Happy Nice Mall

Teauryajya DuBenion, 29, started her striptease career in Los Angeles with the encouragement of some of her friends. “Everyone is a stripper in LA. Your local nurse is a stripper, your teacher is a stripper, your babysitter is a stripper, your dog walker is a stripper,” she said. “I’m sick of skipping meals.”

Now, after more than two years and 400,000 followers, Miss DuBenion, known as @PicassoBae, considers herself the stripper girlfriend of TikTok. “Whenever you have a rough night, you can run to me in the locker room and get some air,” he said. “I am like your co-worker or work wife.”

Ms. DuBenion is part of a growing community of strippers who post on TikTok under the hashtag #Striptok. Rather than rallying around a water cooler, they’ve set up an online network to share professional advice, safety tips, and old-fashioned strip club gossip.

Ms. DuBenion recently posted a viral TikTok, giving dancers advice on how to undress during menstruation. It offers powerful but practical information like “double up the panties.”

The video has been watched almost half a million times, and the comment section was a choir of women sharing feminine hygiene tips. “The comment section was flooded with women giving additional advice on what worked for them, whether they were undressed or not,” said Ms. DuBenion. “It was great.”

He believes that most of his female followers who follow his TikTok don’t want to be strippers, but instead are women inspired by his charisma and poise. “I’ve gotten messages from people saying whether they want to undress, have this new confidence in their current job or in the life goals they’ve set for themselves,” she said. “It’s all because of the way I talk about my own life experiences through striptease.”

Another popular StripTok user is Sky Hopscotch, 27, better known on social media, who recently tossed supplies into a shimmering black bag and read a checklist on a chilly night at her Des Moines home: underwear, makeup, diapers, perfume. and Tylenol. He relayed each line in a bored, arrogant voice: “Who are we kidding? The men you dance on will sweat for you too.”

He uploaded this tutorial with the caption: “Your life is falling apart? Can’t pay your rent? What to bring with you on your first night as an exotic dancer. The next morning, the video garnered two million views and her account hit 30,000 followers. “That’s when I just started streaming StripTok content,” he said.

On the platform, she unleashed an audience eager to inherit her wisdom as a stripper: the good, the bad, the mediocrity of male attention. “I discovered there was a whole community of strippers on TikTok,” she said. “Many women shared their experiences as strippers: some were teaching, others glorifying the industry. I thought why don’t you share my experiences.

In this enclave of the app, women gather to document the posts of their lives as strippers. They display berets from twerking, recite locker room melodramas, brag about counting bills, and lament sexual harassment. In many ways, StripTok has allowed strippers to regain representation in their business, in part because of giving each other advice and encouragement in an industry filled with frustration.

When she started her career 10 years ago, Sky Hopscotch was commonly referred to in the strip community as the “baby stripper”. Inexperienced strippers are even more vulnerable to harassment and exploitation at the whims of bosses and customers.

Strip club clients would pick me and ask me for a lap dance because they knew I was inexperienced. They may be more resourceful, they may deprive me of my money or they may try to get me to leave the club with them.”

Many strippers on TikTok use their platform to help young dancers avoid uncomfortable experiences. They hope their advice will be a step towards making strip clubs safer and friendlier workplaces for women. “It’s very important for senior dancers to share their secrets with you, like hiring a bouncer to go to their bachelorette parties, so new girls in the industry don’t have to get hurt,” Sky Hopscotch said.

Under the constraint of serving male fantasy and competitiveness, strip clubs often become an oppressive environment for strippers. The damage to mental health can be significant. “I’ve struggled deeply with depression, drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders — all sorts of things,” Sky Hopscotch said. “If I wasn’t beautiful, if I wasn’t thin, I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills.”

If the strip club is dominated by the male gaze, StripTok offers viewers something else: a place where strippers are free to show off. Many videos on StripTok feature strippers without make-up, yawning in locker rooms, idling at home in sweatpants. Others are on oversized T-shirts, advising strippers on how to remove hair extensions as a tax deduction.

Stripper Katt, who lives in Los Angeles and wants to be known only by her first name, took refuge in StripTok after becoming disillusioned with her job. She worries that the strip club is making fun of “my most toxic sides of wanting to please men.”

When she became active in the StripTok community, she began to playfully experiment with her own gender representation. “You see me with short hair, long hair, different wigs. Different makeup looks. No makeup,” Katt said. “I feel like people are always there, excite me, and relate to my experience without having to do anything about how I look. That’s really validating for me.”

Katt is an Asian American and is extremely familiar with both overt and implicit objectification, she said. “This is something I’ve experienced in my lifetime by men of all kinds,” he said. “You see yourself in the media as a hot Asian girl or a nerdy Asian girl.”

Through her online platform, she talks about her experience of being bisexual and Asian in the stripper community, often hundreds of positive reviews and building a support network for other strippers from different backgrounds.

Katt, who sometimes accompanies the music on her TikTok, hopes it will help humanize the profession by showing the daily lives of strippers. “You go to work at 7 p.m. These girls just eat Caesar salad, play with their phones and talk to each other about men’s problems,” she said jokingly.

The interest in the inner lives of strippers on TikTok is not without precedent. “It’s because of me,” said A’Ziah King, known as Zola, in a post on Instagram. “I opened an era and opened a way for sex workers to voice their experiences and now I am happy that the door has opened.”

In 2015, Ms. King posted a long thread of 148 tweets about a weekend of debauchery stripping. His posts were filled with fascinating details of betrayal, attempted murder, sex trafficking, and lost friendships. The story was trending worldwide within hours and was recently adapted into a movie called “Zola” directed by Janicza Bravo.

Ms. King said, “I think it is very important for the community to share all aspects and experiences regarding sex work, and only a sex worker can do that.” “It’s important that we share these experiences because it creates a safe space and a sense of community.”

Despite being a reprieve from the strip club bureaucracy, TikTok, like other social media sites, often censors strippers and sex workers. TikTok’s guidelines state that it “does not allow nudity, pornography, or obscene content.” Still, strippers say informative TikToks about sexual health, safety tips and general education have also been targeted. Ms. DuBenion banned her account completely and recently created a second account. StripTok posts are often lost, accounts are shadow banned, and content is removed without explanation.

This could affect their livelihoods as some strippers rely on TikTok’s Creative Fund as a second source of income during times of financial drought at the club. Sky Hopscotch said that her account was frequently deleted after educational posts about supporting sex workers. During this time, his secondary income drops.

“I was making $40 to $60 a day from the Creative Fund, and maybe 96 cents a day for the past three weeks,” he said. “We have to be very careful about what we say and do on TikTok, as we fear we will be kicked off the platform.”

Many strippers use their platforms to raise awareness about FOSTA-SESTA, two bills passed in 2018 aimed at curbing the online sex trade in general. Many sex workers feel marginalized by bills. “While the intended purpose was to stop the sex trade, it has hurt many of us in the community – statistics say it never did,” Sky Hopscotch said. “It pushed people like me further off the platform.”

Through advocacy, StripTok hopes to gain momentum in raising awareness about the harmfulness of anti-sex work legislation.

“One of the legacies of FOSTA-SESTA was making it much more dangerous for sex workers to do it in a safer and healthier way,” said Emma Llansó, director of the Central Free Expression Project. Democracy and Technology, a Washington DC non-profit organization, is committed to advocating for the rights of individuals in the formulation of technology policies. “There have been too many restrictions on sites where people can share information about health and wellness: all kinds of different information that sex workers actually use to keep themselves safe, informed and help each other.”

This censorship has revealed a mutated, secret language on TikTok to discuss sex work. To comply with TikTok’s policies, strippers refer to their work as “accounting” or “skripping” to camouflage themselves. “Whenever I talk about a stripper, I’ll say ‘skrippa’,” said Ms. DuBenion. “Sometimes when I type, I use dollar signs and exclamation points for I. There are things you have to work with to make it work.”

Despite the late hours and heels, she still loves being a stripper. He’s saving up his striptease earnings to finance a group home for people with Down syndrome owned by his sister.

“Until recently, I didn’t start receiving donations from my family, friends, or even supporters on my social media platform,” said Ms. DuBenion. “I even saved all the money I earned from the TikTok Creator fund to go down payment on the house. Two and a half years ago I never thought that stripping would have such a positive impact on my life and the lives around me.”

Ms. DuBenion recounted a time when men came to a strip club and handed her the $100 bills because their online charity had moved them. He hopes this experience will encourage other strippers to tell their stories: expressing their own weak points and discontent.

“I just want everyone to see that I am a real-life person and that I have a purpose in this world,” he said. “I’m doing this for a good cause and I can relate. I don’t know – I’m not an object.”