I make £1000 in a weekend stripping at uni

I could make £50,000 a year if I worked every weekend

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Alice, 24, has just graduated with Philosophy and English and was a stripper throughout her degree, making hundreds of pounds a night. This is her story.

For most of us, Saturday nights are reserved for vomiting up excess alcohol outside student club nights –– but I decided to take a different route.

Instead, you’ll find me stripping in a club full of semi-naked women and men who mostly work in financial services.

The nights start sipping on a glass of red wine as me and the rest of my bikini-clad troops eye up the fresh meat in the club. The beginning is always quiet, and at the entrance, everyone hurries to put their phones away. There’s usually some rustling as we hide the packets of crisps we share with our ritual gossiping and bitching.

I’ve been professionally stripping for the past four years of my life, maybe longer. It’s overlapped with my degree in Philosophy and English Literature. Last week, I went to my graduation ceremony and like the rest of my fellow graduates, I’m thankful I didn’t fall over and faceplant. I think I was more nervous at the anticipation of being whacked over the head with a hat by an elderly man in front of a crowd than I am grinding and shaking my assets on a different kind of stage.

Alice on stage

A typical night begins when me and my friend –– an elegant girl with an amazing ass who does Linguistics at my uni –– chat to the guys as they get their bottles of Corona and Peroni. You can usually tell if they’re financially endowed and down for spending a good bit of cash depending on the drinks they order. Me and fellow ethnic minority hustle partner are both lucky enough to have our own racially-fetishised categories on PornHub so even if we didn’t talk much, we would still earn money both on our own and as a pair.

I could make over £50,000 a year doing this if I worked every weekend. There’s a set fee of over £100 which every girl has to pay to the club. Make that back before you actually start earning and then it’s £20 for one lap dance, lasting three minutes. Stag shows vary depending on the size of the group.

Hustling comes in two main categories. In the words of RuPaul’s Drag Race, there are Comedy Queens and Pageant Queens. We definitely fall into the comedy category, and we specialise in humiliating stags for the wretched pleasure of their friends in the name of lowbrow entertainment. Once the sale has been done, the best man offers us drinks as we wait for the stag to return from his first dance. We chat to the group about where they’re from, what they do for a living, and how they know each other. As I only work weekends now, stag groups are a regular occurrence. Being a comedy queen, they’re easier to banter with.

We take them into the VIP room and sit the stag down underneath the pole before we strip him and whip him with leather belts. His friends roar with laughter around us. At a previous club, it was custom to pour sambuca down the poor man’s buttcrack before setting it on fire. Sometimes the stag decides he’s had enough and attempts to put his clothes back on (unsuccessfully, because his friends always restrain him: they pay good money for this) but usually they try to take it in good humour. Even when we make him crawl around the floor on all fours, barking like a dog.

Alice: ‘I’ll make you crawl around the floor, barking like a dog’

I spend the rest of the night doing a few more of these and talking to nice men who work in risk assessment and tend to live in Dubai. One guy gave me a substantial amount of money and when I wasn’t doing the splits across his lap we spoke about places we have travelled to and books we have read.

Sometimes I’m not so lucky and end up talking to some drunken arsehole, but I’m pretty good at comebacks by now: You can’t afford to touch this, so don’t. Why don’t you save that money you were going to buy a dance with take it to a therapist? I’m sorry about your Madonna-whore complex.

Mostly, it’s all fun and games with copious amounts of tequila shots. Except you’re naked and tend wake up with a load of cash and your make-up resembling a clown caught in a downpour. Sometimes there’s a lot of money, sometimes tragically minimal. But always enough to ensure you return for more.

I’m lucky enough to have managed my finances well so I didn’t have to flat share or take out a huge student loan, and so finished uni mostly debt free. I also effectively avoid the questioning looks of housemates as I return home at an ungodly time in the morning with a fake eyelash hanging off one cheek like a spider, dressed as if I’ve just came home from the gym.

‘There’s always enough money to make you want to come back’

A few of my close friends at uni knew what I did –– they thought it was hilarious but none of them defined me by it. But I’ve had a few close calls with other people. Once I spoke to a man who turned out to be on the same course as me. As there were over 200 people on my course, I believed the chances of meeting him again were pretty slim. Lies. The first seminar I walked into, he was there. Luckily, he was definitely more embarrassed than me.

Another time, I was talking to a friend at the bar before seeing, from the corner of my eye, a familiar face which did not belong to that part of my life. He was manically waving and grinning at me. It was a friend of a friend from uni who I had bumped into a few times at parties, and he had with him a lad from my Free Will and Moral Responsibility class. The irony ran deep.

My first initiation into this absolute carnival was when I wanted to rebel against my academic family. I wanted cash to escape and so I found myself going into a strip club, claiming to be older than I was.

That club turned out to be fairly shit –– the manager was a white-haired man in his fifties who had the mannerisms of a kindly grandfather and an impressive beer belly, except he enjoyed relationships with girls younger than half his age. I was eventually sacked from the club after four months of weird moments like being fined several times over things such as going to the toilet unannounced, I was officially named “idiot of the week”. I was observing the painful process of the manager’s seduction of a 19-year-old girl who, like me, had just started learning the hustle. Ironically, a few years after I had left, I saw him named in part of a campaign for stripper rights.

While I was there, a photographer friend of ours, Jannica Honey, did a picture series on Scottish strippers: check out her work.

Credit: Jannica Honey

It wasn’t until I moved to a different club that I really started raking in the big bucks. Not only was there serious cash but also interacting with and understanding the stories of the girls around me. Most girls were at uni, had children, or supported their family abroad. Some had degrees but preferred to make more money at the club. Some had their own businesses or a day job.

There are a few dance teachers and fitness instructors. Others pay for the education of others. I remember asking a top earner, a striking blonde American Christian, as she applied fake tan to herself in the mirror, what she did with all her money. She laughed back: “I’m paying for my sister’s college fees so she won’t have to shake her ass like me.”

Most of them were opinionated, compassionate, and utterly crazy. They were all so comfortable in their naked skin and commodified sexuality in a way which I had never been exposed to before. It’s almost like if you parade your physical aspects, you become less insecure. And the truth is, after years of spending time with them: arguing, drinking, bitching, doing each other’s makeup and hair, meeting their families and hearing about their life –– I felt a sense of sisterhood which I’ve never quite experienced anywhere else.

Credit: Jannica Honey

Feminism was one of my final modules for Philosophy and it made me think differently about my job. I’ve been so cocooned in my arts degree with my open-minded friends that any negativity reported in the media about my job seemed to come from an outdated sense of moral righteousness or social and patriarchal control of female sexuality. But can it perpetuate gender inequality? Feminists who say so seem to ignore the other factors which led us here in the first place, and see us as voiceless victims in need of redemption.

And then, every now and again, some politician or feminist group will try to push for the closing down of strip clubs or for restrictions in the hope of eventually blasting us into extinction. The truth is, if they ever gave us some genuine thought as people without the stripper label, they would realise specifically targeting a group of marginalised women isn’t really feminist.

Credit: Jannica Honey

We don’t need their imposed opinions on our job. And yes, it’s possible to have both self-respect and take your clothes off for money. If the politicians ever succeed in closing down a job which will mainly affect women –– women who they have never met nor spoken to –– would anyone plan to compensate their families?

And when some club managers can still take advantage of their elevated position to seduce young girls, it seems painfully clear all the energy has been focused on the wrong people. After all, why is stripping stigmatised? Because nice girls don’t take their clothes off for money.

But why can you not be a nice girl and take your clothes off for money? Are the two really incompatible? People need to stop being whorephobic. Strippers are here to stay.

Names have been changed to protect identities.

Thanks to Jannica Honey for her pictures.