The ladies above may look familiar to those of us who
watch a truck load of music videos. To everyone else,
they just look like another pair of models. The
ladies above are Ki-Toy Johnson(left) and Buffie the Body.
This picture reminded me of a story I was told by a
friend of mine who's been living in the United States
for some time now. She tells me that she earns $2000
per night for dancing topless!. A quick
calculation shows that $2, 000 is approximately half the
monthly salary at my previous job and roughly a quarter
to a fifth of the salary of the other contributors to
this blog!
Even more amazing is that Buffie the Body, who
is a top ranked celebrity stripper is rumoured to earn ten times
that amount: anywhere between $20,000 to $50, 000 and
even as high as $100, 000 for a night of her
strip tease performance!
I'll pause for a moment to let those figures (the
money, not their bodies:) sink in.
I decided to do a bit of checking on the extreme end of
the adult entertainment industry where I discovered
that the top ranked female adult entertainment
actresses earn upto $750,000 (sh. 60M) a year! A typical yearly
contract for the average actor can even net $150,000
(sh. 12M) a year. Those figures are from
contracts alone. We haven't even began to include royalties!
After I had been told all this, I sat back in shock
and looked at my friend. She read my mind and said:
"I know what you're thinking and I agree: It's
impossible for a woman to be broke in the free world!"
As I nodded in agreement, I thought back to my
younger days when I visited some strip clubs in
Northern Ireland and Britain. I have to admit, I was
curious to savour the more risque forms of
entertainment. However, I was far more interested in
the business side of the industry. What I found
surprised me.
It's easy to judge strippers and assume that they are
dumb uneducated blondes who were molested by their
relatives, forced to run away from home and found that
the only way they could fend for themselves was by
exhibiting their bodies. It's easy to imagine that
they're women of loose morals with a bit too much "D-D"
in their chests and too little "I-Q" in their
brains. It's easy to look down on them.
My experience taught me different. What I found was
that these women are highly intelligent, well educated
(some getting their first degree in Engineering,
Business, Marketing, Industrial Chemistry, and so
on), extremely driven, morally upright (they are not
sluts or whores) and more hard working than most Fortune 500
CEOs. In addition, they are all breathtakingly
beautiful with bodies that God himself must have
chiseled with such precision and attention that he
could never be able to replicate that perfection.
These women have a business sense that put me to
shame. One would not imagine a stripper knowing the
difference between active and passive investment
portfolio managment or the difference between Q and V
investment schools or the vagaries of tax sheltered
securities. Talking to them (off working hours),
revealed a totally different picture. These women
understand that an individual is a products and
services business. They take themselves very
seriously. The train just as hard as professional
athletes and watching them perform, I often winced
as I felt my bones snap in response to some acrobatic
display of superhuman dexterity being played out
before me. These businesswomen realize that their
current occupation is only a stepping stone to their
eventual goals. It is their way of obtaining large
amounts of startup capital with comparitively little
strain.
I was jolted out of my train of thought as my friend asked
what I was thinking about. Looking at her, I smiled as I realized just
how far ahead of the game this girl in front of me
was. I realized that women really do have a leg up (no pun
intentended) compared to men when it comes to making money. Everyone
has to draw a moral line when it comes to making money
but if I were a beautiful young woman struggling to
earn money, I do not think I would have a problem
dancing topless to earn $10, 000 a week.
Of course, the real test is not whether I would do it
(I'm a man and therefore can't accurately weigh the
situation). The real test is whether I would be fine
if I walked into a strip club only to see my daughter
on a table top, dancing in front of five drooling men
as they eargerly urge her to shed even more of her
lingerie. On the flip side, if I needed money and had
the body and looks (and opportunity) to be a male
stripper, earning as much as the women do, the choice
would be easy.
What do you think? Would you be a stripper? Would you
be ok if your sister or daughter was one? Does
morality have anything to do with money making? Is
stripping immoral (our grandmothers used to walk
around topless in their day. In fact they were even
more seductively dressed that the most daring twenty year
olds today. In a capitalist society isn't it only
right they get paid for it?)? If a woman's body is her
greatest asset (after her mind... obviously:), doesn't
it make sense that she use it to make money? Does a
woman have any excuse to be broke? Is there
a parallel we can draw for men?
NB: Even though I mentioned Ki-Toy Johnson, she is an
actor and [as far as I know] has never been a stripper.
update: Check this video for a peak into the business.
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