Colleagues, Councils, and Club Owners: The Materialisation of the Whorearchy Inside British Strip Clubs

Abstract

Strippers occupy a unique position inside the sex industry, both in terms of social stigmatisation, since stripping is often more socially accepted than other forms of sex work, and the legal framework, as strip clubs are legalised and licenced as Sexual Entertainment Venues (SEVs) in Britain while brothels and escorting agencies are criminalised. This seems to lead to frictions inside the sex working community. While some strippers consider their work part of the wider sex industry and stand in solidarity with the struggles of full-service sex workers, others aim to distance themselves from those who offer sexual services. This is often attributed to the ‘whorearchy ’, a system which ranks sex workers by the degree of stigmatisation and closeness to clients and police, which gives incentive to strippers to dissociate from the wider sex working community. This chapter highlights the ways in which this whorearchy materialises inside strip clubs. Although hierarchies are present in all sex worker spaces, it seems to materialise most inside strip club due to the strict licencing policies of SEVs in the UK as well as competition between strippers, created by the set-up of clubs. Strip club management can be identified as crucial players to enforce and exacerbate the whorearchy.