Siobhan Brooks, "Dancing Towards Freedom"

In "Dancing Towards Freedom", Siobhan Brooks writes from her perspective about what happened in San Fransisco when her and her co-workers at the peep show, "The Lusty Lady", started to unionize.

The Lusty Lady had some qualities to it that made it ideal for the first sex worker business to unionize. For one, it was a peep show, not a strip club, where girls danced together in a room, separated by glass between themselves and the customers. They were paid hourly, not by tips. The business was said to run like a "family", under better, safer, and cleaner conditions compared to neighboring strip clubs. Further, as Brooks reports, "most of the women at the Lusty Lady are students, artists, or both; they are very intelligent and creative, refuting the stereotype of strippers as brainless sex bunnies," (Brooks 252).

Although it seems as though the Lusty Lady is an ideal place to work for women in the business, the women discovered that it was not all it was worked up to be. Especially for Brooks, a woman of color, she realized that specifically in terms of racism, the Lusty Lady was no exception; "I did not notice the race relations on stage at first because, as with many job settings, the racism is very covert. Now I feel a sense of family and support from the dancers and support staff, while simultaneously being aware of the racism" (252).

Brooks "noticed that I was almost always the only woman of color on stage with the white dancers," (253). Further, white dancers were rude with the few customers of color that did come in; "some of the dancer reacted to customers of color; many were impatient with Asian and Latino customers who could not understand English well, and some dancers were hesitant about dancing for Black customers," (253).

Management also fell into racist ideology. They believed that women of color were not as desirable by customers, and therefore did not schedule these women in the "Private Pleasures Booths" where more money was to be made. Brooks mentioned how "the few Black women (about six out of seventy women) were hardly every performing in the Private Pleasures booth, though we were all available to do it," (253). Management responded to complaints of this discrimination by saying that "white men did not want to pay extra to see Black dancers," (254).

This type of institutionalized racism is extremely harmful to people of color, in this case the dancers and the customers. Brooks reveals how she "internalized the notion that I was not as attractive as the other dancers...I had to fight insecurities about my appearance in the presence of white women, since they are perceived as the ideal beauty standard," (253). Further negative impacts were that women of color then choose to work at other businesses where the working conditions were worse, but they could make better money. We see this pattern of lower quality clubs servicing customers of color, and therefore employing more women of color. Complete race and class segregation and discrimination; "Black women make less money in the business than other women, a fact reflective of the general economy," (253).

Though the Lusty Lady has since successfully unionized, the same race relations persist. Internal tension between the dancers themselves, as well as women of color workers and management continue to push women of color to lower quality work places. As Brooks says, it is true that as a Black woman, her "freedom in the work place is always limited by white supremacy" (255). However, she continues "to fight racist policies, practices, and attitudes, and I know I am not alone," (255). How can you contribute to the fight?

Siobhan Brooks, "Dancing Towards Freedom," Whores and Other Feminists, Jill Nagle, ed., New York: Routledge, 1997, 57-65