Turns out, exotic dancers are people too!
This includes paying taxes on their annual income, which in the US averages around $47,000—all of which comes in the form of cash tips from their audience.
And they also have to pay taxes.
If I'm being honest I'd of thought the average wage was higher.
Guess not...
Obviously as someone who earns most if not all of their wages from tips the finally tally will vary widely from person to person depending on a myriad of different variables:
- Are they independent contractors?
- Does the club charge them a fee to work?
- Do they earn minimum wage?
- How many deductions can they claim?
- Where are the clubs located (LA earns more than middle America)
- How good are they at getting tips? (service industry smiles)
“In our industry, money is a touchy subject so we really don’t talk about taxes,” Marie, who owns the pole-dancing studio Poletic Justice, told me over the phone. “Every dancer is different, and every entertainer has different things going on. She may be filing taxes under her business, or filing taxes under her own brand.”
Poletic Justice... lol
Yep, strippers can math just like drug dealers
When your income depends on basic math skills, you better not mess up. Strippers can deduct a wide range of expenses from their taxes because the way they look and even smell can be directly tied to their wages and craft. For example: skin care and beauty products can be deducted from a stripper's taxes.
https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-strippers-get-paid-before-tips
I’ve worked in multiple clubs, I’ve frequented multiple clubs:
Type 1
- Used the “independent contractor” spiel and did not pay girls hourly.
- Club would take approximately 45% of dance profits.
- Girls were expected to tip bartenders, DJ, security, possibly management.
Type 2
- Still uses “independent contractor” spiel on most girls.
- Allows some girls (who work 21 hours or more per week) to be paid strictly for 21 hours (regardless of amount worked over 21) $7.50/hr (NYS minimum wage for tipped positions).
- Allows dancers to set prices with a club fee attached based on length. The “standard” is 50% of the dance.
- Girls are expected to tip DJ’s 10% of their makings and tipping security is appreciated but not required.
Type 3
- Pays ALL girls hourly rate of $7.50/hr (NYS minimum wage for tipped positions).
- Club takes 40% of dance profits.
- Girls must tip minimum of $10 to DJ (regardless of earnings) but will find themselves skipped in rotation on busy nights, put up extra on slow nights, and unable to select their own music if this is repeated behavior. No other staff is tipped.
Type 4
- Pays ALL girls hourly rate of $7.50/hr (NYS minimum wage for tipped positions).
- Club takes 0% (zero) of dance profits.
- No house fee.
- No tip outs.
Every club has a different policy.
The most exploitative clubs are the ones that can get away with it. If the club is in a high cost of living area where everyone is rich (or just pretending to be) like Los Angeles or New York the exotic dancers will be forced to pay the club just for a spot at the table. It's assumed that they will easily make the money back on the floor, but newbies can actually lose money during their first week or two when they have no idea what they are doing.
Pole dancing
This is actually a skill/sport that requires training and a good amount of strength, form, and grace. In many cases it is a wasted talent because the apes walking into strip clubs usually don't care if the naked girl has such physical prowess. Let's see dem titties, amirite? Oink Oink.
But if you ever get the chance to try it out, give it a whirl. Doing anything on the pole is taxing and can immediately drain your energy level to zero should you not have the stamina to handle such feats of acrobatics. Strippers be ninjas. Sexy ninjas. Show some respect.
https://wadusa.org/know-your-rights/your-rights/
LOL... "WAD"... That'll get them to take you seriously!
How to financially fuck a stripper 101:
- Make them independent contractors instead of employees.
- Charge them house fees.
- Employ rent-seeking and make them pay for choice time-slots.
- Expect them to tip out other employees so you don't have to.
Of course no one is going to want to work for the boss under these conditions unless the club is generating massive bank, so it's on the club owner to get that money waterfall rolling down stream.
- Alcohol laws are a huge issue. This will change how a club operates, from how money is distributed to how long the club can stay open and what services they are allowed to provide.
https://www.thebillfold.com/2016/09/why-an-exotic-dancer-is-financially-just-like-your-hairdresser/
In LA, fully nude clubs cannot serve liquor. The clubs, therefore, compensate by cutting into dance fees. Money paid for dances is paid to the dancer, who pays the club an agreed-upon rate for the privilege of conducting her business there. In essence, she is paying rent, or leasing space from the club for commerce. In the city of Las Vegas, I even had to possess a business license in order to work as a stripper, and show it to the strip club before I was allowed to perform.
Because stripper income is so often intrinsically linked to club income, it can be very hard for strippers to evade taxes even though the vast majority of their income is in "untraceable" cash. Clubs have a huge incentive to report earnings correctly and do everything by the book because politically there are many reasons why someone would try to get a strip-club shut down. They don't want to take any chances, and if a dancer tries to lie about how much money they make they'd find themselves without a job pretty quick.
Regulatory vampires
We can clearly see that regulations become absurd in areas that have the highest volume and velocity of money. LA and Vegas are much different than other cities as the regulators bite into those money veins with their vampiric teeth. Liquidity flows faster in these areas, making it easy to tax.
Another club in Los Angeles where I danced would charge odd amounts for dances, such as $51 or $37, and would have the dancer and customer check out at a register at the conclusion of each transaction (there was no end-of-shift payout, and dancers were never in charge of the club’s cut of the money at any time). The money was split 50/50, but the dancer always missed out on the extra dollar, and the club always took the higher amount. It was a brilliantly sleazy business model, since over the years this obviously adds up to a lot of “extra” money that most people (dancers and customer alike) don’t notice or consider. Could they have easily charged $50 or $36 for dances? Of course, but they didn’t. The dancers who did consider this issue would get very upset about it, but crumble under the weight of their powerlessness very quickly before becoming quiet again.
Woof
And let's not even dive into the dumpster fire of entitled toxic dipshits that people in the service industry have to put up with and put on a smile because their livelihood literally depends on it. Thought being a waitress was bad? Yikes, try being a stripper.
In fact the puritanical high-ground that many in America try to stand on allows them to justify all kinds of wrong actions. Being a sex worker is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, and when one ends up losing their life because of their profession, what do the high-and-mighty say?
Oh she deserved it she was a whore! Bad things happen to 'sinful' people, and that's the kind of revenge that the weak and small minded individuals out in the world justify as a good thing. It's truly disgusting on all counts.
Don't hate the player: hate the game.
When a women gets raped, she was probably "asking for it", amirite? Why was she wearing that? Why was she acting like a slut? Excuses are constantly made for the men while that blame gets shifted to the women. That's all part of the systemic failures and rampant toxic masculinity that have permeated society for generations.
It's also where this whole #metoo backlash and SJW/feminist stuff comes from. Some of which is also toxic and some of which is not. It's all just part of the fishtailing spiral of a world completely out of balance and lashing out in a variety of ways.
This is a supply and demand issue.
If you don't like the fact that sex workers exist, remove the demand. Same goes from drugs and all the other "bad" stuff. You can attack the supply all you want, but that's just going to make the price go up. Where supply and demand meet: markets are made. Count on it.
I personally haven't been inside a strip club for over a decade, and the last one I went inside I was only there because it was across the street from where I lived and I hadn't stepped inside for the 3 whole years I lived there: just curious.
Wasn't this supposed to be about taxes?
Oh yeah...
Like any independent contractor—including babysitters, photographers, hair stylists, and comics—dancers should estimate their gross income, deductions, and credits. The IRS suggests keeping a daily log of cash tips, plus there are multiple apps that can help contractors keep up to date on their cash income, including Tip Tracker, TipSee, Just the Tips, or Tip Counter. Even easier? Contractors can calculate their income from an average week, then multiply that by 52, or however many weeks in a year they normally work.
Or you could just eliminate taxes, create an easy flat tax, or just print the money out of thin air like you are now because the entire system is collapsing. Good talk.
Breast implants may be a legitimate business expense
kek
the dancer Chesty Love wrote off her breast implants, which the IRS agreed were deductible because they constituted a part of her stagecraft.
lol... Chesty Love
I'm an adult.
“Our hair, our makeup, our traveling, the clothes we wear—that’s all for work. We need to make sure that our appearance is up to date, we need to make sure that our outfit is on point, and we need to make sure that we can get to and from work, so all that ends up being jotted down.”
What prompted this post?
When you're working a job that is primarily paid in cash, it might be tempting to fudge your income, or omit it from a return entirely. "Musicians, bartenders, babysitters—these industries where they make a lot of cash, and something about it, for one reason or another, doesn’t quite feel like real money. It feels off the radar," Garofalo said.
Crypto and fiat
I've been thinking a lot about taxes, crypto, and fiat lately. These posts are all in the same vein. Privacy is super important. How can we better bridge the fiat system to crypto without all the constant tracking? Surely, those who are still comfortable with large quantities of cash should be on our radar. Everyone who earns tips (service industry) is potentially a candidate to engage in a symbiotic relationship with crypto. Same goes for gamblers (poker players), drug dealers (harder to justify because illegal), artists, homesteaders, and whoever else.
Synergy
It's quite clear to me that crypto is all about community. It's even more clear that we will soon start building bridges out to existing communities and building new value out of thin air. It's not like strippers (or anyone in the service industry for that matter) is going to say no to free money in the form of crypto airdrops. Gotta sprinkle that crypto cocaine on everyone and get um hooked, fam.
So I'm imagining being able to go into a strip club (or even a restaurant or a bar or a casino), make some network connections, use a dapp, and potentially trade my crypto for cash peer to peer. Is it really such a stretch? The value of such a transaction is high, as the cash side of the transaction is fully private and untraceable.
Can you imagine it? Strippers upselling their crypto bags? Getting drunk idiots to pay $200 for $100 worth of Litecoin plus a lap dance? I can imagine it, and it's hilarious. Everybody wins. Even the idiot that bought Litecoin at an x2 premium wins after Litecoin goes x10. lol. easy.
Security is key.
There are multiple documentaries/podcasts about Backpage and the sex industry. Some white girl with rich parents lost their daughter to the sex trade via Backpage? Can't have that! Shut it down!
But just like every other thing in the economy, meddling with the free market has dire consequences. Again, being a sex worker is an extremely dangerous job, and shutting down sites like Backpage has resulted in the assault and deaths of many sex workers, as the demand is still just as high, only the protection buffers have been taken away. I wouldn't worry about it too much though: those stupid whores deserved it, amirite?
With crypto and decentralization we can and will plug these holes in supply, demand, privacy, and security. There is an unspoken and unmet demand for society to give a shit about sex workers, and the supply is near non-existent in a culture of puritanical pretentiousness and self-righteousness. Free value is just sitting there staring us right in the face.
We can very clearly see that sex workers have a demand to exist, so they will exist no matter what. They are one of the most exploited classes of people since the dawn of time. Would they benefit from decentralization and communal ownership of their own craft? I know for a fact that they have the most to gain out of almost every community due to how the entire system works.
My girlfriend was a sex worker back in the day. Can you guess what kind? A phone sex operator. lol! Who does that? Of course I mean "Who pays for that?" not "Who gets paid for that?" Apparently the pay isn't bad. I just asked her: She was earning $50 an hour once she had experience and regular clientele, which is obviously more than what the average stripper makes. Gotta pay for college somehow, amirite?
I also learned that cops are the creepiest clients. How ironic that those who are sworn to serve and protect are the ones who are the most violent and insecure power-tripping assholes. I'm shocked. Go figure.
Stripper TikTok
As my girlfriend doomscrolls on TikTok every once and a while a stripper will pop up telling it like it is. So weird that these things exist now. This girl is somewhat autistic and posts the weirdest shit.
And what has my girlfriend been doing since the day we first met? Mathematical engineering... using AutoCAD to draft panels onto buildings and shit. Look as us over here, breaking stereotypes and trying to build things. Spoiler alert: sex work is almost always temporary job. Unless of course you get murdered while doing it. Giggity.
But cashless doe?
Many think we are heading toward a cashless society, and that very well might be the case. How can we avoid this future? By creating more demand for it. That's how the market works. Things that have demand don't go away. Cash has been losing demand for decades.
Clearly, demand for cash can only skyrocket from here because it's literally going to be the only reason people want to use it instead of crypto. The physical nature of fiat is the only thing that will keep it alive going forward. And even in the unlikely event that these developments catalyze cash's demise, again, that can only help us and expose the central banks for what they really are: debt-slave owners.
Conclusion
Sex work is one of the oldest professions of all time. Don't like it? Fix the system: I'll wait. It's not the girl's fault that the entire industry is sexist, degrading, exploitive, and overall disgusting. It's mostly the men's fault: you can quote me on that. There's nothing inherently 'bad' about sex work: it's the entire system that's a raging dumpster fire.
But as always, we have a tendency to put the blame onto the suppliers while those who demand get let off the hook. Boys will be boys! In a way, this is a centralization vs decentralization issue. Demand is decentralized while supply is centralized: therefore suppliers are easier to attack.
It's quite clear to me that as crypto becomes more mainstream it will begin to branch out to all of the existing communities and absorb them into this new and superior economy. Those who deal in cash are of particular interest to the cryptosphere because the last good thing about fiat is the ability to exist in a physical light-weight form that is easy to transport and transact. The impending connections to the service/entertainment/cash industry are obvious. Will Hive take advantage of this obvious niche? Maybe... maybe not. Someone will and that's all that really matters. Demand vacuums are always filled with supply sooner or later, no matter what.