly didn’t and they were a pretty happy crew. The stripper, the M->F sex-changing transvestite, the 70yo woman with no legs, the one married to an Elvis impersonator, the daughter of the Boston Irish mafiosi, the recovering/ed boozer, and all the rest of the more “normal” ones. It might have made a good cast for a reality TV show except everybody got along too well. Without shouting and [del]cursing[/del] bleeping it just isn’t good TV.
Its my experience that such people who give dance lessons self identify as ‘teacher’
or possibly ‘dance instructor’ so as not to be ambiguous to the parents of their protoge’s. Simple “dancer” doesn’t have that baggage of needing to clarify that they aren’t a stripper.
Depends on who you’re teaching dance to. When you’re teaching ten women age 18-65 how to flamenco, you don’t need to worry about parents who might worry that a stripper is going to teach their li’l darlings ballet.
A dear friend of mine did pay her way through nursing school as a stripper. She had been dancing for several years and as she reached her middle 30’s she decided she needed to get some longer-lasting skills. She’s now an RN. So, that’s a data point.