When five prostitutes turned up murdered in the U.K. and an alleged serial killer faces trial for the deaths of dozens of women in Vancouver, Canada, I thought it was time to shine a light on the sex industry - to examine why this profession is driven underground and how this shaming process puts the women involved at greater risk. For some women, it is a legitimate career choice, but for those women who have fewer choices, it's a risky business indeed.

I do not claim to have an understanding of their work as prostitutes or their personal reasons for working on the streets. I am not here to judge the choices of others or make generalizations about the adult industry. This article is not about women's moral choices, but about shedding light on strip clubs and how they act as the pulse to our own Western culture. This article is based on my own personal experience.

I didn't set out to make a book that was voyeuristic. It was really meant to be a social commentary. I wanted the dancers who were working in the venues and the customers to speak about themselves and their relationships with one another. I wanted to speak about the strange interpersonal relationships between the two, and I wanted to make sure it wasn't told by an outsider.

It was a learning process. In the beginning I was incredibly intrigued, as an outsider would be, by being able to capture these images that were really unusual. But there came a point in the process of making "Lapdancer" that I started putting the images together and realizing it wasn't necessarily about strip clubs.

What I was seeing was more of a phenomenon that existed hermetically behind the sealed doors of the clubs. The club becomes a microcosm of what's going on in society today.

I focused on the customers' desperate need to connect with another and the dancers whom play the part of the intangible for which the customer yearns. This expression of fruitless desire meets the endless need to consume, and in strip clubs feelings become a commodity.

People are consumed with the very real need to connect, yet they spend most of their time on the computer and there's a lot of detachment. We're all searching for closeness, yet there's a great fear of it.

For many men, the strip club is a place to find a "ready-made" relationship built on the exchange of money for time and affection. For other men, it is simply an escape based on fantasy of meeting the woman who will temporarily live up to prefabricated cultural notions of how women are supposed to look or behave.

In my own experience, I felt a sense of isolation. I was involved six days a week, and that might have been my whole social contact for the week because most of my friends were working day jobs. During the day, I would just have enough time to get a bite to eat and run a few errands. I felt alienated because while I was constantly talking to men and soliciting lap dances, I also had this false sense that I was connecting to others. In fact, these relationships were ephemeral and came and went from one night to the next.

In the strip clubs, men and women are exposed in a sense - the men become vulnerable with every dollar they spend, and the dancers are naked or close to naked. Human vulnerability can lead to intimacy, but the mutual relationships don't pan out because they are built on paper thin legs rather than nurturing.

These days, relationships can become as disposable as the forgotten Christmas toy. Strip club relationships are a metaphor for this societal behavior of love for sale. Relationships don't happen when we discover what we perceived to be a replica of our delusions and our fantasies.

Maybe the customer's dream girl is Pamela Lee Anderson, and if that's what they've been fed to cherish, their life's not going to be solid or grounded, but closer to plastic and silicone. Strip club subcultures perpetuate a fantasy that has already been sealed in the popular culture. They work as bed partners, except what happens outside the club walls is always the preliminary catalyst.

The dancers name those customers who come several times a week with a sense of entitlement and ownership "the regulars." Sometimes, they are unhappily married and wish to assuage the pain of returning to a lonely home after a day of work. Other times, regulars are what the culture considers "failures," either due to their physical being or their social introversion or ineptness.

Other men like to look at the regulars as being different from them, but what scares them most is the discovery that the same fear of loneliness exists within them too. Sometimes it seemed as if they would be better off in therapy.

Fantasy is one of the joie de vivres. As a working artist, my need to express myself through my photography is dependent on leaving reality temporarily and escaping into the world of fantasy. But I also need to be grounded in reality to stand back and look at the truth of my situation.

When people look at my book, most don't get turned on. It's not a "sexy" book. It's a slice of reality, not the "striptease" complete with smoke machines. I didn't intentionally sit down and think I want to photograph the men and the women with a hard flash.

I think in part it's my particular style and somewhere along the way, I realized the bright flash on the subjects and the environment revealed the often-obscured imperfections of the participants. I wanted to relish in the imperfections of reality as well as share that experience with the viewers and readers of my book.

I decided to become a dancer, as a dancer, not as a photographer posing as a dancer. I was really a career stripper. I wanted to make enough money so I could travel and work on my photography. I made that money and went abroad. When I came back, I made the decision to start dancing again. As I realized I could save a certain amount of money, then I felt that I could put my photography on hold.

For the next eight years, which turned out to be longer than planned, my decision was just to dance. Dancing was never in my plan after I graduated with a BFA from New York University.

But I enjoyed my career dancing and rarely regretted going to my jobs. However, I will be the first to say that there were some unpleasant psychological detriments to the job. I was determined to settle down and pursue the things I wanted to do with my life after my dancing career. The fact is I was feeding myself fantasy on a daily basis.

John Lennon said, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans." This was my own personal fantasy that I held on to desperately out of an unrealistic fear of my own future and which allowed me to pursue dancing for many years.

Dancing was for the most part a disassociative experience in which I moved on automatic. I started to see customers as $20-bills. It's a business, but a lot of the customers and dancers, including myself, get really mixed up about it.

I worked as a dancer for about eight years on and off and keeping my own identity intact, learning how to separate myself on a daily basis from my role as "ready-to-please-the-world-girl," was vital to my person. When you sell sexuality for money, it's always a bit confusing for everyone involved, and a lot of the customers don't know what they can and can't do.

For myself, running around five or six days a week in a little plaid skirt didn't give me a fair chance of expressing myself as a full woman. The job becomes routine and boring eventually.

At the end of a late night shift, there wasn't enough energy left to photograph, although I did shoot here and there and started to think and write about the project. Writing gave me a lot of clarity.

Most of the time, the girls weren't put off by the camera. Dancers and customers would tell me if they didn't want to be photographed and I always asked because I didn't want to create any problems. Most of the customers were actually excited about it and had fun with it.

Some dancers are furious at the customers, and certainly I experienced similar feelings when customers went past the line. Sometimes they were drunk. Sometimes they are misguided and believe a lot of the dancers are prostitutes. They have their own misconceptions, like the rest of the world, about strippers.

The fact of the matter is that those guys are paying your rent. I once knew a dancer who became incredibly angry at the fact that she was dancing to make a living, but the fact is she was going to Paris once a month and supporting her work as a filmmaker. Why work a regular office job and have someone harass you sexually and not make the kind of money you should be making?

It's a mutual exchange. Sure it's a corrupt system and a lot of the guys act despicably. But that's how they think they're supposed to behave in a milieu where human expression runs rampant for the pure effect of drama.

At the end of my career as a dancer, I realized I was fortunate - I had saved some money, invested, moved ahead and all the hard work I put into "Lapdancer" was finally published. I can say the same for many of my colleagues; they left the business with something to show for it.

I am left mostly with a lot of absurd memories. That was part of the fun for me. It felt like a big adventure at the time. I made three really close friends. We'd spend the summers together, working and sharing a place in the country and during the day sunbathed in the woods. There was a lot of silly fun. I loved to dance and when I requested the d.j. to play classic disco, he acquiesced, even though the other girls didn't like it.

There was a down-to-earthness about being in the industry. You're baring it all, literally. You are naked, bending over, plucking toilet paper from your nether regions. Because of that you make connections with other women faster in a dressing room than you would in real life.

I'm not sure why there's a need to look for negative reasons why a woman would make a choice to dance, instead of looking at the positive reasons. People ask, "What could have possibly happened to the poor dancer for her to make such a horrible, tragic decision to dance?"

I think that sort of reflection or notion comes from a culture that immediately needs to find a negative explanation for why a woman would decide to use her body to make money. I think I read a statistic that one in three women have been sexually abused in one form or another in all work sectors, not just dancing.

I think that only in a sexually repressed society, one which undermines women's choice to work in a so-called disreputable job, does the issue of looking into their family history become par for the course.

What about the simple motive: mega cash for uneducated, unskilled labor. And we especially have a lot of issues for a woman taking off her clothes, but you don't hear the same thing about men. Sure, there are not as many male dancers, but it's just not said.

When people ask me about the ever-talked about alcohol and drugs pervasive in the business, I say, "but of course, this is the entertainment industry. Just like Hollywood except no Betty Ford clinic". You could make the same comparisons with the restaurant business or stockbrokers.

But, not all dancers blow all their hard worked earnings blowing it up their nose. I've found that the older dancers are really motivated and are typically high cash earners. They are hard-core hustler workers, and they have goals. People don't realize there's a whole contingency of strippers that are real estate or stock investors.

However, not all dancers fit within this paradigm and not all sex workers are not in control of their own decisions or are able to plan their futures as I or other strippers that I knew did. This is why I believe that first and foremost we do not simply vilify or typify the "sort" of woman who goes to into this line of work. All women should be elevated to the status of human beings, no matter where we sit on the moral totem pole.

It's time we begin to look at the sex industry with more discerning and complex minds. Our initial reasoning is that there is something intrinsically wrong with working in the sex industry. It is most interesting why our culture demands answers and relief from their own sexual repression and anxieties by pinning it on the shoulders of the "whores."

In the past, before my book came out, many people became so uncomfortable with the subject that I had to awkwardly close the conversation. Now, that I have made a book, which to many legitimizes my foray in the sex industry, I have discovered that many are fascinated with my thoughts on the subject.

There's so much shame in being involved in this business. For me, making this book was so helpful in moving away from that. It was saying "This is a fraction of my life, but it is not me completely." In the process of putting the book out there and letting people see my history and who I am as a person, it wasn't take it or leave it. It was just, "You can talk about what you do, and this is what I did, and I can talk about it."

Now, my life is different because I have to go to the ATM machine, like everybody else. I'm doing my photography and working on a project that's really meaningful to me. I'm not a part of it, but I feel really connected to it. I'm expressing myself and being creative. And I'm making up the rules everyday, by myself. I do want to tell people, "don't set your dreams off too long." But I know I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't danced.

*****

To view Juliana Beasley's website:
click here [2]

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