Content note: discussion of sex work, linked material contains images representing sex work
From my inbox:
Hi Hoyden About Town,
I’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a rough cut of my current project License To Pimp.
This feature documentary is about the choices that three San Francisco strippers, Lola, Daisy, and Mariko, make as their workplaces engage in illegal labor practices. Strip clubs refuse to pay strippers even minimum wages & actually charge them for the privilege to work. As an ex-stripper & filmmaker I go behind the scenes to reveal current workplace realities & show how the clubs operate by violating workers’ rights. Through each of the strippers’ situations, License to Pimp offers tangible ways that sex workers try to better this industry so it’s safer, fair, legal, & less violent.
Support the making of this important film and check out the Kickstarter page to see how you can help!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/himab/license-to-pimp-documentary?ref=liveSincerley,
Hima B.
The Kickstarter page has lots more information about the content of the documentary, describing how many strip clubs have essentially become brothels (so that the strippers can earn the extra money they need to pay their performance fees) without the standard workplace protections of an actual registered brothel, leaving the strippers vulnerable to far more violations and violence than regular hookers.
One potentially problematic point – to differentiate between different kinds of sex work in the strip clubs, Hima B. refers to stripping vs lapdancing vs prostitution. I know because of past objections to the term that many sex workers who perform full intercourse for pay reject the term prostitute for themselves precisely because of its connotation of being forced to do it, so this is perhaps why for this situation with the strip clubs that Hima B. has purposefully used such a charged term?
Categories: arts & entertainment, gender & feminism, law & order, social justice
Sunday Singalong: Nina Simone 
Queen Victoria and now 
Hoyden About Town 
So women have to pay to be strippers?
Last week, we discovered women have to pay to play football in their underwear.
That’s that awesome power (young, conventionally attractive) women hold over (some heterosexual) men due to the men finding them sexually attractive, right?
so this is perhaps why for this situation with the strip clubs that Hima B. has purposefully used such a charged term?
That makes sense.