Unionising Sex Work & Harm Reduction for Strippers with Stacey Clare | Transcript
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Hannah Witton
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Doing It, the sex and relationships podcast where sex has never been so nerdy with me, your host, Hannah Witton. This week I am joined by the brilliant author and activist Stacey Clare. Stacey is a retired stripper writer, theatre performer, activist and co-founding member of the East London Strippers Collective or the ELSC. Her book The Ethical Stripper chronicles her journey into stripping alongside a rigorous analysis of sex industry regulations and legal regimes. She runs community events, works with unions to improve the strip club industry, and puts on life drawing events with the East London Stripper Collective. I am so excited to have Stacey on as a guest as she brings so much expertise to conversations around the ethics of sex work and first hand insight into why harm reduction for strippers needs to be at the heart of that conversation.
Stacey talked to me all about why she named her book The Ethical Stripper and how she wants the term to invite people in to have conversations about the ethics of sex work and working towards harm reduction for strippers, rather than the unhelpful and unproductive debate about whether stripping is good or bad. Stacey also shared about how strippers have long had misclassified professional statuses and talked about recent cases that have changed the industry so that strippers have worker status. We also talked about how more and more strippers are signing up to unions, and how sex workers rights are part of a broader workers' rights movement. We spoke about the UK licencing act of 2009, which forced many strip clubs to shut down and made the industry far worse with less job opportunities, worse workplace conditions, and higher financial strain on strippers. We chatted about why Stacey founded the ELSC in response to worsening conditions and why she wants all sex workers to unionise. We also talked about SWERFs, sex worker exclusionary radical feminists, and why their arguments are ideological, contradictory, and help no one, and why Stacey wishes they could work together instead, in a way that actually protects and helps women. I learned so much from my chat with Stacey and she shared so much inside knowledge about the industry, and what is needed to actually support the workers in it.
As usual, you can find more info and links to everything that we talked about in this episode in the shownotes over at doingitpodcast.co.uk and please let us know what you think over on our Instagram, which is @doingitpodcast. And if you liked this episode, please give us a rating and review over on iTunes and Spotify. It is really appreciated. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. Here is my chat with Stacey.
Hannah Witton
Stacey, welcome to the podcast. So excited to chat with you. How are you doing?
Stacey Clare
I'm doing all right, thanks. How about you?
Hannah Witton
Not bad. Thank you for asking. So I'm really excited to dive into you, your work, like everything that you do. And so I guess a good place to start would be like, what is an ethical stripper?
Stacey Clare
Yeah, it's a bit of a loaded question. When I wrote The Ethical Stripper or like kind of came up with the name, it was meant to sound provocative. But I guess it was along the lines of the ethics of workers' rights and like ethical practices. And so actually, it's kind of almost taken me a few years of kind of really thinking it through and like properly sort of like fleshing it out. And so the conclusion I came to was like, the ethics of harm reduction are what I consider to be - you know, were sort of like certainly my intended meaning behind the phrase. It's not meant to sound divisive. It's not meant to sound like it's sort of setting up a kind of dichotomy between like, "Oh, there's the ethical strippers over here who are better than the non-ethical strippers."
Hannah Witton
Oh I see, yeah, yeah.
Stacey Clare
It's like, it is a bit controversial.
Hannah Witton
Is it sometimes taken that way?
Stacey Clare
Yeah. I've certainly had some flack for that by, yeah, people who've just sort of said, well, you know, that can be understood one way. But you know, too late now. It's on the book! It's on the front of the bloody book.
Hannah Witton
And also, I guess, like you said, it's provocative, it draws attention, and it invites people in to start having this conversation.
Stacey Clare
Yeah. I agree. Yeah, I think that's the point. It's that like, you know, if something does capture people's attention, and get them to start asking that question of like, "Oh, what does that mean? Like how can stripping be ethical?" And then like, that can open up a door into, you know, discovering a bit more.
Hannah Witton
They might not even realise that they're about to be hit with just like workers' rights stuff. You might think you're like going in at a like, is stripping good or bad for feminism kind of thing? Because there's also like that side of thing that's really emotionally loaded for so many people.
Stacey Clare
Absolutely. And I think the conversation is couched in so much moralism and right or wrong, like the dichotomy of whether it's good or bad I think is just not helpful anymore. Like, it really isn't. Ee don't really get anywhere by having this kind of subjective, you know, like - yeah, we can sort of draw some lines, we can say that, yeah, abuse isn't not something we should tolerate as a society, exploitation of women is not something we should tolerate. But so if we're going to have the sex industry, if the sex industry is going to exist - which it kind of will, because people have been having transactional sex since the dawn of time - so if we're going to be able to like have that as a functioning part of society, how safe can we make it? Which is not about trying to understand whether it's right or wrong. It's more like how does it work? How does it function? How is it regulated? Who's in charge? Who's doing it? Who's calling the shots? You know, it's like those are the conversations that I want to be having.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. How did you get to this place? So kind of like rewind a bit, ike, what is your story in relationship with stripping? And then how did you come to kind of write this book?
Stacey Clare
Yeah, so I was a student and I was skint. I went to art school in Glasgow, and got sort of halfway through my degree and was just, you know, always basically struggling for money. I don't come from a family of money, I was always just like living on student loans and student income, and working part time in minimum wage shitty jobs. But, you know, I was like really flunking my course. And then it was just like a revelation. I mean, I was always, like, very sociable, and went to parties a lot, like, did a lot of drinking as a student, but then I was like, well, you know, discovered stripping, and it kind of just actually worked really well. Like it fit really well into my life, like it was working at night, which I was happy to do, I was able to do a lot less hours and earn a lot more money for like a period of time than I ever was doing part time minimum wage jobs. And it just changed my life. Like I just, you know, I got into it through friends. Like I went to some pole dancing classes and picked that up really quickly, because I was a climber and a, you know, athletic kind of person. I, you know, had friends in the industry who were already dancers, who kind of like helped me, took me under their wing.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Were they also students? Was that something that was quite common?
Stacey Clare
Yeah, oh yeah. That's so common. So so many strippers have put themselves through university or gone off and set up their own business, like, bought a house, like, it's just so many women are keeping themselves like, out of poverty by doing some kind of sex work. But anyway, I just took to it. And you know, within a couple of years, like just my whole life was transformed. Like, it really was a good - a good thing for me at the time.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. So you say at the time - so you don't strip any more and kind of like, what is your relationship with it now? Do you miss it? Or are you like, a happily retired stripper.
Stacey Clare
So I kind of go into this a fair bit in the book, but like, I, I came at it from the position of, you know, a young - like I was 22 and didn't really have any money. And you know, I loved the performance, loved the - it was quite kind of glamorous, and quite sort of exciting. But I also kind of had this underlying awareness like that caught up with me really quickly. I was always the sort of person who would read a contract before I signed it.
Hannah Witton
That's good!
Stacey Clare
And so like, and I kind of had some awareness of kinda like working - workers' rights, like from previous jobs knowing that you know, if you do four hours, then you have like statutory -
Hannah Witton
You get a break. Yeah.
Stacey Clare
- you get a break, you know, you're not - and I was like aware of the - because there's employment law here.
Hannah Witton
Are strippers employed, or are they like technically freelancers?
Stacey Clare
So this is actually a key point. We are misclassified. And again, I go into a lot of this in the book, but it is something that the Union currently are working very hard to rectify. It's that basically, dancers have been misclassified for a long time. Similar to other gig economy workers, people who are in precarious work, who are, you know, you don't really have a very kind of straightforward set up like a contract or, you know, a contract basically. What you are is you're treated as an employee, even though you're self employed.
Hannah Witton
Right.
Stacey Clare
So when you start working in a strip club, they very often get you to sign like just a list of rules. And one of them is like a declaration of "I am self employed, I understand that I'm responsible to pay my own tax and national insurance, blah de blah. So what they do is the clubs wash their hands at the very beginning of any responsibility towards you as an employer. And then -yet they still set about treating you as an employee. So they tell you when to work, what to wear, how to behave, all the list of rules, these are - actually, this is something that we've now finally achieved in February 2020. There was a ruling. A stripper took her club boss to court, Nowak v Chandler Bars, if anyone's interested in law you can go and look it up. Public ruling. And she proved that actually, we have something called worker status. And this is like an really relatively unknown, untalked about thing. But it turns out that you can be self employed, but still a worker, and it has to be - you have to meet a certain set of criterias. And the more rules that you are given to follow, particularly around when you can and can't work, and if you need to take a day off, if you can send a friend in return, send someone else to do your job for you. That's the definition of self employment. Clubs do not let you do that. Clubs are very - I'd say quite controlling. And quite - not very -
Hannah Witton
Was this the same thing that like the BBC got in trouble with where they had like loads of freelancers, that kind of actually ticked all the boxes to have like worker employee status? It sounds quite similar to that, like if that kind of like happened in journalism.
Stacey Clare
So the union that we've been working with United voices of the world have had a series of high profile cases, so far to do with this exact issue. And I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC were, you know, one of those cases. But there was Topshop, there was the Ministry of Justice, Bank of America.
Hannah Witton
Wow. Oh my goodness.
Stacey Clare
Often cleaners and security workers, taxi drivers. It's people who are doing low wage, low skill, you know, and often undocumented workers who can be pushed around and can be exploited. And so it's these are the kinds of, you know - we fit into that category of worker, which is like, we - there's something wrong! This isn't okay, we're meant to be self employed, we're meant to have the true freedoms that come with self employment. And if we don't, then we need to have the rights that come with worker status. Those rights include the right to maternity pay, the right to holiday pay, the right to not work more than 48 hours in a week if you don't want to, the right to have national minimum wage for the hours that you do work. There's all kind of things that you can fight for. But we had to prove that we had worker status in the first place. And that's what we got with the 2020 ruling with Sonia Novak. She actually changed UK law -
Hannah Witton
That's amazing.
Stacey Clare
- to dancers all over the UK. And the latest I heard is that there are tonnes of sex workers signing up to join the union and more and more cases coming forward and now there's a really big - what is set to be a very high profile case in Edinburgh with the dancers who - so Edinburgh City Council has recently voted - very narrow vote, mind, it was I think five to four - to introduce a nil cap policy on strip clubs, which is effectively a ban on strip clubs. They're gonna basically try and ban strip clubs and shut them down and all the dancers, all the union members of Edinburgh have gone, "Nah, no way, we're not having that." They've crowdsourced £20,000 in 21 days to pay the legal costs to bring Edinburgh City Council to the judicial review, which means they're going to challenge the council's decision and get a judge to look at it again and say, "We think that this is discriminatory against the women who work in this club because you know, make them unemployed, push them into more precarious work. We need these workplaces to stay open because we need to be able to fight for our workers' rights. We can only do that in the workplace." If you criminalise sex workers' jobs, you're creating a situation where they can't access justice. They can't take action because their whole job is criminalised in various ways. It's just not - that's I call unethical. Like, that's where I come back to this word ethical because it's like, there's so many deeply unethical decisions being made about sex work and the sex industry at a policy level. So it's like all of this workers' rights stuff is the only way to like achieve what we're trying to achieve, which is empowering workers so they can do something when when things go wrong.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Do you think other cities will try and do what Edinburgh has done? Is that kind of like a weird one off? Or is there kind of like a scary trend that's maybe starting
Stacey Clare
So this year, Bristol did in fact, do the opposite. Just around about almost the same month, Bristol finally made a decision after multiple public consultations and continuously being told over and over again that like, "No, don't make these clubs illegal, you will make it worse by making it go underground." And the the vast majority of people in Bristol who've engaged with this are politically aware and have given their feedback, given their response to Bristol City Council, which is the democratic process, and Bristol has finally gone, "Okay, we get it. Okay, right. We're listening." You know, they've listened to the dancers, they've listened to the Union, the unionised dancers as well, the members of the union and their representatives, and they've listened to the public and gone "Okay, fine. We'll let -" There's two remaining strip clubs in the entire city and they're going, "Okay fine, we'll let it be and you can do, you know, you can establish your workers rights."
But it's not a guarantee. It's very much a postcode lottery. I mean, it depends on what political persuasions you know, are going on in like various different areas. I think Edinburgh - I think Edinburgh City Council really wants to be seen to be progressive. And, you know, for women. That's really the discussion about - well, the debate, again, about whether if this is right or wrong, whether we should be part of society or not. But from our point of view, this shouldn't be a debate. Safety isn't - safety should never be a debate.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Because it's already happening. And like you said, like it will - the sex industry like will exist.
Stacey Clare
Yeah, it will. And I think there's a misguided assumption that if you remove the opportunity, that men will just go and do something less sexist. But there's no anecdotal evidence that that's the case. I mean, in all the countries that have taken on something called the Nordic model, which is to criminalise buyers. So Iceland, France, Canada, Republic of Ireland, Norway, Sweden, like they've adopted a regime, which is seen as the kind of kinder version because it's going, "Well, we're not going to criminalise the sellers. We're not going to criminalise sex workers, but we're going to criminalise the buyers. We're gonna go after the buyers." And actually, there is no evidence coming out of any of the countries that that legal regime has actually changed anything. Because whoever you criminalise, you create the same set of problems. You create, you know, a clandestine, underground, difficult to manage. And, you know, the criminal marketplaces are run by violence and coercion. I've been saying this over and over again, to anyone who'll listen, criminal marketplaces are dangerous. So don't criminalise sex work if you don't want it to be violent. Do you know what I mean? It's just so simple.
Hannah Witton
On the like union stuff, there's something that I think like now, especially with everything that's going on kind of in the country as a whole in terms of like the unions and like workers' rights and it feels this is something that it's on a lot of people's minds right now and there's like a big movement towards it. And so like, you formed the East London Stripper Collective and like why did you form that and like, what has that been like? And then also kind of how do you see sex workers' rights fitting into this broader, like, workers'/labourers' rights movement that's kind of happening now?
Stacey Clare
So in 2014, we formed the collective. It's just a response to, you know, what a bunch of us were seeing. I mean, I started dancing in 2006. There was a change in the law in 2009. There was a piece of legislation called the Policing and Crime Act 2009. And that was an attempt to clean up this strip club industry, like particularly stripping and lap dancing, by introducing a licencing regime. So it was like, there had - prior to that there hadn't ever really been a clear, sort of, clear cut kind of licencing, like set of regulations. It was all done by kind of local governments, and it was open to quite a lot of abuse, really, like there was a lot of club owners paying councils backhanders to be able to have a nudity waiver and all of this. It was all very, you know, not very kind of clear.
And there was a booming period round about from 2000 - and well, yeah, from 2000, really when Spearmint Rhino opened, the big lap dancing club on Tottenham Court Road. There was a, there was a huge kind of boom industry all over the country. There were like lap dancing clubs opening, you know, everywhere. And they were opening without a kind of licence. They would they could just open like a regular bar, or like a karaoke bar. They just need a public entertainment licence, a premises licence, a liquor licence, all the usual things you'd want, you'd need in place for a nightclub.
Hannah Witton
Right. Yeah, yeah.
Stacey Clare
And then that obviously incensed a load of I'm gonna say radical feminists, because that's what you know, they are. That's the phrase that were used. The radical feminists and also just, you know, local residents, you know, middle class people who don't want the valuation of their property to be affected by people puking on the street, or, you know, just sort of what you might consider like transgressive behaviour or whatever. Anyway, but yeah, there was - it led to a big fight back so that the law change was a response to, you know, it was an attempt to kind of contain or curb what was seen as this kind of spread of like a contagion, you know. And you see that sense of kind of moralism coming up over and over again, in the sense of how it's treated, and how policy is kind of designed, whether or not it's, okay, accepting of and therefore let's actually try and genuinely solve the problems, or if it's just more of a kind of we don't want this to happen but we can't necessarily stamp it out but we can try and just control it.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Make it more difficult for 'em.
Stacey Clare
So, exactly. So we actually saw from 2009 up until - well, so yeah, following on from the 2009 law, we dancers, we saw things got worse, not better. And one of the one of the problems was that the licencing regime had meant that the only way you could run a strip club anymore was with this particular licence, if you have SEV licence, which meant there were less clubs to work in. Like all of the kind of - all of the places that were operating kind of on the fringes that didn't have the correct licencing they just shut down or they, you know, they came up like a normal nightclub. So that meant as a labour market, our choices became smaller. And it actually like effectively a state mandated monopoly, do get what I'm saying?
The state has gone, "Okay, we're gonna give you - we're gonna give a certain number of people the right to run a strip club." But they didn't do any, any work at all to address the workers' rights, to address the fact that we were being misclassified, and we were being treated like employees, and all of that. They didn't do any of that work. They just went, "Okay, well, we're going to insist that if you run an SEV you got to give the dancers clean drinking water, and showers and lockers." And it's very paternalistic. And again you can see that in the way - the response to it. It's like. "Ooh, these poor women. How're they going to get clean?" Really, we need showers? To do what? To wash off the dirt after we've given someone a lap dance? We've got showers at home, like this is the 21st century, like fuck off, basically.
Stacey Clare
"Oh, you know, we've got to have lockers." Because why? the place is crawling with thieves, obviously, they're going to need security. And it's just, you know, "Oh, they need to have a taxi home. Gotta provide them with a ride home." Because it's just again, it's just so paternalistic and infantilizing. Like, we're not, we're not seen as workers, we're seen as victims.
Hannah Witton
Right, yeah.
Stacey Clare
Anyway, to get back to the point, that we saw working conditions actually deteriorate, not improve. We saw, you know, the effects of the SEV licencing regime was that clubs had to pay more to keep hold of their SEV licences, and each year that they would have to go and get this licence renewed would be another £60,000 in legal fees that they've got to pay for lawyers to represent them. Who do you think they were passing those costs on to? We were the ones paying more house fees all the time. It just became this money grab, and it became - you know, if you never know that your business is going to run, function, for more than a year, you're not going to invest in it. You're not going to treat it like a regular business. You're gonna treat -
Hannah Witton
Oh, were they really like temporary licences? Yeah.
Stacey Clare
Yeah, that's it. Literally it. If you're only granting temporary licences to these strip clubs, then you're not - you can't expect them to change what their behaviour like -
Hannah Witton
Yeah, it just is this licencing thing still the case now or?
Stacey Clare
Yep. Yep.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Stacey Clare
So yeah, basically. Yeah.
Hannah Witton
Is this one of the things that like the East London Stripper Collective, but then also you mentioned united voices in terms of like the workers' rights for dancers and strippers - is that is this something that kind of there is a movement to try and change in the law?
Stacey Clare
I think what happened, I think, to be honest, in 2009, there wasn't particularly anywhere - if you were a stripper, and you had a workplace issue, there really wasn't anywhere to go bring this. There wasn't sort of like a sense of like, there's an ombudsman or regulatory body, there was just the council or the police. In which case, you know, you'll - who's gonna go to the police, if they're - you can predict the moralism of, you know, the way the councils and the police are going to treat the issue is like, "Well, you're a stripper, what do you -"
Hannah Witton
That paternalistic attitude as well that you mentioned.
Stacey Clare
Yeah, exactly. So then, I think what we did with the East London Strippers Collective, at least to begin with, was build community. We really did start to sort of try and bring strippers together. And to think more, I don't know, like, more imaginatively about like, well, okay, if those clubs are run that way, how would we want to do it? If we were in charge? How could we do it better? We, you know, experimented a lot with kind of different structures, like acts of resistance, you could say. Like, parties, we were doing our own events, and we were coming up against a lot of, you know, closed doors. I had, a lot of people say, "Well, we can't have strippers here, that's against licencing." And I'm like, "Actually, there's licencing. I know licencing law inside out." And it turns out that if you have a premises, you can offer sexual entertainment 11 nights a year without getting a licence. So once a month but obviously with one month off for Christmas, presumably.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, or something.
Stacey Clare
You're allowed -
Hannah Witton
That's so interesting. That's so weirdly specific that that is in there.
Stacey Clare
It is very weird and very specific, but it is true that you are allowed to offer sexual entertainment, like anywhere in the country can provide sexual entertainment 11 nights a year without -
Hannah Witton
Good to know. You heard it here, folks.
Stacey Clare
There's a bunch of - there's a bunch of venues down in Cheltenham that know this and for the horse racing, you know, for the the big annual whatever that's called. Ascott, or, I don't know.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. I think that sounds about right.
Stacey Clare
Anyway. There's a bunch of venues down there that run pop up strip clubs, and they operate for like, a week or like, you know, two weekends in a row. And they don't need an SEV licence and they and they charge - by the way they charge the dancers extortionate house fees because they can get away with it. Because guess what?
Hannah Witton
Yeah, because it's so limited.
Stacey Clare
It's precarious. It's transient. It doesn't exist. It's not a permanent - it's not a fixed workplace. You can't - it's almost impossible to fight for workers' rights iff your job only lasts for four days. So, this is the point, you take away the strip clubs, you're gonna have these very precarious pop up events that are run by people, you really wouldn't want to be in charge of a strip club, but they can get away with it because there's no one stopping them, there's no one getting in the way. And then that's also going on. There are agencies and this is also the reality for full service sex workers, by the way. So it links up with you know, all kinds of other sex workers experience similar problems, like their work is not recognised as work by law. So then they can't take action when things go wrong, can't take action against predatory business owners or you know, that kind of. So anyway, I don't know if I answered your question.
Hannah Witton
No, honestly, I'm just like, this is so interesting, especially like all of the kind of really nitty gritty like policy side of things that I didn't know about, like, it's really interesting. And I guess, it also kind of demonstrates the real, like, materialistic and, like, practical side of this topic and of this issue, like it's people's lives, it's people's work, and how it impacts them. And like you were saying, like, when you kind of get into the moralistic debate, it's like whether or not you think that somebody is like, good or bad, or like a good feminist or a bad feminist, for stripping or not like that - like, whatever moral judgement you cast upon someone, that actually has no impact on their, like, their income, or their, like the material reality of their working conditions in their life.
Stacey Clare
Absolutely. It has no impact. It has no impact on their safety, it has no impact on their - the very real material conditions of their livelihoods.
Hannah Witton
And you mentioned the radical feminists, I'm guessing you're specifically like, referencing SWERFs. And do you want to kind of talk a bit about what that is?
Stacey Clare
The SWERF kind of phrase, Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist, It's an ideological position that I think is - it's a really weird one to sort of try and get to the bottom of, but it's I think the history goes back to like the 1970s. When feminism, you know, really, there were huge strides forward in the 70s with, like Roe v Wade and the decriminalization of abortion. And I think that feminism - I think feminists actually, from that point on, became quite split. There were those who really identified and recognised the kind of sense of power and empowerment that came from, you know, the proposition of like sexual labour, being paid for. You know, like someone being paid to provide sexual services is a bit like saying, "Well, why don't we pay women to do emotional labour? Why don't we pay women for housework?" You know, it's like, that sense of like, this is stuff that women are doing, this is a form of work and labour that women are performing, why shouldn't they be paid for it? And there was the other side of it, which is, you know, this can only ever be an expression of patriarchal power, you know, kind of male desire. This is all entirely bound up with male desire and women performing for, you know, male pleasure. Which I think -
Hannah Witton
I mean, I'm always just like, isn't it a bit of both?
Stacey Clare
Sure, exactly. This is it. I don't think there's an objective truths about that. I think that what is true for one woman can be very different from the next. You see that, in the range of experiences that we do have from women leaving and entering the sex industry. Some have a positive experience, some really don't. And that's - they don't have to negate each other. But it's, you know, we can't take those negative experiences and say, well, that's the reality. That's all there is. You know, that that's literally - and you do hear that from the radical feminist left. You do hear that kind of sense of, you know, the stories of, you know, horrific stories of trafficking and abuse, which by the way, isn't what we're talking about when we talk about sex work. We have to recognise the consent. We have to recognise that we're talking about people who consent. Even people with limited options can still consent, and we have a real problem as a society kind of recognising that.
But if we're talking about someone who really has has not consented at any level, then we can't say that that's sex work. We can't even say that's the sex industry. That is abuse. So therefore - and we also we actually do already have laws in place, we already have legislation that, you know, decrees what trafficking is and how we respond to it. I'm not saying that coercion doesn't happen within the sex industry, but it's this ideological position, I think, that if a customer pays for sex, then they have bought the consent of the person and that can't ever be real consent, because it's paid for. And that just - that as an ideological - if you go through that wormhole and you follow that logic through, then you have to arrive at the conclusion that then all labour is bought consent.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, I was just gonna say, because all of the things that a lot of SWERFs have issue with with sex work, if you then applied it to other kinds of like, low income precarious work, then you'd say all of that is also illegitimate.
Stacey Clare
Exactly. I think the attempt from the radical feminist left to draw a line and say, "Well, we have to limit the marketplace somewhere. And we can allow a bunch of consent to be bought within the traditional marketplace or the regular job market. But we can't allow that to happen in the bedroom, or we can't allow that to happen to our bodies, or our sexual organs." Or something, it's like, there's something specific about, no, we can't go there. But like that to me, you know, sort of taking up an ideological position, you have to be in a sort of - you have to be quite privileged actually, to be able to entertain an ideological standpoint. Because again, it's like, you know, if you're going to go - you're going to work from an ideological position it - again, it just kind of completely undermines or doesn't recognise the lived reality and material circumstances of other people's lives.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, it's like, "Well, I would love to ideologically be opposed to the patriarchy and all of this, but gotta pay rent." Like, that kind of thing is almost missing. Yeah.
Stacey Clare
It's that kind of thing. And I think, yeah, it's, it's quite, it's quite messy, and it's quite muddled. And, and unfortunately, it's become this kind of really seething battleground of, you know, one side versus the other. And it's a shame because actually, you know, there are some things that we do have in common, like, we don't want to be abused by men. That's something we both share in common. You like, we don't want to - we all want women to be empowered. It's just the different sort of approaches of how we go about it, but imagine if we - if both sides were like working together and listening to each other? You know, that's kind of like, I wonder if that will ever be the case or those - I wrote a kind of chapter about this. It's, you know, both positions - well, particularly I think the radical feminist left is a very entrenched position. And there's a lot riding on it. There's a lot - it's a very kind of high stakes game, because there's a lot of - I don't think it's too controversial to say that there's a lot of SWERFs in a lot of positions of power in media, in publishing, you know, that, that do get to kind of control - and politics -
Hannah Witton
Yeah, I would say that, like being anti the sex industry is quite a mainstream position.
Stacey Clare
Totally. Yeah, it is. I think mainstream feminist feminism says, without question, that sex work is wrong, that, you know, the sex industry shouldn't exist. And we think, you know, men who entertain any of this are just, you know, bad. And there isn't a lot of nuance, there isn't a lot of room for discussion. There isn't a lot of room for like, "Actually, could we look at that a bit more carefully?" You know, is there a kind of version? Is there a more compassionate version? But at the moment it is just two sides going, "Fuck you. You're wrong."
Hannah Witton
Yeah, unfortunately. We've got some questions from folks on our Instagram for you.
Stacey Clare
Ooh.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, someone asked: what's the line between stripping and burlesque? And does it bother you that the latter gets more respect? Your face!
Stacey Clare
Oh, yeah, you'll have to read my book to find out what - I do actually go, I go into this a little bit in depth. I think the line between - I think the main difference, certainly one of the big differences from a licencing point of view, burlesque happens on a stage with an audience in a traditional setting. Strip clubs have a much more sort of, you know, a lap dance is a, you know, very close to -
Hannah Witton
There's like a more fluid back and forth between like the performer and the audience.
Stacey Clare
Yeah. The lap dance, you could say is more of a sexual act than it is, you know, a kind of tableau that you look at from a distance. It's something that you experience, it's kind of like an exchange. And, you know, I do say it's a sexual service. I think those - so those distinctions very much have been written into law. So this Policing and Crime Act actually defined sexual entertainment. Here it is, like this is more or less the correct wording from off the top of my head.
Hannah Witton
Ooh, okay.
Stacey Clare
"Entertainment which is solely or primarily for the sexual arousal, or stimulation of an audience, regardless of exchange of money, regardless of how big the audience is."
Hannah Witton
Yeah, you know, I'm now thinking of those, like, massive, like Magic Mike shows that they put on. And like, because they're on all of the time. So they will have the proper licence for it. It's more than 11 nights.
Stacey Clare
They don't need one. They don't need an SEV licence because it's not -
Hannah Witton
It's not seen - is it because the genders have flipped for it? So it's just like not seen -
Stacey Clare
No, it's, it's because it's not solely or primarily for this sexual entertainment. So if you take sexual entertainment and you add comedy, you add athletics, artistry, you add cabaret, you add any of that, you can say that it's not just about sexual entertainment. It's an art form. And that's because proliferated, because it's not, it's not curbed by licencing.
Hannah Witton
Right, okay.
Stacey Clare
You can get more or less as naked as you want on the stage if it's a theatre act. Like under the Theatres Act, nudity is completely fine. But it's sexual entertainment legislation that has basically defined the lap dance as the problem. That's what - lap dancing, not necessarily pole dancing on stage. It's lap dancing. And now, you've got to remember that -
Hannah Witton
what do you what's your opinion on that? Do you think that lap dancing is like, its primary thing is sexual entertainment? Or do you think it can encompass the other things as well?
Stacey Clare
I mean, I don't really buy the argument when people try and say that lap dancing, "Oh, it's not about sexual entertainment. It's all just a bit of fun. It's all just-" I mean, I don't buy that. Of course it is, of course it's about sexual arousal. Like I've been - come on, I've been lap dancing since 2006. I know what happens in the lap dance and people get aroused. That's part of it. That's why people go for it, because it is like a kind of, "Oh my God, that girl's naked arse. Oh my God it's in my lap. Oh my God." You know, but the sense in which, right - we've got a real problem as a society, with thinking that when men get a hard on, that they're somehow dangerous, right? This is -
Hannah Witton
This idea that they can't control themselves, like once they're aroused. And that is that's a really dangerous idea.
Stacey Clare
It really is. It really is a dangerous idea. It's a widespread core belief. You see it pop up - I've seen - literally in the research I did for my book, I would read newspaper articles with quotes from police detectives, and like local police officers saying, "Well, of course, you know, if we're gonna have aroused men walking around the street, we need to have some, you know, sort of safety mechanism." What?
Hannah Witton
I'm now thinking of that the amount of times that I've been aroused just walking down the street. I wouldn't be deemed a danger to society just me walking around. Like sometimes I'll be like listening to a sexy story in an audio book and like -
Stacey Clare
So but - it's - we get into this really weird territory of saying, "Well, if men get aroused in public, then we're all at risk. All women everywhere at risk." That's misogyny. That's saying that, you know, male sexuality is so dangerous that we all as a society have to make sure that we don't, you know, we don't trigger it. We're are going to have to make sure we don't be -
Hannah Witton
Unless we're prepared to follow through.
Stacey Clare
Right? It's, it's just so entrenched and so, but I do - I mean, I think you know, there are a lot of people that really do believe it, you know. I had this conversation with my dad years ago, he was trying to give me this whole talk about how male sexuality is like putting your head in a cage with a lion's head or something. And I was like, "What? Really? You believe that?" I mean, you know, he grew up in the 50s. That's probably a really outdated kind of social set of codes. But we have to break that down. Like, we really do. The message that sends out to both men and women, that male sexuality is dangerous, is harmful. So yeah, that's, that that's what - that's my kind of take on that.
But we, we ended up there, you asked me about the difference between burlesque and lap dancing.
Hannah Witton
No, it's all good.
Stacey Clare
I do think that, yeah, lap dancing has been identified as this thing that must be controlled, and controllable in a way that Burlesque is seen as, "Oh, that's harmless. That's all a bit of fun." But I wouldn't be surprised.
Hannah Witton
"It's an art form."
Stacey Clare
I genuinely wouldn't be surprised, though, if the radical feminist left did succeed in shutting down strip clubs that they would - where they're gonna go next. What's the next target? I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, burlesque is seen as the kind of next problematic thing.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And somebody else asked: my boyfriend is very lovely, but is uncomfortable with the idea of me selling anonymous pics online. He thinks it's unsafe.
Stacey Clare
Well, okay.
Hannah Witton
Thoughts?
Stacey Clare
There's a lot there, isn't there. I think it's probably quite normal for people in a couple to have like different boundaries and different sort of kind of comfort levels around sex and sexuality. And, you know, the kind of sharing of that, or the expression of that, that's something for you to talk about and work on. As for whether it's safe doing - so my impressions of online sex work are it is certainly safe in as much as you are at home. It's the you know, the safety of your own bedroom. But it doesn't - it's not without its own risks. You know, sex workers online, do you experience things like cyber bullying and trolling, they do experience, you know, creepy advances from people that are, you know, have unverified accounts that, you know, like people can be - the anonymity of the internet means people can just behave so atrociously to each other. And also, there's the long term impact, like if you really - yeah, it depends if you're face out or not, if you're happy to, you know, for your identity to be known, you know, later on in your life. It can come back to bite you. You know, even if you cover your face, but you've got recognisable tattoos. It's very, very common. I know this, again, from my experiences of the sex industry, that people who do some kind of sex work can often later on in their life just want to do something completely different, have nothing to do with that, and that part of their life is just completely in the past and over and they've just become a new person. But if, if there is like digital remains - it's just something to think about.
Hannah Witton
A trail.
Stacey Clare
I think the - I think the chances because we are so saturated now, like, who isn't sending nudes online, like, you know, your particular nude is just going to be lost in like a haystack of nudes. It's not as if it's very likely that someone - they'd have to tap to have quite a lot of skill. Like that would be like a digital fucking detective to be able to find - but anyway, yeah, so these are all genuine risks and things to think about. But I think yeah, most of all, talk to your partner and talk to your - I don't know, like seek advice. It's right. It's good to be asking these questions.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, if you know, other people who are doing online sex work and getting like their takes and insights and if they've got any tips about online safety and things like that.
Stacey Clare
Exactly. I do know that there is a huge drive at the moment for online sex workers to kind of catch up on things like digital safety and digital security to do with protecting your identity, but it's not to say that you know once the images are out there, they can't be replicated. That's always the case. You can never actually stop people from even taking a screenshot of a screenshot, you know what I mean. I would want to know what - I would want to know what the boyfriend thinks. What what he's saying. What does he mean by it's not safe? Ask him that.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, have a big old chat about it.
Stacey Clare
Sorry, I didn't think I was gonna be like doing an agony aunt session.
Hannah Witton
Just threw you in the deep end there. But Stacey, thank you so much. I've honestly learned so much from this chat. And can you please tell people like where they can find more of your work? Like plug away at your book and all of that?
Stacey Clare
Yeah, I mean, it's out now, The Ethical Stripper. You can buy it online. It's published by Unbound.
Hannah Witton
Ooh, I love Unbound.
Stacey Clare
£9.99. Oh, no, sorry, £10.99. Available in Waterstones and WH Smith. I think for a lot of - if you want to buy it directly from a bookshop, maybe call in advance and check they've got a copy or preorder a copy but can very easily just buy it online and get it sent. And there's also an audiobook if you want to listen to me actually reading it out and ranting about - yeah. And as for the East London strippers Collective, we are still going strong. We are a Community Interest Company running our own events. We run a regular life drawing class with models. And we've been doing that for years now. But every Monday at the Crown and Shuttle in Shoreditch, and we're also about to open to start doing life drawing classes in Lambeth in South London at Toulouse Lautrec every other month. Just Google life drawing with ELSC for details. We've got an Instagram page, we've got a website, we've also got a shop! Got a merch shop -
Hannah Witton
There you go, support!
Stacey Clare
T shirts, tote bags, mugs.
Hannah Witton
And does all of the like proceeds from that go towards campaigns and stuff?
Stacey Clare
So I mean all of the money that we earn - so East London Strippers Collective perspective is a business, you know, we function as business. So all of the money we earn from that goes back into ELSC, and the running of ELSC, but 20% of the profits from the merch goes to our Sustainable Support Fund, which is something that we started up during COVID and we're sort of going to keep running as a continuous thing, which is a fund for members of our community who are in crisis. We can offer them £100 or £200 grants, like emergency just cash in their pocket if that's what they need at that moment.
Hannah Witton
Oh nice.
Stacey Clare
So that's yeah, come and just check us out. And if you're - yeah, if you're based in London, or even if you're not, just contact us on Instagram, if you want to chat.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Stacey, thank you so much. And thank you all so much for listening. Bye.
Stacey Clare
Thanks a lot.