Demi: Stripper, wife, and homemaker.

Demi holds an intimidating presence, she has a dry sense of humour and a polished physique, often fronting a domineering personality; encouraging her followers to respond to story polls before berating the men who leave less than savoury responses. 

But Demi is nothing but lovely and beyond welcoming. We had shot together twice before she booked me for her and Lou's wedding. It was the first wedding I had ever shot professionally, and I was quite nervous. But the day went incredibly smoothly, and there were often moments I caught myself tearing up behind my viewfinder. 

A few days ago, I met up with Demi at her workplace for a deep dive into Demis experinces in the stripping industry. We met around 11 am, before the doors opened to customers. It was my first time in a strip club, as I had only shot pop-up strip shows before. Velour booths, campy decor and floor-to-ceiling mirrors welcomed me. 

After shooting, we sat in one of the darker booths next to the bar. Starting with the basics I  started by asking Demi to describe her job to the average person… “Wow, what a question, I’ve literally never described my job to anyone… I supply sexual entertainment services, for (hopefully,) rich men or women… and anyone, as long as they’ve got money.” 

What would you say your average clientele is? Do you work within any specific niches? 

“Especially at this point, most people don't have as much money as when I started, You have to work with what you get… If you don't really love young guys and you prefer older men because you make more money off them… you don't really get a choice, and I think that's just down to people not having as much money.” 

Demi went on to say how she hates working with larger groups, and also the “younger lads” as she doesn't have anything in common with them, “I’ve got nothing to say to them”. She much prefers middle-aged men between 40 and 60, on their own, as she knows how to work them. “They’re my fave, but at the moment, you take what you can get.”

“You have to be able to adapt. Because if you can't adapt to working with people who you don't necessarily love, or you don't necessarily have anything in common with, then you're not going to do well, because if that's all you get one night. That's all you get, you have to find a way to make money”

Demi often attributes her success to not working at the strip club to make friends and having quite a strict relationship with her work life. From briefly looking through Demi's Instagram with rose-tinted glasses, it would appear she's quite the socialite. I wondered if this job was any easier because of the connections she had made along the way, despite her rigid work ethic.

Do you think you'd be able to continue in this industry if you didn't have friends in the community? 

 “Seven or eight years I've been doing this now, so I just do this to make money and go home… My main goal, coming in here, is to make money, I don't want to have a good time, I’m not here to chat with my mates, I don’t want to drink, and party, it's not how you see in the movies”

“It would be a little bit harder if you didn't have anyone... Trying to make money in that environment, but I don't think it would bother me so much because I've just focused on making what I make and going home. I have a dead busy life outside of the club, my life doesn't revolve around being in here… (Some people) come out to have a drink, if a customer buys a bottle of gray goose, they'll sit with them for two hours, even if they've not spent any money on them. I think that's where a lot of people go wrong in the industry. Because you're not here to make friends with the girls or with the guys. It's a job at the end of the day, and if you treat it like a job, you're going to get more out of it.”

Did it take you a while to develop this attitude towards work? 

“I've always been that way. I just think it's how I am anyway, as a person I see things very black and white. There are nights where I come in and have a few drinks, and you know, it's more of a fun thing… But you just see people doing it literally every shift.”

Is it common for strippers to drink on shift? 

“I think it's quite common… And I've always said, if you can't work without having an alcoholic drink, you shouldn't be doing this job. It feeds into this lifestyle that's not attainable for longer periods of time. If you can't do it if you're sober, you shouldn't be doing it. It's not the job for you.”

You also do online sex work. Do you find it difficult to separate work and home life if you're working from home as well as in the club? 

“I've taken a little bit of a back seat from it. I still post, but these days, people are literally having a gang bang and selling it for three dollars. How can you compete with that? It's so oversaturated you have to do the next shocking thing to get any attention there… Then where'd you go after that? What's next? How do you up it? If you're not prepared to be constantly working, then you're probably not going to do very well on online stuff,”

There’s been a wave of online discourse, largely led by sex work abolitionist “feminists,” who frame sex work as inherently degrading, often under the guise of feminist concern. In response, many sex-positive feminists push back, arguing that sex work can be empowering, especially when it involves reclaiming bodily autonomy and sexual expression. Still, many sex workers place themselves somewhere in the middle, simply asserting that sex work is work, and with any job, it doesn’t need to be empowering to be legitimate. But in cases where it is empowering, that feeling is often tied to artistry and performance. With forms like pole dance — which originated in strip clubs — now celebrated as athletic and expressive art, I was curious whether Demi views her own work through a similar lens: not just as labour, but as a form of art.

Do you view stripping as an art form? 

“Yes, and no, I think I'm a good dancer. I do think it's an art form, but it doesn't have to be an art form for you to make good money in strip clubs. Because you can do the bare minimum and still do well. I know girls who have no rhythm, who can't dance. You wouldn't ever think they were professional dancers, but they make really good money. The people who come in, 80% of them are more interested in just seeing you naked. You can do what you want as long as they've got a good view of your asshole. Yeah. It doesn't matter how you got there, as long as you're there.”

“People always like to bring up the fact that stripping isn’t empowering to women when they’re coming for our necks. But I don’t understand when it became the standard expectation that your job has to empower you. If feeling empowered in your workplace is what you need to feel fulfilled then I wish you the best of luck because most jobs that you would think would empower somebody are more than likely underpaid, you’re more than likely being overworked and the feeling you’re chasing is probably even further away than before. If you think having to sit and listen to a man you couldn’t care less about tell you he wants to fuck you like a slut for half an hour while you slink around naked is somehow worse than working 12 hour shifts for minimum wage, having to justify sick days and beg for holidays to make your life worthwhile, coming home to your white picket fence, the partner you hate and the 3 kids your family drilled into you that you needed to have just so you can cry yourself to sleep then wake up and rack a line on your bedside table just so you have the energy to take the kids to school and make it through your day…then you’re insane. I’m empowered in the aspects of my life that I care about, my marriage empowers me, my friends and family empower me, the way I choose to spend my time outside of the club empowers me, why do I need to feel empowered at work? If I don’t hate my job, it’s allowing me to live the life I want to live and I’m not hurting anyone, then why do I care?”

After nearly a decade working in strip clubs, do you feel you've become desensitised to nudity — either your own or others'?

“Oh yeah, 100%. If someone said, oh my god, I like your pink hair I'd be like oh my god, my landing strip matches look, and I'd (consensually) get my fanny out, no problem. You do forget people in everyday life don't just get their flaps out. A lot of people in my social circle are in the industry, it's even more normal between us, so it does make you forget…

It's very rare that anything shocks me. I can think of two instances from customers, probably my whole stripping career, that shocked me, and that's it.”

Would you be willing to talk about them?

TW: THEMES OF INCEST, PEDOPHILIA, ABORTION.

“You might have to put a trigger warning on it. The first one was a guy who gave me some money to dance with him. He asked me my name and I told him, and he went, Okay, cool. He said, Do you mind if I call you my daughter's name while you dance for me?

Straight to jail. Don't pass go, don't collect 200 pounds. That took me aback.” 

Demi explained that she said no and immediately returned the money to him.

“The second one started quite normally. Normal for a strip club. He's said I want to fuck you, I want to come inside you. I was like, Oh, whatever that's so normal I hear that every day. But then he said, Oh, but if I came inside you, you'd be pregnant, wouldn't you? And I was like, maybe, that's how it works. Then he went, and then you wouldn't be able to work anymore, would you? And I was like, well I would probably not go through with the pregnancy. I was just humouring him at this point. And he said Oh, okay, so you'd have an abortion? That would be so. Hot. I was like, what? And he said it would be so horny to watch you abort my child.  I was like… I'm rarely, rarely shocked in here, and you've managed it..”

We went on to try and theorise how this man could have possibly got to a point where he viewed abortion as sexual, possibly an intense case of a degradation and humiliation fetish, we simply landed on the fact it would drive anyone crazy trying to break down the psyche of people who visit the strip club as a substitute to a therapists office. 

“You know what I think to preserve your sanity, you can't deep things people say in here… I think a lot of the time, they just want the shock factor, they want to say something that you've not heard before, they want you to react, Oh my God. What? They want to worry you a little bit. I don't think it's a strip club thing. I think it's a man thing. They just want to make you feel a certain way, a certain sense of uncomfortable, because they get off on it. 

I rarely think about anything that happens. I'll tell my wife on the way home. Oh, my God, this guy said that. Oh, my God, he did this.. How embarrassing. You know, laugh about stuff. But I would never go home and worry about anything anyone said.

Obviously, it's more pleasant if someone's nicer to you, but I don't really care. People say Oh my god, where's your self-respect? You're just gonna let people be nasty to you? But what does it matter if it's not affecting me?  I'm not arsed about it, as long as I'm getting paid for it.”

Do you think working here has given you a different outlook on feminist issues? 

“If you shout too much about political stuff on Instagram, you will get deleted. Your shit will get removed, and it's all well and good saying, well, you should do it anyway. Because it's what's right, and it is what's right. But if it's going to completely deplatform me and I'll end up with no income from doing it. I think sometimes you've kinda got to bite your tongue and take the L and just do what you can outside of the public eye to help these kinds of things. It's an important issue to talk about, and I have a lot of chats here with the girls. Just not with the men.”

Do you feel as if you're playing a character when you work here? Or is it just an extension of yourself?

“Probably more of a character, but then again, I think it depends on who you talk to. You always adjust how you come across when you're talking to different people, and I think if you can't do that you'll find it hard. If a young, 18-year-old lad just wants you to tell him how fit he is and get your tits out for him; you're going to approach that differently than an older man who wants an intellectual conversation, who's there more for that human connection than someone who just wants to look at your tits. So I'm probably a slightly different person with everyone I speak to, but fundamentally, I'm always the same, I'm quite a sarcastic person. I'm quite straight-talking, my humour is very dry, and I'm never any different. I think you can kind of keep an element of yourself as long as you know how to make everyone like you, wherever they're from, and whatever they like.”

You mentioned that you work three days a week. Are you happy with your work-to-life balance?

“I'm happy doing my three days, you know, I come to work, I make my money, I go home, I do normal things for the rest of the time. I'm always that busy anyway, just with life, walking the dog, going to Aldi and shit. I'm actually so boring I tell people this all the time. But I'm happy with it, I could always work less, I think everyone could work less. If I didn't have to work, I'd volunteer at a dog sanctuary and spend all day with dogs.”

Do you have any advice for anyone coming into the industry? 

“Don't do it … You know what I do think, don't do it, is a good piece of advice. But then I also think, who the fuck am I to tell you what to do?” 

Would you still do it if you could go back and listen to your advice? 

“Yeah, as mad as it sounds I'm happy doing it. I'm content with my life. A lot of people think it's a stepping stone, but no I'm doing this until I'm done, then I'm gonna do nothing.” 

“You have to be thick-skinned. If you've never been in this industry before, you're gonna have a shock. It's very taxing on the body, even the bare minimum is hard work… You can't get upset about the industry, it's kind of a know what you're coming into situation. You have to deal with men face-to-face who probably aren't very nice people. You can not come in here and expect everyone to respect you. We don't make money from people respecting us; we make money from people getting horny over us. They come in here and pay so they can (within reason,) say whatever they want. If you're not ready to be seen as a sexual object you shouldn't be doing this job… people are attempting to humanise strippers (in the public eye,) and viewing them as a whole person with opinions, but men don't pay for opinions, they want to see us naked… I don't want their respect, I don't need their respect.” 

“A lot of the push for humanising strippers at the moment is harming strippers, because that's not what men want to do.”

Do you have a long-term plan? 

“I'm happy doing this until I'm not hot enough, or until I get so sick of the sight of a strip club that I won't step foot in one again.” 

We naturally started talking about Demis wife Lou, as she had joined us for the interview, I asked Demi to explain how their relationship had come into fruition. 

How did you meet Lou? 

“If I had never got into this industry I would never have met my wife, she was managing the strip club that I worked at, and it was love at first sight for me, not for her though she was otherwise occupied. But I was persistent and I decided I would marry her one day. Then lots of tequila, chats and flirting later we ended up in a karaoke bar, doing questionable things… and then ended up in a courtyard of a bar at 12.30 pm, after seven shots of tequilla, a bottle of champagne and four cocktails, while everyone was going about their daily life … just rolling around, doing questionable things. And then we ended up in the taxi back to mine… doing questionable things. And now we're married and have a dog and a house, and we would have never met if I hadn't been a stripper, so thank you to the stripper gods for my wife.”

“Also, I see a lot of people slagging clubs off and slagging this job off, saying how horrific and soul-destroying it is. Which is fair if that's your experience, but I think that a lot of people are being very dramatic about it, it's not that bad. As long as you know what you're getting into and you have thick skin. Clubs work a certain way because they have to; if you owned a club, you would want to make money too. People talk about house fees and fines, but that's how it's always worked, and I'm all for clubs working that way because you have to have an element of being passed off at the club to make it work, as crazy as that sounds. If everyone were best friends, people would take the piss. If I worked at a club where people didn't have to pay house fees and fines, I would take the piss, I'd come in when I want, and there'd be no kind of structure. Some clubs are worse than others, and I'm fortunate that I work at a respectful club.” 

Do you think you feel so strongly about the structure of strip clubs because you live with Lou and you see the behind-the-scenes of the managerial role? 

“Yes. I think when you take a step back and look at it from everyone's perspective, then you do see how hard it is to organise 50, 60 girls. You do see how it affects the business, and if I were running a strip club, I'd be charging house fees, because that's why people start businesses, to make money.”

Demi went on to comment on the structure of strip clubs and how in this case the house fees stay the same regardless of how much money you make. Although clubs have taken a massive hit post-COVID, as well as from the recession, so profiting isn't always the case. Although Demi commented on the benefits of a stable house fee, regardless of your income that night, in her eyes making it worthwhile, especially working a busy shift.

If you want to see more of Demi's work and follow her journey in the industry, you can follow her at @demi.jordanx on Instagram.