Image: Jim Cooke
About a 30-minute Uber ride from Wall Street, there’s a dim purple basement where women, myself included, steadily accumulate bills, one by one, in three-minute song cycles. Some are as young as 18; others, old enough to be their moms. We come from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Brazil, and Colombia. The money pours in from the southern tip of Manhattan, Dubai, London, Singapore, and Silicon Valley. We collect fives in thong straps, twenties in rubber bands around our ankles, coax hundreds out of wallets and into little Swarovski-encrusted clutches. We scoop it up, naked on all fours, in crunched-up wads and fresh sticky singles, confetti-bombed onto the stage.
The rap lyrics that pulse from the speakers describe the money as stacks, paper, rubber bands, Benjis, Gs, guap, clips, bankrolls, racks, rain, and millis to buy Bentleys and diamonds and top-shelf liquor; in real life, we pay for rent, clothes, tuition, MetroCards, a nest egg for a business venture, and, most of all, childcare. A good quarter of the staff are undocumented mothers who find that making $500 to $1,000 during bedtime hours beats other options—say, making $200 a week to nanny someone else’s kids.
For the lazy among us, digital currency is a boon: eminently trackable, instantly accessible. But for the business of stripping, the end of cash is causing a crisis.
This job exists because of the large, untraceable piles of dollars—which, according to the most adamant financial experts, are not long for this world. Cashlessness is trending around the planet. According to a 2018 Pew Research survey, 29 percent of Americans reported not using cash at all in a typical week. For the lazy among us, digital currency is a boon: eminently trackable, instantly accessible, and relatively secure. But for the business of stripping, the end of cash is causing a crisis.
A club makes the majority of its profits in credit card charges at the door, the bar, and the private rooms; the cash that flies around has always belonged to the strippers. On the floor, customers hand out hundred dollar bills as liberally as business cards. It’s a rare exhibition. Though the Federal Reserve estimates there are 13.4 billion hundreds “in circulation,” the bills rarely make their way ordinary businesses, like grocery stores or laundromats, circulating instead among illicit industries—money launderers, drug dealers, predatory employers, according to Kenneth Rogoff, author of The Curse of Cash: How Large-Denomination Bills Aid Crime and Tax Evasion and Constrain Monetary Policy. Financial experts often present these contraband uses of the hundred dollar bill as evidence in the case for eliminating cash, Rogoff adds.
But without cash, the club I work at is free to exploit. Cash handed directly to a dancer gets pocketed, but credit card charges are skimmed—and because workers are more or less off the books, we have no recourse to contest absurdly high fees. When a customer pays several hundred dollars to spend time in a dark room alone with a dancer, the club takes a 70 percent cut. (Though the club explicitly forbids sexual services, management offers no advice or instruction in how to give an hour-long “private dance.”)
When the customer runs out of cash bills and doesn’t want to pay the exorbitant fee at the club’s ATM (which is often, conveniently, broken) the club will take roughly 30 percent out of every dance dollar—plastic bills representing the cost of a lap dance. That’s on top of a roughly $100 nightly fee that dancers pay in order to work, positioned as a “sales target” or “membership fee.” This club is particularly predatory, but almost all clubs siphon a hefty chunk of digital payments. Aside from the money, the banking industry’s long history of discrimination against vulnerable people—particularly communities of color—is a reason why millions of Americans remain unbanked, despite the high fees. Without cash, strippers are forced into the banking system, an industry that many believe is designed to undermine them.
A segment of sex-positive feminism tends to frame strip clubs with an empowerment narrative—an economy that reclaims female sexuality by making men pay to watch. But the benefits of that economy exist because of cash. Cash allows sex workers access to reliable and untraceable income, it makes it possible to avoid the discrimination inherent in the banking system, it allows us to hide our work from outside scrutiny. Without cash, sex workers pay the maximum price literally and emotionally when they walk into a business which ritually serves them up to drunk and violent regulars, who expect sexual favors in the private rooms. The trauma is worthwhile only because of the sub-economy of cash–without which, stripping here is just a really shitty experience.
It’s easy to preview the cashless world: look to Sweden, where, in one 2018 survey, only 13 percent of respondents said that they made their most recent transaction in cash. Most of those transactions are conducted through Swish, a bank-sanctioned Venmo-like app, used by around 60 percent of Swedes. According to the New York Times, about half of all businesses in Sweden are expected to go cashless by 2025.
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