Oracle Online

Maybe it is because Minnesota is located in the Midwest and not on the West Coast where plastic surgery is commonplace. But the women here just don’t look like they belong in Playboy, even if they are strippers.

First of all, the women I saw those nights were nowhere near “Barbie-esque” and as perfect as I had expected them to be. I was initially disgusted by the behavior of the men at the club, and equally disturbed that these women could walk up to a man, rub his back, and beg him to buy a dance from her.

The first woman we saw dance didn’t want to comment to us, but we couldn’t get over the forced look of sexuality and happiness painted on her face while she danced for men clearly as old as her father.

She moved slowly, painstakingly, as though she didn’t want any of the fat on her body to move, for fear of
a man considering her ugly and imperfect.

In sharp contrast to the first dancer was the third, a girl who weighed a bit more than average.

Despite the fact that no man approached the stage to tip her, she still tore off her skimpy underwear and rolled around the stage completely naked.

This young woman had a sad look on her face as she slapped her own ass, ignoring the cruel groans from the crowd as we saw her fat shake.

Soon after, another young woman ran up in front of me and squealed about how happy she was to be able to talk to a girl for a change.

“Sunshine” is a beautiful 18-year-old woman, just four months out of high school. She has short, curly blond hair and big dark eyes that have a look of true happiness in them, but hiding close behind is a sense of fatigue.

As Sunshine settled down in her underwear across from me, she interrupted our conversation many times to giggle at men walking by, trying to entice them with a dance.

The first thing that came out of my mouth, which I knew sounded rude but couldn’t hold back, was this:
“How in the hell do you do this type of thing?”

Sunshine looked me straight in the eye.

“You get numb,” she said. “You get numb almost instantly.”

This made sense, but I still couldn’t fathom how someone could get started in this business in the first place. I probed the issue with Sunshine and “Harley,” the two girls I spent the most quality time with.

Sunshine responded to this by claiming she didn’t know if she wanted to go to school, and she didn’t want to look long and hard for a “real” job.

Harley, on the other hand, has been working as a dancer since last February and said she had a job interview the next morning for a “real” job, which paid 12 dollars an hour č more money than any dancer makes at the Vu.

Each dancer pays seven dollars per song to be on the Vu stage. In addition to that fee, the Vu takes, on average, 40 percent of the tips they make each night. As much as this bothered Sunshine and Harley, they both agreed they don’t have an easy way out of the business.

“Dancing here costs more than you take in. We are required to wear at least four-inch platform heels or we can’t dance, and those alone can cost almost a hundred dollars,” Sunshine said.

We found that although none of the dancers consider themselves to be happy, it’s a way to get by until they find something better.

“The men are gross, but you develop a thick skin fast in this business. You have to, to survive,” Harley said. After spending hours studying these women, I felt no different from them, and I realized that I hoped they would soon find much better in life.