Sun Feb 05, 2023 7:47 pm
I started out in sexting, around 2008. I believe the company was Text121Chat (which is apparently STILL active?!), and I had shifts where I'd sext customers for 3-4 hours at a time. I barely made any money, but I was a green little college student, during the recession, and it was hard to come by any vanilla job at that time.
I joined my first forum for sex work, at that time. I forget what it was called, but it was for phone sex & psychic hotlines. People shared their tips, and it was extremely helpful, as otherwise I was the only person I knew, working in that industry.
Then I became a cocktail waitress at a strip club, and started stripping in 2010. I had joined the Exotic Dancer Net forums, at the time, for some motivation & encouragement, and to start learning the ropes.
The strip club was SO different, then. We had floor length gowns for VIP rooms, minimum time in VIP was 1 hour, and you HAD to buy a bottle of expensive champagne. We had 50-80 girls working every night, the club would get so busy that there was standing room only, and we had VIP floor hosts who would try to schmooze the customers into getting their whole party back into the VIP rooms.
There were actual rules, like you couldn't eat food in the dressing room, you couldn't be on your phone on the floor (customers definitely couldn't record anything on their phones), and they would sometimes do weigh-ins (ugh fuck that). We still found things like used condoms, sometimes, but the extras girls were apparently really good at hiding what they were doing. My club was considered upscale, and I never saw anything myself.
We also had girls doing legit stage SHOWS. Like, almost burlesque or Vegas style performances. We had a girl who'd been dancing for 10 years prior to when I got there, and she was a spectacle to behold in the best way possible. Another girl did a full on bellydance routine, and she also did the same style of dance for lapdances.
It was a whole vibe. Times have changed a lot. My club has slowed down, but at the same time, it's honestly much more chill, and easy to get through a night of work. You're not drowning in a sea of people crammed into one building, anymore. And while there are still some serious drugs happening, most of the dancers are now mellowed out from vaping, and they're nicer to each other.
Also, hiring standards have gone way down, because at this point, clubs are acknowledging that business has slowed down, and at least girls will pay house fees.
Regarding camming/texting... the texting sites used to literally be text only, long form conversations, where you'd rapidly talk to someone as fast as possible to get $0.10/text (iirc). No photos, nothing. SextPanther feels like the gold standard, now. I don't notice as many changes in camming, because I started on Streamate around 2010, and it's relatively similar except for tip vibes and splitcamming 5 sites at once, becoming my new normal. But I do think way more girls are camming than ever before, now, and it seems fairly mainstream, especially subscription sites like OnlyFans.
I will add, I used to have people literally stare at me in shock, when I told them I was a stripper. I was "outed" at my past vanilla jobs as "the stripper," even when I was no longer working at the club. Nowadays, I hear people bring up their OnlyFans in casual conversation, in public, and everyone does pole fitness.
) and then danced on and off alongside day jobs for 14 years. I started escorting too later on in the '00s and in ways have preferred it to dancing, especially the travelling.
