Ph.D-ancer
Mona Salim stood under a doorway that was draped in red satin. Moments before the DJ called her onstage, she adjusted her silver sequin bikini top that exaggerated her buxom figure. She was ready to work.
On this brisk winter Saturday night in Mixed Emotions, a Manhattan strip club, the 25-year-old exotic dancer scanned the hazy red room, examining reflections displayed on the mirrored walls, looking for any regular customers.
She gestured to a handsome 55-year-old investment banker from Iran who visits the club every week. “[He] throws money around like it ain’t no thing,” she said.
She started dancing three years ago, when she was just starting graduate school in sociology at the City University of New York, focusing on women’s rights in developing countries.
“I became a dancer after reading a great deal of sex worker rights literature and developing a feminist analysis that made me want to strip,” Salim said. “Not just because the money would help pay for school, but because I felt that putting myself in this industry was part of legitimizing the work we do.”
She stepped onto the stage at the center of the room, encircled by a bar filled with men gazing from below and clutching dollar bills. Rihanna’s song “Diamonds” blasted on.
Find light in the beautiful sea
She flung her wavy sable hair over her shoulder and strutted down the stage in her 3-inch heels toward a group of men dressed in collared shirts and khaki pants. The spotlight encapsulated her. She was in control.
Salim is a co-founder of “We Are Dancers,” a group created to educate and organize dancers. She had heard from a friend that a few current and former New York City dancers were meeting informally for brunch — later called “Brunch and Bitch”—to chat about “stripping-related stuff.” While working as a dancer in Manhattan and Queens, she witnessed many dancers being fondled by customers, and club owners refusing to pay freelance dancers.
From the frequent brunch meetings, a grassroots organization grew. About 10 dancers help with running the website, public relations and organizing events. The group has more than 100 members.
In November, “We are Dancers” launched a fundraising effort to create a know-your-rights booklet focused on sexual health, birth control and employment law. They hope to pass the booklet out to all 35 clubs throughout the five boroughs. So far, they’ve raised half of their $5,000 goal.
“We are working-class women, women who confront a great deal of stigma in media, courtrooms and politics,” said Salim, who moved to New York from Mumbai to attend graduate school. But, she admitted, dancing helps pay her $1,100 monthly rent. She can earn as much as $400 a night.
“Sometimes, these negative stereotypes become internalized and some dancers turn this shame inward,” she said, adding that every dancer has a different reason for stripping. “Some dancers strip because of the exhibitionist thrill, some to pay their tuition, and others because they lack documentation for other types of labor.” After graduation, Salim plans to be a professor or start her own nonprofit, helping underserved minority women.
One night during her first of year stripping, she was approached by a late-night customer who had bought several $20 lap dances. He asked her to perform a sexual act in the Champagne room, where dancers take patrons for private shows. She refused. He raised the price offer. She refused, again. After the lap dance ended he flashed his police badge and told her that she did the right thing.
“It’s so easy for a dancer to be hauled to central booking in the middle of a shift and urged to take a guilty plea to avoid legal costs,” she said
So shine bright, tonight you and I
We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky
She contorted her body, climbed the pole, linked her legs and swiveled down. Her eyes, brushed over with smoky-black mascara, locked with a lanky man in his mid-20s. She blew him a kiss from her Revlon “Really Red” painted lips.
“Give it up for our Indian princess,” said the DJ, perched above the stage in a booth. Many of the 50 men in the club applauded.
Salim swept up the bills that had fallen out of her black thong during her upside-down splits on the pole. She estimated that she had around $50 in her hand.
“Hey girl,” called out the lanky man who had caught Salim’s kiss minutes before.
“Hey Greg,” she said, sitting next to him at the bar.
“It’s my birthday,” he said. “I got you a card. It perfectly summarizes how I feel about you.”
He waited for Salim to open it. The Hallmark card with a pastel flower design read inside, “cash holder.”
He laughed before she could respond.
“He’s sweet,” she admitted later. ”But he can be annoying.”
Greg, who did not reveal his last name, has been an on-and-off customer of Salim’s for two years. Salim ranked Greg as her fifth-favorite customer. Her number-one is a “hot” half-Asian man who discusses “anti-racist political chit-chat” between lap dances.
She sat on Greg’s lap, adjusting his blue-striped polo. She grabbed his hand and led him to a private back room.
Salim sat in the first row of a class with two dozen other students. Her notepad organized and labeled: Eisenstein, Sociology-Gender & Globalization course. Her O’s filled and the I’s dotted with hearts. She wore an oversized gray CUNY sweatshirt that belonged to her ex-boyfriend Chris over yoga pants and pink Nike Lunar Glides. Her hair coiled in a bun, leopard glasses sliding off her shallow nasal ridge. She called this her “Tuesday getup.”
On the whiteboard the professor, Hester Eisenstein, wrote, “How does the association of ‘liberated woman’ and modernity affect the process of globalization?”
A woman sitting two seats to Salim’s left raised her hand. “I think the modernity means that a liberated woman in the U.S. has the same rights in the Middle East,” she said.
“But,” Salim interjected, “the notion of modernity is a Western terminology. A liberated women is defined by one’s society, which in essence, combats the very nature of modernity.”
“For example, in the Middle East, the ultimate goal of women activists? is to pursue justice that is promised by Islam to all humankind. Modernity often represents secularism,” Salim said, creating making circular gestures with her hands. Throughout the class she constantly interrupted, occasionally sliding to the edge of her seat, ready to lift off.
“She’s fierce,” Eisenstein said after class. “You can’t help but feed off her passion and determination.”
An hour later, slouched in a leather chair, sipping on a large Carmel Macchiato, Salim appeared less fierce.
“Why do I wear my ex-boyfriend’s sweatshirt?” she said. “Because he was too scared to pick it up from my place.”
Salim recognizes that most men would be hesitant to date a dancer.
“My love life sucks,” she said, laughing. “Most men can handle this,” she added.
Salim broke up with her boyfriend two months ago. “I want a guy who can accept me,” she said. “Or Channing Tatum.”
The conversation shifted when the topic of Salim’s family was introduced. Back in Mumbai, her dad works as an engineer, her mother as a teacher. Salim is the middle child. She has an older sister, who lives in London, and a younger brother attending college in the U.K. He family doesn’t know she’s a dancer.
“They would disown me,” she said. “But, I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing.”
She logged on to her Facebook page and scrolled through pictures of her teenage years. In one image, a 14-year-old Salim stands in front of a white concrete wall, her hair in pigtails, a white collared shit and a tan skirt, less than an inch above her knee — a school policy. Her thick glasses give her bug eyes.
“This was my awkward phase,” she said. She scrolled to a picture of herself at 17. Her figure has matured, glasses replaced with contacts, her hair combed down and a plaid skirt, a few inches above her knee.
It was Easter and Salim prepared for her club’s annual party. All the dancers were required to wear pastel pinks, yellows and greens with matching bunny ears.
“I don’t know what to make of Jesus’s resurrection intersecting with adulterous erections,” Salim said, applying pale pink mascara at home. Beside her, a purple duffel bag, embroidered with a peace sign, carrying her costume for tonight.
“It’s unfair,” she said. “We have to spend a day shopping for pastel thongs and bunny ears and pay for it ourselves.”
As an independent contractor, Salim signed a agreement with the owner of each club owner where she dances, stating that she must follow specific guidelines. The rules range from “No drinking on the job” — which Salim said many girls violate— to, all dancers must dance for at least 20 minutes each hour. But some unwritten rules are also a fineable offense — like not following specific dress codes for special events. In the past year, Salim has spent $350 on costumes: naughty Santa, “Dominican Independence Day” bikini, heart-shape bras, to name a few.
On the subway, headed to work, Salim sat between a man in his mid-40s with a handlebar mustache and a woman whose hair had gray roots. The woman noticed the man glance at Salim’s cleavage, peeping out from her Nike sweat suit. The woman looked at Salim, raised her brows and rolled her eyes.
Four stops later, Salim exited. “That’s what I have to deal with on a daily basis.” She zipped up her jacket to the top.
Salim arrived to work at 9 p.m. Two bouncers, Big Mike and Carlitos, both peaking at 6-foot-3, stood at the doorway, each smoking a Camel Crush.
“Hey baby girl,” said Big Mike, hugging Salim.
“Happy Easter,” Carlitos said.
The dancers all hang out and change in a back room, adjacent to a tiled room filled with eight showers. Inside are 10 vanity tables with corresponding red bar stools. Makeup bags, uncapped lipsticks and compact power littered the cramped room. Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue fragrance competed with Bed Head hair spray. Every night, about 20 dancers come in and out, working for a minimum of four hours.
Salim took the vanity farthest from the door, next to Michelle, a slim 26-year-old with a lily tattoo on her left hip.
She placed her bag on table, pulled out her bunny ears, placed them on her head and smirked.
“Jesus would be proud,” Michelle said.
As 10 p.m. approached, the room filled with dancers — and pastel bunny ears.
“Did you hear what happened to Club Eleven in the Bronx?” asked one dancer, rubbing lotion on her legs. Before anyone could respond she continued: “The owner was arrested for not paying some of his dancers.”
“No way!” replied a petite dancer who was wearing platform boots that rose to her knees.
“This is what happens when dancers are treated as disposable,” Salim said.
The chatter continued. “You all need to come to out to one of our meetings,” she added.
The following Sunday, Salim traveled to JoeDoe, a restaurant on the Lower East Side, for this month’s “Brunch and Bitch.”
Huddled in around a large table near a window sat the 10 leaders of “We are Dancers.” Rachel Aimme, co-founder of $pread, a magazine by and for sex workers, walked in, her hair pulled back in a haphazard ponytail. These days Aimme plans most of her schedule around her 4-year-old daughter.
“I have good news,” Salim said, pulling out a cardboard cylinder from her Greenpeace tote bag. “The posters are in!”
She unrolled an 18-by-24 print displaying a dancer, who resembled Salim, standing with a dropped hip, arm hooked around a pole, wearing a red bikini and matching lip gloss. Behind her is a montage of a woman applying makeup and a dancer on a pole surrounded by dollar bills. “We are Dancers,” bold white letters declared across the bottom.
“I love it!” said Edible Akynos, a pastor’s daughter, who says she was raised in a rich Christian household. She’s been in the adult industry for 10 years and has two kids. “We need to start putting these out throughout the city and selling them online.”
“I agree,” said Essence Revealed, a burlesque dancer, who earned a dual degree in history and women’s studies. “But we also need be careful not to spread ourselves thin.”
Most of the members of We Are Dancers have children, attend college or work a second job. The group is still looking for dancers to translate the website into Russian and Spanish, the most common foreign languages among the city’s dancers. Three weeks earlier, an anonymous donor sent Salim a money order for $500. That money will help pay to print their know-your-rights pamphlet. Salim estimates that within two months the organization will have enough to start printing.
Despite the dancers’ enthusiasm, they understand they are facing strip club “mega chains,” operated by owners who have stakes in multiple clubs. The dancers brave enough to speak out against seedy bosses risk losing their jobs and outing themselves to their friends, family and colleagues. “Understood,” Salim said. “But we can’t stop momentum now.”
Everyone nodded. “You can’t stop us bad bitches,” she added.
After a six-hour study session a few weeks later, Salim was back at work.
“I had to apply extra concealer,” she said, staring at her reflection.
“Did you hear Brittany was fired?” asked Sapphire, a tiny, tanned dancer.
“No, what happened?” Salim asked.
“She got in an argument with one of the managers,” Sapphire said.
Minutes later Salim was on deck. “Who run this world?” Salim said, weaving through a crowd of thirsty men, reciting Beyoncé’s lyrics. “Girls.”
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