The Way We Work Now
I’m a Las Vegas Stripper. I Don’t Know When I’ll Dance in Person Again.
The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.
This anonymous woman in her twenties works at a strip club in Las Vegas. She spoke to Mai Tran about transitioning more to digital striptease, or “camming,” once the pandemic hit.
I don’t know when it’s going to be safe to partake in my profession again, and that’s really scary for people like me, who chose this line of work because of the accessibility it provides.
On an average day before Covid, I would do my online work in the morning — so my camming and fetish customers — and at night I would go into the strip club. Usually I get there around 5 p.m. and people really start coming through the doors around 10. The club is super full, there are a hundred girls out on the floor, and every room is taken. I’ll head home at 2 a.m. and repeat the cycle. I have chronic illness so I don’t have a set amount of days. Whenever I feel good I just go into work, probably about two or three times a week.
I was pretty clueless about Covid until it started gaining traction on social media, around the end of February. Since I’m immunocompromised, going into work was a bit scary. The government hadn’t given much guidance besides: “Just clean.” The first two weeks of March, there were Clorox wipes everywhere, and everyone thought, we can sanitize things. It’ll be fine. Three days later everything shut down.
A lot of dancers and I moved our work online, doing things like OnlyFans and camming. I was fortunate enough to already have a nice online following, but others have struggled because it takes a lot of marketing to get yourself out there. Sites also take…
