Sascha Cohen

Exotic dancers deal with harassment, discriminatory labor practices and club owners who find devious ways to limit their pay. Here’s a look inside the battle to unionize stripping.

Sex work has long been “the vault in which society stores some of its keenest fears and anxieties,” the authors explain. Instead of acknowledging the prostitute as a fellow worker with material needs, we have made her into an abstraction, a symbol of our collective emotions about power and womanhood. Across time, region, and culture, sex workers have been constructed as vectors of both literal disease and moral contamination.

“There’s an art to this,” restaurant manager Lisa (Regina Hall) tells a new hire at the fictional bar and grill called “Double Whammies” in the film Support the Girls. The perky young servers must be flirtatious but not indecent, assertive but accommodating. Double Whammies is a casual dining spot, “like Chiles or Applebees,” Lisa explains, but with sexier uniforms and, ostensibly, better tips.