Like many young people who move to big cities after college, Sheila McClear struggled to find a job while pursuing her dream of working as a writer. Her writing career started to take off, but almost no one in her life knew that she was moonlighting as a nude dancer at a club in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. She turned her experiences into a memoir, Last of the Live Nude Girls. She spoke with The Grindstone about sex work, gender stereotypes, and even Chris Rock.
How did you first get started doing sex work? Why not become a waitress or tutor kids after school or any other job?
Well, I honestly did have lot of trouble finding work, including even waitressing, but so do lots of people. So needing work and money was only part of my reason for getting into it–the rest was, you know, my issues. It was easy–I just walked by one of those places one day and asked if they were hiring.
There was also a certain laziness involved on my part–I didn’t want to work long hours at a boring job. So I worked short hours at a weird job and had time to pursue other things, including a lot of internships. Whether it was worth the psychological toll it took is still up for debate, and I’m not, you know, recommending my route for anyone else. But that’s what I did, and my book is a story about what happened and what I saw and experienced there in an obscure line of work.
People have often been surprised by your involvement in sex work because you’re quiet or reserved in person. Do you think sex work requires a certain personality?
I’m fairly introverted, which is part of why why I worked in a peepshow instead of a strip club — I didn’t have to talk to anyone much. Many of the women I worked with had a similar personality to mine and probably wouldn’t have done well in a club either.
I think it requires an extroverted personality, because it’s really a sales job. There’s a lot of rejection, which you can’t take personally, and you have to hustle. Maybe that’s why a lot of former dancers end up in real estate.
How did you balance your two jobs? Did you compartmentalize them as a way of keeping them distinct?
Compartmentalization is probably the biggest part of the job, and the trait that most strippers share. I think women in general are probably used to compartmentalizing parts of their lives more than men are, because they tend to have more roles to play in life and more rigid expectations of how they are supposed to be in those roles–wife, mother, girlfriend, employee, etc.
What are some of the misconceptions that people have about sex workers?
I used to think they were all airheads and sort of trashy. That sounds terrible. Anyway, I was wrong. We were all basically regular girls, but maybe more with an outlaw attitude.
Also, the standard for looking a certain way isn’t what you think it is — there are girls who are all ages, all weights, shapes, etc. in the business. As an older customer once told me, “80 percent of this business is personality. It’s talking. It doesn’t matter what you look like.”
It’s really pink-collar service work. It was also surprisingly regimented and fairly organized. The stores were open 24/7– peepshows are always located in the back of porn stores–and they ran four six-hour shifts a day. You couldn’t stay over your shift unless you’d signed up to work a double, because it wouldn’t be fair to the girls on the next shift to have an extra person to compete with. And also because some girls would purposely schedule their shifts to avoid each other–maybe because they looked too similar to that girl, like they were both blonde or something. We switched booths every half hour, because some of the booths were more visible than others, so you were likely to make more money at them.
Chris Rock once said in a standup routine that a father’s only job is “to keep his daughter off the pole.” Do you think parents and their involvement have any relationship to whether their daughters become sex workers?
That’s a heartbreaking quote. I think what Chris Rock was so uncomfortable with was the idea of his daughter being objectified the way he probably objectifies strippers. I can’t say I blame him, but the reality of the work–and the customer/dancer interaction–is more complicated. I don’t think coming from a dysfunctional home is a prerequisite to working in that industry–it’s another misconception, and probably plays into the trope of “the damaged woman.”
I certainly didn’t [have a bad childhood]. My parents are great, although chagrined at some of the choices I’ve made, which I take full responsibility for.
Do you think the United States would see any benefits from a sex worker system similar to the one in Holland, where the industry is legalized, regulated, and strictly controlled?
It sounds like a good idea at first glance, but a lot of sex workers–and I believe the system in Holland just involves prostitutes (“sex worker” is a catchall term) –are against regulation. I’ve come to agree with them. Basically, the argument against regulation of that industry is that it creates a middleman and turns the state into the pimp. I think certain industries exist better in a decriminalized but largely unregulated grey area–kind of like the growers of medical marijuana.
