3 naked ladies talk about their view from the stages and laps of the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s and today.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
This entry was originally written and posted on November 4, 2009 at 9:00 am on the now defunct dirtygirldiaries.com
This week on Three Naked Ladies, the legendary Georgina Spelvin sits in for Jodi Sh. Doff.
Georgina Spelvin: My childhood was spent “on the road.” The only real friend I had was a girl who lived across the street from my uncle in Jasper, Texas. I spent a week or two at their house every summer until I was about twelve. She and I connected again in the early 90s. Georgina Spelvin is a stage name, so she never knew. When she learned about my “secret life in porn,” she was thrilled and delighted. Probably more so than I ever was.
Lauri Shaw: But, you started in Broadway musicals, right? Were your peers in the mainstream judgmental of your decision to go into porn?
GS: I didn’t make any lasting friendships in the world of musical comedy. It was always “I loved you, Baby, but the show closed.” Because of this itinerant life, others’ opinions of me, or anything else for that matter – held little weight.
LS: The 90s class system went like this: feature entertainer porn stars like Jenna Jameson or Janine Lindemulder were at the top; then came girls from Scores,Tens, and VIP; mid-level topless girls from say, Flashdancers next, after which came the girls at topless dives. Girls like me who removed their panties were close to the bottom of the heap. It was strange — we made more money than the girls in many of the topless clubs. But you definitely lost status the minute you showed cooch.
Rachel Aimee: Yes, girls at the high-end clubs can be really snobby about dive bar strippers because we make our money in dollar bills instead of twenties, but the reality is that the dollar bills often add up to more than the twenties after the high-end club girls pay out their $100-plus house fees.
LS: In the nude clubs, there was always someone whining, “I didn’t sell a bottle because I don’t do blow jobs like all these other bitches.” If someone was openly turning tricks, she was low on the totem pole. There was a lot of hypocrisy.
RA: Strippers look down on peepshow girls because they take their bottoms off and do dildo shows. But, I worked at a peepshow briefly and I found the peepshow girlsdisparaging about strippers. They would say “at least we work behind glass and don’t touch our customers.”
LS: Human nature doesn’t change, I’m guessing your generation had a pecking order too?
GS: I’m sure there was, but I was just “tap dancin’ as fast as I could” trying to make a living. Making friends was not a big priority.
RA: Most girls move from club to club so quickly that making friends isn’t a priority. There’s this unwritten rule that you don’t talk to the new girl until she’s been there for at least three weeks, because who knows if she’s going to stick around anyway? I’ve worked at several clubs where I never even exchanged so much as a hello with any of the other dancers. I only really made friends at the club where I worked for six years!
GS: I didn’t socialize much with anyone doing the films –I have no idea what they did off the set. Getting cast as Miss Jones was such a fluke. And every sex film I did after that was a case of someone talking me into doing “just one more.” They were a means of getting a few dollars together to pay the rent on the Pickle Factory: the film company our little “collective” of wannabe film makers we were trying to keep going in New York in ’72. They didn’t pay anything like what they do today, believe me. $100 for the day. That was it.
RA: I’ve always been lazy about doing any kind of sex work other than stripping because stripping can be so low maintenance. You can go in there, make money, then leave work and stop thinking about it. You don’t have to worry about maintaining relationships with clients or agencies or scheduling your life around your job. (Although, of course, there are plenty of strippers whose lives revolve around their jobs — I’ve been privileged enough so far to be able to get by without really throwing myself into it.)
GS: I always thought of myself as an actress – working in the only medium where work was offered to me. Hollywood never called me back. I am very glad to count several of the sex film actors and actresses I’ve met recently – and the few I got back in touch with when writing my memoir, The Devil Made Me Do It, as friends. I’m not terribly active in any causes – sex work related or otherwise. I’m too lazy and very selfish with my time.
RA: Being a part of the sex worker activist community has always been really important to me, as a support network as much as anything else, because it can be so difficult to talk about sex work with outsiders.
LS: What stopped me from doing porn was, I was afraid my father or my brother might inadvertently stumble on the material. Once someone takes a picture of you, you can’t control where it ends up, and it lives forever… weren’t you worried about anyone you knew coming across your work?
GS: When I did my first hard core film, I didn’t know it was to be hard core until we got to that scene. The only “blue movie” I’d ever seen was a short clip of Candy Barr – a famous stripper in her day. She’d given a guy a blow job in a motel room while someone recorded the event with an 8mm “home movie” camera. It was all new to me. No one I knew, nor anyone they knew, knew anything about such things.
At the time, it was $100 a day that was sorely needed to pay the rent on the Pickle Factory. That was all I was thinking about. Trying to remake the world through underground films. If I had had any idea that making The Devil in Miss Jones (not to be confused with The Devil & Miss Jones!) would make Georgina Spelvin ahousehold word, I might have given it some thought…The short answer? It never entered my mind.
