The emergence and undermining of sex worker-led freelance feminism

Introduction

In this short piece, I begin to unpack some of the important questions raised within this special issue in relation to how feminism, precarious labour and entrepreneurialism coexist together in contradictory spaces and ways. Specifically, I outline the current, exploitative and precarious workplace practices within strip clubs in the United Kingdom (UK) to then discuss how a sex worker-led feminist project emerged in response and later became a viable business that was able to sustain its feminist work through equally precarious forms of gig work. By focusing on the topic of sex work, and through this instance of ‘freelance feminism’, I highlight further contradictions, this time inherent to the paradigm of feminism itself and the intersectional issues feminism gives rise to. For example, I demonstrate how the ‘activism’ of typically privileged white feminists can exacerbate the already precarious conditions of marginalised workers while also undermining the transformative potential of their grassroots feminist politics. The article ends with a discussion of the very real need to rework feminism and activism within and in response to ever-increasingly hostile social environments.

The ‘problem’ with UK clubs

Within the current UK system, stripping – like many freelance jobs within the service sector and cultural and creative industries – lies at the extreme end of precarity, offering workers no employment, job, or income security. In some instances, workers can even lose money by going to work as they are typically required to pay house fees (which can be extortionate) and they can also face arbitrary fines for things as minor as having chipped nail polish (Sanders and Hardy, 2014). Rather than exceptionalising strip clubs as uniquely ‘bad’, such employment practices and processes reflect broader trends across labour markets (Sanders et al., 2013). For example, like hairdressers, strippers are misclassified as self-employed freelancers which means that despite management having significant disciplinary powers and control over uniforms, working hours and schedules, workers are denied basic labour rights and protections, for example, minimum wage, sick and holiday pay, and are responsibilised for organising their tax, national insurance payments and pensions (Cruz et al., 2017). The strategies employed to organise and manage strip club labour epitomise neoliberal market logic by encouraging individualistic, competitive and even hostile working environments. For example, management routinely purposely schedules as many dancers as possible per shift in order to extract high house fees, Such strategies not only make it more difficult for workers to earn money but often cause dancers to blame themselves or other workers for their low/unstable income. Indeed, research suggests that management actively contribute to and reproduce the discursive construction of stripping as inherently unstable to mask the deliberate and harmful nature of their labour processes which substantially impact dancers’ entrepreneurial success (or lack thereof) (Law, 2016; Mount, 2018).

Sex worker-led feminist projects

Despite the competitive and individualising work model within strip clubs outlined above, sex workers continue to demonstrate worker solidarity and engage in collective feminist practices. For example, based on a shared set of workplace grievances, a group of self-identified feminist women (who also happen to be strippers) established a network, that I will for anonymity purposes name ‘Dancer Collective’, to campaign for better working conditions. More broadly, Dancer Collective also seeks to improve the safety, dignity and employment rights of sex workers by promoting self-organisation and the adoption of harm-reduction approaches to regulate the sex industry. Building on their existing skillsets developed within sex work, Dancer Collective has since combined promotional freelance activities with their collective feminist politics to become a viable and sustainable business that is run entirely by dancers/ex-dancers. The collective sits across and permeates different areas of freelance work combining artistic and creative activities, from pop-up strip club parties to public talks, art exhibitions and life drawing classes to establish and sustain their autonomous organisation. Through the development of a range of worker-led strategies, opportunities and growth for performers that lie outside of the current exploitative business model of a regular strip club, workers are now in charge of creating their own working conditions and actively support other sex workers1. Such community support can be particularly vital for sex workers who, unlike other precarious workers (e.g., Uber drivers), face whorephobia and are disproportionately at risk of violence and social exclusion making it exceptionally difficult for many to speak out or publicly challenge exploitative workplace practices due to fear of being outed (Simpson, 2021). Through this example, we can see that when freelance work within strip clubs is coupled with exploitative managerial practices this creates precarity and a hostile work environment for sex workers and yet, when equally precarious gig work and promotional activities are combined with sex worker-led collectivist practices, they can instead be used to advance feminist politics.

The effects of COVID-19, the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ and strippers’ collectivised response

For context, it is important to state that, while many dancers register their earnings formally, others may not, given that most people enter the stripping industry temporarily, intermittently, to supplement other forms of low-income and/or because they are disproportionately from marginalised groups, are students, carers, parents and migrants (some with insecure status) and/or are managing long-term physical illnesses or mental health issues (Mulvihill, 2020). However, during the pandemic, this meant that, when strip clubs closed, many workers not only lost their jobs but were also denied access to the UK Self-Employment Income Support Scheme and were left without the ‘financial safety net’ available to other workers. Given the damaging financial repercussions of the pandemic on businesses, particularly those within the hospitality and entertainment industries, once COVID-related restrictions were lifted, many strip clubs were unable to re-open and as the UK subsequently entered a ‘cost-of-living crisis’, experiences of financial precarity exacerbated for many sex workers, especially those unable to return to work.

In response to ever-declining state support, Dancer Collective supported sex workers in crisis by exploiting the broader platformisation of work and hosting digital events to raise emergency funds that provided immediate financial assistance. During this time, we then witnessed more sex worker-led feminist collectives emerging that followed similar entrepreneurial strategies to sustain their feminist work by raising money through online and in-person events, casualised gig-work activities and by collecting one-off donations through platforms such as GoFundMe. The expansion of such worker-led activism demonstrates its necessity, however rather than supporting primarily women workers, instead, counter feminist campaign groups – working in collaboration with local authorities – considered this to be a strategic time and opportunity to ensure that dancers do not return to work and that strip clubs remain closed indefinitely (see Farell-Roig, 2021 for one example in Bristol, UK).

Counter-feminist campaigns for the abolition of strip clubs

Within the paradigm of feminism, the sex industry remains a polarising issue. In opposition to the work of Dancer Collective, feminist groups – now working with political parties and as mentioned, with local councils – began campaigning to abolish the UK stripping industry in 2008 on the basis that they are a source (rather than a symptom) of gender inequality and violence against women and girls (see Clare, 2022 for an overview of ongoing debates). Such campaigns led to important changes in the regulation of strip clubs, and in 2009, local authorities were granted increased powers to decide whether to licence businesses as ‘Sexual Entertainment Venues’ (SEVs) and to determine the number of SEVs they considered ‘appropriate’. If councils deem the appropriate number to be zero, a ‘nil-cap policy’ is implemented which essentially bans the regulated stripping industry in that area (Colosi, 2013). Adopting such provisions was not compulsory, but 89% of local authorities implemented this approach by November 2011 (Hubbard and Lister, 2015: 146) and the number of strip clubs has dramatically decreased from 386 in 2013 to approximately 150 in 2022 (Abrahams, 2022). One consequence of reducing the number of strip clubs is that the few places still open now have a monopoly and are even less inclined to implement changes to improve working conditions. Furthermore, with fewer alternative places to work dancers are also less able to challenge harmful working practices due to fear of losing their already precarious jobs.

In 2019, anti-strip club ‘feminist’ groups-working in collaboration with political parties – initiated campaigns in London, Manchester and Sheffield where men were hired as part of a series of ‘undercover sting operations’ to secretly record women at work in strip clubs. Campaigners claimed to have footage of women ‘touching themselves sexually’ and breaking ‘no touching’ rules with customers which they argued was evidence of the ‘extreme harm and abuse’ taking place within the industry at large. The material gathered was then presented to local authorities in an attempt to have licences revoked with immediate effect. groups frequently referenced women ‘straddling [men] and grinding on [their] crotch’, to ‘prostitution’ and ‘blow/hand-jobs’ suggesting that the main concern was tackling ‘sex’ and exposure of the flesh rather than sexism which is an issue of power, consent, and justice (Gill and Orgad, 2018). Indeed, the campaign itself was based on the collection of footage taken without consent – likened to revenge porn by sex worker organisations (see Parvin, 2019) - and causing very real harm to women who faced being publicly outed as sex workers and losing their jobs. Problematically, there was a clear lack of care or consideration for workers during such campaigns that instead prioritised a personal/moral repugnance at the ‘ickiness’ of specific acts (Wolkowitz, 2006).

Feminism undermining feminism

Alison Phipps (2016) argues that, in a neoliberal context where the emotional is commodified, powerful groups mobilise traumatic narratives of sex worker exploitation as ‘investment capital’ to gain political advantage often in alliance with broader conservative agendas. With access to significantly more secure sources of funding, resources and power, it is clear how the concerns of typically privileged white feminists outside of the strip club as the ‘moral majority’ (Sanders and Hardy, 2014) are continually prioritised over and above the voices of stigmatised workers reliant on precarious streams of income to sustain their feminist rebuttal. While there are many different strands of feminism, through this case example we can see the reproduction of a long-held tradition within feminism whereby some women are given authority to speak on behalf of all women disregarding intersections of class and race.

The decline in strip clubs may be considered a feminist success story for some; however, for others, it exacerbates existing precarity, feminised poverty and gendered violence. For example, I recently carried out Participatory Action Research with dancers where we found that with fewer places to work, dancers were pushed into more dangerous locations, for example, private events and underground venues with less security and into more dangerous forms of sex work, most notably full-service work (see Simpson and United Sex Workers, forthcoming, for full discussion). While most dancers welcome regulation to improve their safety at work and working conditions, the widespread implementation of nil-cap bans under the guise of ‘reducing violence against women’ is ultimately based on the acceptance that ‘Other’ women (i.e. sex workers) are merely collateral damage in the broader fight for gender equality. Indeed, efforts to abolish strip clubs rather than improve workplace safety demonstrate how violence against sex workers is weaponised by so-called abolitionist feminist groups to ensure that sex work remains dangerous and to advance their political agendas.

Overly simplistic calls to ‘end demand’ by eradicating strip clubs also ignore why primarily women enter and continue working in the industry in the first place, that is, in response to broader economic shifts, hostile cuts and austerity measures, increased benefit sanctions and the introduction of universal credit, public sector wage stagnation, the rise of precarious work, extortionate childcare costs and a lack of alternative viable employment opportunities that disproportionately affect women (Hardy, 2019). Furthermore, when clubs are closed due to nil-cap bans, there are currently no contingencies in place for dancers who are left without a job or any real sources of support. It is widely assumed by feminist campaigners that strippers can simply find work elsewhere and in ‘safer’ hospitality roles. Yet, such assumptions not only uphold the idea that working-class women should be condemned to low-paid service jobs, but they also obscure the complex problem of gendered violence and exploitation prevalent across all labour markets. For example, research continues to show how strip clubs are not unique sites of sexism evidenced by the routine sexual harassment and abuse experienced by hospitality and countless other workers (Sanders and Hardy, 2014).

Reworking feminisms and activism?

The aim of this article was to begin to explore how feminism, precarious labour and entrepreneurialism coexist together in contradictory spaces and ways through the case of one sex worker-led feminist project. Within the stripping industry specifically, we can see how precarious work can lead to third-party exploitation; however, on the contrary, similar activities can be repurposed by workers to advance grassroots collective action. The transformative potential of such feminist projects should not be understated specifically in regard to gaining workers’ rights and protections. There have been recent, monumental shifts for strippers and their union, who have won the first-ever successful campaign against a nil-cap ban in Bristol as well as a legal battle to overturn a nil-cap ban in Edinburgh (Campbell, 2023; Evans, 2022). Nevertheless, what this article has demonstrated is how this collective feminist action is continually and violently undermined by feminists with access to substantially more secure sources of funding, resources and power. As the UK becomes ever more hostile, particularly for marginalised communities who are also disproportionately more likely to work in sex work, violence against them and their exploitation must not be weaponised to advance certain political agendas but instead must act as an impetus to support sex workers in their fight for safer working conditions and labour rights. While feminists have long called for a reconciliation between the two extremes outlined within this article, now really is the time to rework ‘feminisms’ to ensure that the concerns of those most marginalised remain at the centre of the collective movement and are not harmed by our politics and action.