When I woke up last Saturday I was surprised to find a full-page review (see below) of my first book, The Ethical Stripper, in a major broadsheet newspaper, The Times no less. I wasn't surprised to learn that it was written by Julie Bindel, a fervent feminist in favour of sex industry abolition. The editorial decision to give Bindel a platform, to position her as the voice of authority on sex work, proves so perfectly why I felt compelled to write the book in the first place. Yet again, the mainstream media machine and its journalistic apparatus has failed sex workers. In fact, calling it a “review” could be misleading, since one may expect a book review to be written by someone who is at least impartial to the material. If there is one thing that Julie Bindel is not, it’s impartial to the subject of sex workers’ rights.

While writing the book I knew I was playing into a game of rhetoric wars, which is always won by those with the most clout. But I wonder how much Bindel’s voice still resonates, when it so clearly shouts down and rides roughshod over the lived experience of an actual sex worker (me) after I’ve endeavoured to encapsulate all I’ve learned from many years of working in an industry that most people would rather not talk about. Sex workers’ rights are a feminist issue, and Bindel is one of the most powerful feminists around. The Ethical Stripper is an appeal for allyship, but I knew there might be some people too invested in their beliefs about sex work to listen.

Bindel writes “the reason so many feminists oppose blanket decriminalisation is because it legitimises pimping, brothel-owning and sex buying.” This sentence neatly sums up how far she has missed the point of the book entirely. Activists like myself are not interested in “legitimising” sex work; we are simply asking for it to be safe. The reason so many sex workers, human rights organisations and major institutions globally, including the Royal College of Nursing, European AIDS Treatment Group and Amnesty International, are opposed to blanket criminalisation is because it drives sex workers into increasingly precarious and dangerous circumstances.

The harm-reduction principle is not difficult to understand when it’s explained in precise terms. Most people are introduced to the harm-reduction argument via addiction and public health; put simply, criminalisation does not reduce harm. Criminalising the sex industry doesn’t create positive social outcomes, but rather produces underground marketplaces handing power directly to those willing to break the law, i.e. pimps and brothel-owners. This is where violence and coercion happens – criminal markets are dangerous places. So what would you rather have? A regulated, visible marketplace, where justice can be enacted? Where workers can access their labour rights? Where CCTV can back up claimants when workplace abuses occur? Or women doing sex work with no rights, no visibility, no safety, and no access to justice?

I’ve worked in strip clubs since 2006. Most of them aren’t great places, and I’m no apologist for badly run businesses. I’ve also worked for private agencies, performing sexual labour in unregulated spaces – hotel rooms, flats, Airbnbs. I remember one party in Orpington, a group of nine city boys playing poker, wanted a topless waitress to serve them drinks all night in their flat. They sent me to answer the door to the pizza deliveryman, and started soliciting me for ‘extras’. This experience taught me that if anyone thought men behaved badly in strip clubs, they behave a whole lot worse when they know no one is watching. Which is how all abuse works – when it’s hidden, it can’t be challenged.

Bindel’s “review” has fallen into a predictable pattern I described in detail in The Victimhood Industry, a chapter she bizarrely references. The insidious narrative laid out by Bindel and other Radical Feminists is that sex workers are in favour of empowering and emboldening perpetrators of exploitation and violence. This straw man argument dominates the airwaves, reducing sex worker advocates like myself to mere puppets for the pimp lobby, turkeys voting for Christmas. It's this kind of rhetoric that is incredibly harmful to sex workers; it not only ridicules and belittles any of the crucial work done by sex worker-led UK organisations, such as SWARM, Umbrella Lane, National Ugly Mugs, X-Talk, DecrimNow, and of course the most established group, the English Collective of Prostitues (against whom Bindel seems to have a personal vendetta given how castigatory she is towards them). It also holds us back from having serious, progressive dialogue about how best to regulate and police the sex industry, and, more importantly, empower sex workers to fight their own battles.

There’s good reason for The Times to offer Bindel the gig of reviewing the book, since they can rely on her to rattle off an attention grabbing article for readers, accompanied by the obligatory titillating image of a stripper. With the deepest of ironies, the photo selected this time was taken at an event organised and hosted by the East London Strippers Collective, an organisation I’m proud to be part of, which serves to challenge existing exploitation in the sex industry by offering a worker-led ethical business model, in which workers set their own rules, create their own working conditions and uphold their own boundaries. But I would assume these nuances would be completely lost among the Times readership, shielded from such notions within their ideological gated-community, protected by their paywall. In fact, trying to get a rebuttal published in any mainstream newspaper has proven impossible, which goes some way to demonstrate just how silenced sex workers really are.

Despite The Ethical Stripper being loaded with nuances about sex work from beginning to end, nuance seems to be something that Bindel has utterly failed to appreciate, internalise and digest. But then why would she? Bindel is one of several abolitionist voices that I have critiqued. For instance, her questionable research methods when producing public reports, such as “Profitable Exploits: Lapdancing in the UK” for which (according to her own report) she appeared to have gathered evidence by interviewing strip club workers without them knowingly consenting to being interviewed; or research for “Big Brothel” that consisted of recruiting male friends to ring up numbers advertising sexual services to ask the nationality of women selling sex, which was then translated into unsubstantiated evidence of trafficking, a claim that was swiftly condemned by a list of academics and researchers from nineteen universities as misleading. Ironic then that Bindel says in her review The Ethical Stripper lacks credible research.

But most striking of all, to me, is not her choice of words, but her tone. Sneering, derisory, calling the book “flimsy, modish”, and misrepresenting the gist of it, I question how powerful this kind of ivory-tower feminism really is. Bindel sounds like a bully, refusing to let anyone else on her turf, since she has dominated the narratives about sexual exploitation throughout her career. But isn’t it time that sex workers themselves, with lived experience, who can express their concerns and self-advocate, are allowed into the national conversation? If there was one intention behind The Ethical Stripper this is precisely it.


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Rebuttal To Julie Bindel

Hello everyone!

It's the big moment you've all been waiting for... At last the book is no longer an idea, it's actually taking shape. The whole project is starting to feel more real now by the day - and no small thanks to all of you who pledged to support it. So, as a huge thank you to you all, I wanted to make sure you'd all be the first to see the cover design. Credit goes to Sasza St (@shedrawsfilth) for the shoe illustration, and Mark Ecob (@mecobtweets) for pulling together the design.

It's been a while since I last updated this project to let supporters know how it's been going. All I can say is F*** Covid. There have been various challenges to getting this book on the shelves, but I can finally share the good news that we will be going to press very soon!

The count down is on now to the publishing date, which is 3rd of March 2022 - chosen to coincide with International Women's Day on 8th of March. We've been coming up with all kinds of fun ideas for events to celebrate the launch of the book, so I hope I'll see some of you in person around that time.

If any of you feel like sharing, tweeting, or just generally circulating this project in your networks, here is the link for pre-ordering copies: https://unbound.com/books/the-ethical-stripper/?utm_medium=AuthorSocial&amp;utm_source=Author&amp;utm_campaign=Ethical

Hope you love the cover as much as we do...

Best wishes and huge thanks for your continued support,

Stacey and all at Unbound

XXX


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Book Cover Reveal

Hi there everyone,

Apologies for leaving it so long before posting my first update. It's been quite the year since getting this crowdfunder launched - I've been up to all kinds of mischief, such as performing with the Sex Worker's Opera in Amsterdam on their final sell out international tour, appearing on TV with Piers flippin' Morgan to try and talk a bit of sense and logic into the hysterical tabloid conversation about feminism, performing with Gypsy Charms for the second year in a row at the Edinburgh Fringe, mobilising strippers to join a trade union and fight for their employment rights, protesting outside Parliament (again) to say no to further criminalising sex work, writing articles for Metro and Dazed, and doing more press interviews than I can shake a 6 inch heel at.

Update on the book - it's on the way! About time too - we're aiming to get it published by the end of this year to coincide with the 10 year anniversary of the Policing and Crime Act 2009 (the current law that regulates strip clubs in the UK). I want to use the book and the publicity it may generate to highlight the problem of feminists campaigning to get strip clubs shut down, and help keep the public discourse about sex workers' rights moving forward.

In order to make that happen we had to change things around a bit at Unbound, and so decided to publish in paperback rather than hardback, as it's easier and quicker to get the book out there. This means if you pledged for a hardback, you'll get a paperback instead - apologies if this is inconvenient. It will still be a limited edition copy and you're name will still be listed as a patron (plus I'll sign all the paperback copies pledged through the crowdfunding page to make up for the change of plan). Anyone who really isn't happy is welcome to withdraw their pledge by emailing support@unbound.com, and I won't be offended :-)

As for writing, I promised a while ago I would publish an excerpt from the book - so here goes:


            Something has gone very wrong when a fully grown adult female is made to feel bad for having had physical contact with another adult in supposedly private surroundings, regardless of the gender division or economic power dynamic. In twelve years I've not once worked in a club that dealt with touching between dancers and customers well, without using shaming and censure to implement the rules. I’ve never been taken aside by a reasonable and sympathetic manager to discuss the issue with care and consideration. There’s really only two approaches; either turn a blind eye, in which case there is inevitably a failure of duty of care to protect dancers from unwanted contact and word gets around that the club offers contact dances so it becomes the norm. Or an over-the-top autocratic management style where club security are often given too much authority to micromanage and intimate dancers in order to discourage them, leaving customers feeling disturbed and unlikely to return. 
            Travelling around to work in different clubs, across a number of cities in different countries, meant that I encountered rules and regulations that varied from club to club. For a while I was at Stringfellows, Paris, an incredibly snobbish club where workers were all constantly looking down their noses at each other, succeeding only in bringing the energy down to a rather low ebb. Touching was especially taboo there, whorephobia was a given. Private dances were performed in a communal VIP area decked out to look like a sumptuous Rococo salon with low divans for customers to sit on. I was performing a private striptease and struggling in my teetering heels, and since there were no arms of chairs or sides of booths to use for balance, my only option was to reach up so my fingertips just touched the ceiling giving me an anchor point. I turned round to show the customer my back and bum, and lowered myself into the classic bump and grind move in his lap. My legs were taking the full strain and I was exhausted, it had been a busy night so I allowed myself to actually sit in the guys crotch, closing my eyes and giving myself permission to momentarily enjoy the few seconds of relief and human contact. I was wrenched out of the moment when one of the enormous security guards who was patrolling the dance area yelled at me. “TOUCHE PAS, EH?” was his remonstration, looking at me with pure disdain and leaving me feeling like a fucking school kid. 
            Hashtag not-all-bouncers of course, there were some good guys over the years and certainly they were only working within the limitations of their licensing regime. But it only adds insult to injury when the very security staff who are employed for our protection become our fascistic overseers, especially when the house fees we pay to the club are going directly into their wage packets. It is a huge error on behalf of the local licensing authorities to expect business owners, who they suspect of misogyny, corruption and unsavoury practises, to implement rules with due regard for the needs of dancers. In my mind, passing on the work of regulating the industry to the people you trust least of all to uphold welfare does a great disservice to the group of vulnerable female workers your policy is supposedly designed to safeguard. 


 

That's a little taster, and there's plenty more juicy morsels pouring out onto the pages of my laptop, while I'm on writing retreat in Australia.

If you haven't already seen it, I'll leave you with this weird video of me putting an appearance on morning TV with Piers Morgan to argue about stripping and feminism. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKaU7vFXN20

Thanks for reading

Stacey x

The book is coming! Sooner rather than later...

Forget everything you think you know about strippers
In this powerful book, Stacey Clare, a stripper with over a decade of experience, takes a detailed look at the sex industry – the reality of the work as well as the history of licensing and regulation, feminist themes surrounding sex work, and stigma. Bringing her personal knowledge of the industry to bear, she offers an unapologetic critique and searing indictment of exploitation, and raises the rights of sex workers to the top of the agenda.
The Ethical Stripper rejects notions of victimhood, challenges stigma and shame, and unpacks decades of confusion and contradictions. It’s about the sex-work community’s fight for safety and self-determination, and it challenges you to think twice about every newspaper article, documentary and film you have seen about stripping and sex work. <meta charset="utf-8">
‘Passionately argued, meticulously researched and angry as hell ... leads the reader beyond the strip club and on to the battlefield where sex workers fight for their rights’ KATE LISTER 
‘Deeply impressive ... An important book, sorely needed’ CAROL LEIGH
'An unflinching takedown of inadequate working conditions … A must read’ JUNO MAC, co-author of Revolting Prostitutes

The Ethical Stripper

The Ethical Stripper: Sex, Work and Labour Rights in the Night-time Economy

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