femi babylon (formerly known as suprihmbé)
“I don’t gotta do anything but stay Black and die!” was one of my mother’s most commonly uttered phrases during my childhood. “Stay Black” is a common Black phrase. Stay true.
Mami is a first generation, Gen X college graduate, but I sometimes can’t tell if my gramma is as proud of her as she was of my uncle, her favorite child. My grandmother is a boomer and worked the same job as long as I knew her, until she was forced to retire early. By the time I was in high school, she was living off social security and my mother was sending her money. Mami never taught me about money or how to manage it. She had the phone bill in my name for a few years, but I didn’t learn about credit until I maxed out a Chase Bank credit card. She had a closet full of clothes and shoes that she rarely or never wore. Mami was a high school Spanish teacher, then a principal, and she was queen of the side hustle before white people got their hands on it. She braided hair, sold Avon, made her own candles. We were a wavering working-class family. “Pink collar.” After the divorce my two sisters and I became latchkey kids and I walked to and from school at age seven. When I was eight or nine, the whitelady neighbor next door called child services on my mother. I can’t imagine what for. We were mostly quiet, tiptoeing in and out of the back door, laying blankets on the stairs and sliding down into a pile of soft bed things. When the social worker came, we dutifully lied, claiming our Auntie was meeting us at home and just stayed inside.
Mami said the whitelady also asked, during one of their former over-the-fence conversations, why she didn’t ask for alimony during the divorce proceedings. My stepfather was abusive. I’m not sure why my mother declined alimony but as I got older I heard her say, “I didn’t need it.” Black women are supposed to take pride in our ability to overcome.
As a young girl I never thought about work, or marriage. I thought about writing comics and growing my hair out. I thought about traveling. I thought about freedom from my mother, who was also abusive, mostly verbally and psychologically, but occasionally physically. It took years of growth and self-defining adventures for me to scrub my mother’s words from my mind. Unlike most other kids my age—including my siblings—I didn’t work in high school. I wasn’t allowed. I didn’t get an allowance. Every once in a while my grandmother gave me pocket money, but Mami took money from our piggy banks whenever she felt like it and dared us silently to ask for it back. Because I was barely passing in high school after being a high-achieving straight-A student in elementary school, my mother stopped investing in me. I had lost my value. Even though I wasn’t a troublemaker, I wasn’t a child she could brag on anymore, and I reflected badly on her as a parent. I was anxious and deeply depressed. I sat in the basement at my grandmother’s and played goddess in The Sims 2 until the wee hours of the morning and barely passed my classes. Since I wasn’t growing anymore, my mother stopped regularly buying me new shoes and clothes. So when I was finally in college, free from her clutches, one of the first things I wanted to do was get a job so I could have money of my own to buy these things for myself.
Before I got my first vanilla job, I was propositioned by a young man.
I was “exploring my sexuality” at the time and my favorite movie was The Players Club. I saw the movie when I was too young to be seeing it. It has a number of quotables. My favorite: “Run me my money.” Most of the time when we talk about it, we only mention Diamond’s hot pink, gauzy dance scene to R. Kelly’s “It Seems Like You’re Ready,” the infamous “Dollar Bill” speech delivered to Diana a.k.a. Diamond’s cousin Ebony, and “Use what you got to get what you want.”
When I was around fifteen or sixteen a cousin of mine had made a passing comment, probably as an insult, that I could be a stripper. But I took the idea seriously, turned it over in my mind for months and months. I had always been obsessed with lounge singers, brothels, whores. Women who were, by my definition, free.
Of course, these women also couldn’t “have it all.” If they were loose or promiscuous or liberated in one way, they were always doomed in another way. Like Ethel, from Diane McKinney-Whetstone’s novel Tumbling, who saved herself by fucking and releasing men, but had no loyal girlfriends or support system and ended up secretly giving away both her children to the dignified, but scarred, churchwoman Noon. Still, Ethel was the kind of liberated I thought I might be. She had her own moral code and it set her apart from the other women. She was danger, she was other, she was a hussy. And even at seventeen I thought I’d rather be a hussy than constrained by societal norms. So when a young man said, “I can give you a little money if you—” I set my mouth to do it.
Hard easy money.
I wasn’t good at it at first, but it didn’t matter because I was young and inexperienced. Boys have been taught to appreciate that, and as men they learn to prey. Though I have always preferred girls and women, I was much more tolerant of boys and men at that age because I leaned toward obedience. I hadn’t yet found myself and though I stood for certain things, I hadn’t yet fully fleshed out my values. I was newly seventeen in college and men’s eyes lit up when I told them my age and hit the knees. There was a space of ambiguity here, as there always has been. Was I working? Was this “sex work”? To me it was a hustle. I needed the money, the need was urgent. Yet sometimes I was fucking for my own pleasure; to learn how to have sex skillfully was my goal. There was also the allure of men who were, and are, a clear and present danger. I was assaulted or coerced into certain acts. It was not simply the danger of being a “sex worker,” but of being a woman in this world. There was a high chance I might be assaulted, and I decided to take the risk.
This is the problem with terms like “sex work,” a term that wasn’t necessarily created for women like me, yet nonetheless has a certain amount of utility. The women—most sex workers are women so that’s where my focus is—who embrace “sex work” want their erotic labor to be considered “real work.” I understand this. On a fundamental level, many sex workers want to be accepted as “regular workers.” Yet arguments around labor and decriminalization betray a certain libertarian politic that is highly embedded in current and past sex work rhetoric: to be recognized as a freely acting agent, and also to have our (erotic) labor exceptionalized. On both a personal and political level I find it frustrating.
I eventually got bored and found a minimum wage vanilla job at one of the restaurants on campus. I hated it. Was this work? Showing up to the same place every day, even when I didn’t want to, just so I could buy food and shoes? Having to take home Sun Chips and provolone cheese for dinner to avoid spending my meager wages? Why was that work? I felt like six to seven dollars per hour just wasn’t enough for me to take it seriously, even if I’d had nothing before. I would rather have nothing.
I sensed I was about to get let go, so I found another vanilla job, this time at a Chick-Fil-A in a cafeteria on another part of the campus for eight dollars per hour. An improvement. I was wary of one of my coworkers. He was nice to me, and his kids were older than me and also worked in different areas in the cafeteria. But he was too nice. Handsy. I have always been standoffish and intimidating, despite my lack of size. He never bothered me, but I found out months after I quit that he had been accused of sexually assaulting one or more of his coworkers. Go figure.
The college stuck me with a $3,000 bill at the end of the school year and that was the end of that. I half-heartedly attempted to raise some money via a yard sale over the summer to pay down the debt, but my mother confiscated (stole) the money. I never accused her, but the money was in the drawer and then it was gone, and I knew my sisters hadn’t touched it.
By the end of the summer my mother was asking me to look for an apartment, another thing I had never done and never been taught to do. She seemed determined for me to leave. I scoured the internet for places to live but I didn’t know what I was looking for. When I would show my mother listings she would give me half-assed answers or brush me off. She rarely spoke to me directly at that point. I made a list of three places and we drove down there, an hour south of Indianapolis, to look. She cosigned on the first apartment we looked at, without asking about the quality of the neighborhood or looking into the company. I ended up with a one-bedroom row apartment in the hood of Bloomington. The plan was for me to go back to school, but I knew that wasn’t happening. Three thousand dollars seemed like an insurmountable amount of money, and I knew I was at the bottom of my mother’s list of priorities because she told me so. She had two other kids to worry about.
Plus I had rent to pay. Originally the plan was for my mother to pay the rent until I found a decent job. I had no idea how hard that would be. The rent was $415 a month and when I moved into the apartment I had around $550 in my bank account. The prospect of paying rent gnawed at me like a mouse on closet panties.
They say one of the four core principles of human agency is forethought. Well my brain was telling me that if I didn’t do something quick I would end up homeless. After weeks of unsuccessful job hunting I quickly deduced that I wasn’t gonna be able to find a job as quickly as my mother had claimed. Students were coming back to town and I was one young Black woman in a town with one strip club, the bulk of whose economy depended on the public university.
Like a good girl is supposed to, I explored almost every other option until none of those options manifested anything for me. I told my friend, “I think I’m gonna have to go strip because I don’t know what to do.” I had been wanting to try stripping for a long time but I still did my due diligence of looking for a vanilla job.
I had wondered if it would be hard to be naked. I rode my bike the few miles to the strip club with a pair of wedge heels (my first pair of heels) and a lingerie set tucked in my backpack. By the end of the day I was back in my barely furnished apartment, employed and preparing for my day shift, and surprised at how easy it was to get naked and how hard it was to dance gracefully in heels. Luckily it was a hole-in-the-wall white/mixed strip club and many of the girls lacked both color and rhythm. I didn’t learn any pole tricks there. But I taught myself a lot of floor work and I learned how to talk to adults without looking at the ground or gazing off to the side. I learned how to stand my ground and set boundaries. I learned how to save money.
I considered my labor to be work because it was providing for me, though I had never heard the phrase “sex work is work.” Later, when I began riding in cars with strangers, I started to consider my work to be the opposite of work, an opposition to “regular” work. Anti-work.
When I was stripping I worked a double shift at least five days a week. A double shift was about from noon to midnight. When my new pussy smell wore off I began to work all day to save for a futon to sleep on and money to move. As the club began to get drier and drier, I started paying attention to what the Black girls said about Indianapolis. Misogynoir—racialized misogyny directed at Black girls and women—dictated that I would have to “change my look” to compete up there, but what was my other option? Macy’s hadn’t hired me on full time like I thought they would, and I had grown weary of vanilla jobs.
My goal was to work less and make more money. I openly spoke to my regulars about earning money to move. One of them was a businessman who had been trying to get me to leave the club with him for a while. I took him up on his offer and suddenly I was a prostitute.
With that shift into trading sex, I was able to secure a cheaper apartment and plan a move to Indianapolis, where hopefully my future would be brighter. Another regular of mine owned his own vending machine company and gave me his phone number and job information so that I could claim I worked for him in order to secure a lease. And thus, at eighteen years old, I embodied two more core principles of human agency: intentionality and self-reactiveness. I figured out how to reserve a moving truck and conned two guys from the club into helping me move my shit. A month before I turned nineteen, I bounced out. I arrived in Indianapolis with twenty dollars in my pocket, on a mission to turn things around.
It wasn’t as easy to find work as I thought. Although Indianapolis is a bigger city than where I came from, I was only able to find work at a Black club. I wear my hair natural, and it was difficult to get past auditions, even when I wore braids, and even though I’m slender. My skin and hair deterred me. The Black club was equally difficult in a different way. I was much more reserved around Black men because they expressed an overfamiliarity related to their feelings of ownership of Black women. I was able to wear my hair the way I wanted but I made very little money and it was often attributed to my hair not being straight. The only other women who wore their hair unrelaxed wore buzz cuts and were extraordinarily beautiful. I struggled to fit in. My politics have always been “left” of my peers, and I found it hard to balance my values with my need to make money to survive. I fell into street prostitution at first, then pursued it. I worked alone. I didn’t know how to screen clients or what that even was at the time. I didn’t have many friends and I was struggling with an infection contracted via an eczema scab. I got into strange cars with men. My cell phone was often off. I had no internet access once I moved away from Bloomington, and I often felt hopeless and isolated. I took men and women home constantly to abate these feelings with casual sex romps. Still, I struggled to make ends meet, even though the studio apartment I’d moved to was fifty dollars cheaper than my previous one. I borrowed $400 for rent from the club owner, desperate.
Older men who saw I was struggling wanted me. They offered me covert sips of their drinks. Extras seemed to be an unspoken rule in this club, because all the women were Black, and all of us were poor. Drugs were common in all the clubs I ever worked at. In Bloomington it was pills, coke, alcohol, and heroin. In Indianapolis it was weed, alcohol, and coke. The day shift DJ had his eye on me. He was forty-three years old. I cluelessly maneuvered around his advances, unaware of what I was doing until another dancer pulled me aside and told me to be careful. “Men often think you’re leading them on when you act like you do. I know you’re just a kid but he has a history of dating the younger dancers so you need to stop messing with him. You don’t see how he looks at you, but we do.” I hadn’t thought a grown man like him would be interested in me. I was recklessly playful with him, and I would hang out in his booth sometimes before my shift or I would pop in when business was slow. He always played my song requests. Until one day when I slept with a patron he knew. Suddenly he started requesting a tip for every song I requested. I hadn’t any idea that I was “supposed” to tip him. I didn’t make enough money to do so, and he knew that. I was upset that it took me so long to learn what many men are like. Because I wasn’t giving him what he wanted (pussy) he treated me differently. I stayed away from the DJ booth during his shift after that.
The night shift DJ was my favorite person at the club, though. He was kind, and he had a daughter who was my age. He was impressed by my taste in music, and he invited me over to his house to hang out with him and a girlfriend. He treated me like the woman-child I was, and it was off-putting. But I latched onto him. The three of us spent the night listening to music, talking about our lives, and drinking box wine. They didn’t offer me the wine, I was allowed to make my own decision, and they snickered at me feeling the need to sneak it at first. I had never drunk more than a sip before. I sang the woman a song because it was her birthday and I delighted at her response. At the end of the night, I fell asleep at the foot of the bed. It is moments like these that I cherish. The strange sense of safety among strangers. A loose compilation of misfits and transient family.
I wasn’t making enough money to pay rent, so I called up my “aunt,” my former babysitter, who was seven years older than me. She secured a spot for me at the club she was working at in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Many of the women I know who ventured into erotic labor had been “initiated” or introduced to it by a friend or family member. I remember my mother making sly comments to my young aunt about her lesbianism and her stripping. I know that a lot of women who consider erotic labor a further exploitation of women’s bodies wonder: How does it all fit? Particularly for a Black woman who is already doubly or multiply exploited? Stripping down for the male gaze for profit, allowing their eyes and hands to travel our bodies as we milk it for all its worth. Is this power? White sex workers have embraced this as a form of empowerment. They cite pussy as power, a cissexist move to claim a place of dominance under capitalism. “We are winning capitalism,” I heard one wealthy white sex worker say proudly. But are we? Am I?
Traveling didn’t bring me any closer to winning capitalism. I learned how to handle money but what is that skill worth when you live in a constant state of economic lack and financial panic? We grasp on to these individual empowering moments like a ring in a garbage disposal; the panic that at any moment the blades will cut us is always lingering, even when the disposal isn’t on.
I feel loss, but not in the sense that anti-porn and anti-trafficking proponents would hungrily grab onto and exploit. The loss is in the fact that I do not fit here. I am losing against capitalism, not as an erotic laborer, but as a Black woman mired in poverty, in racism. I am disempowered, not by my profession or side hustle, but as a victim of structural oppression. To prove that I “love” my (sex) work under these conditions is a pressure I simply cannot, and will not bow to. I found stripping and prostitution liberating. I own my trauma. I consider the fact that I could find so much joy in the face of danger a triumph. I enjoy being a fantasy just as much as I enjoy being real. But the perils of being Black and woman and poor weigh on me. I have been a sex worker throughout my young adulthood and into my late twenties, through motherhood and beyond, but it has never been sex work that drained me. Engaging in erotic labor presented me with options I never would have known I had. I became myself. I defined myself.
Ebony’s vicious rape near the end of The Player’s Club is often left as a footnote, or a lesson learned because she fucked Diana’s man. We gloss right over Ronnie’s oral violation of Diana—she fucked Diana while she was blackout drunk in front of a group of white men at a private gathering, without Diana’s consent. Diana graduated from school but the strip club was presented as a place of danger and degeneracy. Ebony left the game and started working a minimum wage job at the same shoe store her cousin used to work at. The adage at the end of the movie rings clear and true to those of us who might reap the rewards of surviving capitalism: “Make that money. Don’t let it make you.”