Open letter to the guy who called me "baby girl" today....

Dear dickbag,

I’m 38-fucking-years of age, and have been a grown woman for a very long time. I am no one’s “baby girl.” Go try running that game on one of the young ones who hasn’t yet learned that she’s got value far beyond what you might recognize in her. Or better yet, drop that bullshit entirely. And while you are at it, stop leering at every woman who strikes your fancy, or the ones that set off the alarm in your lizard brain that tells you when she might be easy prey. No woman worth having will give you her number after you’ve eyeballed and sexually harassed her in the Kroger parking lot.

Women don’t exist in the world to be your eye-candy, to make the landscape prettier, or to be anyone or anything for YOU. It doesn’t matter what you think a woman should be, how you think we should dress and carry ourselves, or what you think we ought to be doin in our spare time. We aren’t in the world to be your soft place to land, your shoulder to cry on, or your fucking shrink…….so do us a favor and keep your comments, opinions, and your overly intimate anecdotes to yourself. Not only have we heard them all before, we don’t care!

Highway robbery, or just another night in the club

I find it amazing when large strip club chains charge insane house fees, dance fees, VIP and Champagne room fees and still expect their dancers to tip everyone under the sun, whether they do anything directly for the girls or not. There's door men, bouncers, champagne hosts, bartenders, djs, house moms............just to name a few. Depending on the club, there are more or less people with their hand out, but no matter where it is there will always be at least a few.

I've mentioned before a chain I worked for where I paid out at least 1/4 of my earnings in fees on any given night. That was before any tip outs to staff. They made so many thousands of dollars off of me in the years I worked there, and damn near every woman who worked there paid out similar amounts. The pure profit they made off of us was astounding. And it was a double slap in the face because not only did they take huge chunks of our money, but WE PAID THE REST OF THE STAFF OUT OF OUR OWN POCKETS TOO! It wasn't enough for them to make money hand over fist, but they wouldn't pay the rest of the staff a decent wage because they knew they could tell them to expect tips from the girls and we'd have no choice but to pay them. And if they didn't feel we were tipping them enough, they had the power to screw us over in little ways.

The dj would screw you over on the rotation or by playing music you hated, the bartender by ignoring you, the dance counter by marking you for more dances than you actually did, the door guy for making you wait forever before walking you out (or not walking you at all), the house mom by being openly hostile.............you get the gist. The only way strip clubs run smoothly is when the dancers tip everyone else well and often. It's one of those things that everyone knows is bullshit, but they do it anyway because that's just how things are done.

My current club (which is a part of a large chain) has a very low house fee, low room fees, and no minimum tip out for service staff. We still tip our dj and bartender, house mom and room hosts, but the club pays them reasonably well, so our tips are actually a tip rather than their entire pay. I hope other clubs will follow suit and stop forcing their entertainers to pay the rest of their staff. It's just another example of one of the twisted things that is the "norm" in the strip club industry. I'm not sure what it would take for other clubs to follow suit, perhaps a large-scale stripper revolt. We're certainly smart, willful, and resentful of paying out so much of our hard-earned cash to people the club ought to be paying. However, as I've mentioned before, organizing and unifying strippers is akin to herding cats. But I'd be behind anyone who started off the revolt.

Just fucking do it.

There are so many times when I'll think about writing more about my life, but it overwhelms me more often than not. It's hard to know where to begin, how much to tell, what the focus should be. And I know the solution is to just start writing and keep writing until I get whatever point I want to make out of my system, but procrastination is my Achilles heel, so much so that I'll sit around feeling guilty about the writing I could have done, should have done, should be DOING. I think just writing things here at this blog that no one reads is as good of a start as any.

The funny thing is I'm the kind of person who goes off on long, inappropriate tangents on Facebook updates and threads........the kind that put people off because I'm "too serious." Well, fuck yes I'm serious about things, and I have a fucking lot to say about almost everything. I'll admit that Facebook is not the appropriate outlet for that stuff, but sometimes the need to speak outweighs any worry about whether or not it might bore or annoy someone.

So yeah, from here on out my goal is to just fucking do it, whether it's earth shattering or mundane is irrelevant right now because it's more important to just put words on the page regularly. I'm going to start with a minimum of one blog post a week and see where it goes

And this counts for one. ;-)

Outdated stereotypes need to die

I've seen this discussed a few times today, and people seem to think it's either offensive, or that people should lighten up and take a joke. I'm interested in whether black women think these stereotypes are fun, or if they find them offensive. I find it aggravating that when I see a black women on television she's inevitably playing some sort of "sassy black lady" character, or acting as a "magical negro" or white girl's bff. And now we have fashion houses profiting with the antiquated "Mammy" stereotype. Will we EVER get past these caricatures? http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/09/dolce_gabbana_sends_racist_mammy_earrings_down_the_catwalk.html