#sexwork malaysian strippers stripclub aria kenji

[malaysian-rants]

In Conversation: Malaysian Strippers in Melbourne

In Malaysia, most sex workers are still referred to as “prostitutes” - women that sell sex for payment, a derogatory slur. The definition perpetuates a very narrow vision of sex work for our population. That, combined with the religious underpinnings of many of our laws, criminalizes most forms of sex work and in turn endangers the livelihood of sex workers throughout the country. Many conflate sex work with sex trade/human trafficking but whilst many people that are trafficked are wrongfully subjected to rape and sexual abuse, it is important to not mix a sex worker that has agency versus someone that is being trafficked. Strip clubs/Gentlemen’s clubs are popular destinations across Australia and are not illegal as opposed to Malaysia. I had the pleasure to chat with Kenji and Aria, both Malaysian born and raised, who are or were strippers in the Melbourne industry. 

Disclaimer: To protect their identities, the dancers are referred by their aliases and also the reason why this interview was transcribed into a piece of writing instead of a voice recording!

Thank you so much for joining me today, ladies. Let’s dive straight in. How did you both come into the industry and why?

Aria: I love telling this story because it clearly encapsulates how naive I was! I was an international student pursuing my undergraduate degree in Melbourne - it’s a privilege to be able to study abroad but it also comes with a lot of financial strain if you don’t come from the RICH rich section of Malaysian society. I wanted to do more than just the typical go-to-class, study, and done regime.  But applying for a job in Australia when you’re fresh out of college and don’t have any credentials, is so difficult. It’s already difficult enough to get a job when you’re qualified so you can imagine the struggle with not much. A friend recommended trying a search for nightclubs that needed podium go-go dancers. I thought, “hell yeah! I love dancing and I think I’m pretty good at it so might as well get paid!”. I went through different job sites and found something on Gumtree, that should’ve been my first indication of dodginess but hey, I didn’t know better. So I scored an interview with what I thought was a night club which turned out to be a gentlemen’s club - a guy friend pointed it out to me when I told him about the interview and where it was! I tossed about whether to go or not but ended up doing it. I wanted to be able to save money and invest in myself so this was a way for me to do just that. 

Kenji: I was studying too. I had a slight idea of what the industry was like having met a dancer through one of my friends beforehand. For me, it was kind of like curiosity killed the cat. I’ve always been attracted to the strip club scene but never had the balls because of how taboo it was or is. On my birthday, I did my first audition. I was fortunate enough that I knew someone that was familiar with the industry - so he pointed me towards the more reputable clubs in the city. I did my thing and there were a few other dancers auditioning - they felt pretty stern and unfriendly but having been in the industry myself now, I understand why they weren’t too warm to new dancers because the more dancers there are the more competitive it becomes, on a broader scale. My audition happened during club hours - didn’t get the part because at the time they were looking for girls that could do pole tricks BUT I got tipped which was a nice birthday gift. King street was notorious for being the hub for strip clubs so unknowingly, my best friend and I stumbled across another club. We got in for free at this other club because we were girls. We went straight to the manager and asked about jobs there so we were kind of scouting and wanted to get a dance from one of the girls there to get a better grasp of what it was like. She to this day is still the BEST hustler and dancer in my eyes. She approached us and worked her magic - experiencing this and getting to work with her later on I will always be in awe of how she hustled us. Many that approached us were standoff-ish after they found out we wanted to be dancers but she wasn’t. I ended up applying to that club a few months later and started working. One of my parents fell sick and filed for bankruptcy a few months after I started working so it worked in my favour because I had this as a source of income to support myself while at uni.

What was it like for both of you starting out? Did you have a friend to hold your hands through the initial few months or did you have to hit the ground running and how did it evolve?

Kenji: I’ve definitely got a broader network of sex workers; dancers, escorts, and even pornstars and it’s completely different from when I started out. Like I said before, I had a friend who was familiar with the industry so he was able to answer any queries I had. I remember him telling me, “oh you’ve really come out of your shell” and to an extent, I had, but in saying that, when I’m stripping I’ve got a whole persona going for me. I’ve noticed that with a lot of girls, they have a facade almost. The more full-time you do it, the more you embody that persona. Then the less you do it, especially now with COVID, so many girls in the sex industry speak out about how they feel like they’ve lost their sense of their identity.

Aria: You know I definitely think the loss of identity also spreads across the board of people that have lost their jobs due to redundancies. The sex work industry definitely suffers more because we don’t have a lot of spaces to openly talk about it. I’m no longer a stripper but I feel for my sex workers across the board. But to answer your question, I started in the industry not knowing anyone - it can be quite isolating. I quickly made friends with girls that auditioned the same time I did. We had a rule in the club that newbies had to work every Tuesday night for the 1st 3 months - it was poker night, also very dead but great to practice getting comfortable with the pole and patrons. I think becoming a sex worker really dispelled a lot of the internalized myths, especially when people say that it was/is easy. It’s something that gets signaled through language, through media when you’re growing up that sex workers choose this line of work because it’s easy but if they only knew the sheer amount of work it takes to be a successful one! You need to act, it’s a business, and it’s also a lot of rapport building whether that’s with clients or your fellow strippers. Sex work also opened another door into the hospitality industry for me and it served as a wonderful stepping stone into different work that probably fit better with my schedule.

Kenji: Yes! Dancers can come off as standoff-ish sometimes but I know it’s just a wall to protect themselves from all the bullshit they go through day in day out. 

I know the clubs have different touching and no-touching policies. Can you both tell me about how you navigated those boundaries with different patrons?

Aria: Those boundaries were definitely something I learnt about the stripper world, I guess. There are rules and like any workplace, some people think it fit to bend those rules and blur the lines. It’s frustrating because it skews shit for other dancers because then you get the clients that say, “oh but X did this for me and it was fine” Well I’m not them!

Kenji: Exactly! Every strip club has its politics like every other workplace. Stripping can be seen as teasing. “It doesn’t matter where you get your appetite as long as you go for dinner”. It’s built for these corporate men who have wives at home. I was working at one of the two non-touching clubs in Victoria. I can’t speak for the whole of Australia but it seems like most clubs have a waist and above policy. It would be annoying whenever we’d get clients that kept insisting for more. You’re probably at the wrong club if that’s what you’re after. You came in, there’s a certain set of rules, we don’t want to be touched, none of the girls want that but too often we’re faced with a rebuttal insinuating that another dancer in the club would allow it. When asked who it is, so we can do justice and tell management, often it’s a sham or they’d be ridden with fear. I have seen it happen once or twice but the girls never seem to last many shifts. Some clubs are stricter than others; though it’s difficult to police and check even with all the security cameras because it’s dark and the weekends get pretty busy.

So no touching meaning they can’t touch you at all or are there some exceptions?

Kenji: We call it control touching. So you can sit on them, you can’t grind on their privates. They can have their hands on your waist but not too low. 

How did you make the distinction on who to disclose your sex work to? Do you wish you could have been more open about it?

Kenji: It’s something that I’m proud of but secretly proud of. There’s that conflict in my head because it’s not something that’s widely accepted but it’s a great way to filter out those whose values don’t align. People’s views on sex work are a huge prerequisite to whether I can hold space for them in my life or not. I’ve told a few people from home, and there are a few people I regret telling because it’s so easy to slip and that can have a ripple effect. I’ve got a handful of people from home that share this secret, my sister included. It’s a lot easier telling the people I meet in Melbourne being foreign. Dating is a lot easier when you lay out the facts from the get-go - if you can’t take the heat you gotta leave the kitchen!

Aria: It’s so important to be upfront about it. When I started, I told a few friends who I knew wouldn’t react badly to it, all they cared about was my safety. The men I dated in Melbourne were mostly so lovely. Their responses were like “Yas, get that bread!!” It was nice and unexpected. Funnily enough, it was the opposite when I went back to KL and dated during the holidays. I wasn’t dancing anymore at that time but for me, my partner’s views on sex work were important for me to understand their own whorephobia. So I had a great date with this guy and the next day I told him about my previous sex work - he flipped. He said, “how can you be someone that wants to practice feminist values, someone that wants to empower women, and then you do this?!?!”. Sometimes, you have to protect your peace and walk away but I was feeling up to the emotional labour that day. Sometimes, you just have to respond with a little empathy because he grew up with a lot of conservative/puritanical values. So I explained everything to him and unpacked his skewed perceptions and biases; it took him a day to process but hey, now we’ve been dating for almost 4 years. Being a sex worker is part of me and will always be. It’s nice to see people capable of changing their mindset when they get the chance to and when they matter enough to you for you to put in the effort.

Safety is one of the most common things people have concerns about. How did you personally manage your own safety? Whether that's you know, maintaining your anonymity, maintaining safety from clients outside the club, and working late hours?

Kenji: Kenji is my alter ego. Keeping your identity separate definitely helps. With regulars, some have my number but it’s a lot easier to give out your strippergram if you have one. It’s a great way to stay anonymous considering I don’t have my face on there. With physical safety, we’re not allowed to leave with any clients and we’ve got backdoors if we wanna leave unseen. The guards are lovely enough to escort you to your car or uber if they’re not busy breaking a fight or tossing someone out of the club!

Aria: Sometimes, you also just leave with friends and you grab a bite after. Those are some of my best memories after work. It’s 5 am and you go for a quick Maccas run or burger run with the girls.

Kenji: Yes! The guards are your best friends when it comes to safety. They’re big teddy bears to us but vicious to patrons and those who disrespect us. All I have to do is tell a guard someone’s harassing me in order for them to send them out. The night I found out my dad fell sick, I still had to go to work after bawling my eyes out. I went to work at 9 pm and the shift lasted till 7 am. My phone died whilst I was trying to book an Uber so I asked the Head of Security to help hail me a cab. He asked how far away I lived, and it was barely a 5-minute drive so he took his own car and drove me home mid-shift. It’s comforting to know that we’re being looked after.

Aria: I did a lot of half an hour walks back home in the wee hours of the morning. Not the safest, I know but I honestly was at the point where booking an Uber was an expense I didn’t need. I would dress up in baggy clothes and have a large hoodie to protect my safety and you couldn’t tell I was a woman.

Kenji before we started the interview, you briefly mentioned grappling with your sense of identity. Can you delve a little further into this?

Kenji: This club has been my home club for over three years now and that overlaps with the years that I’ve spent in this foreign city. I had a little more of an ambiguous accent back then and it was fun at first but the question “where you from?” grew old. I’d mix it up, play around with my accent, or make them guess and pretend they’d get it right on the first go. These guesses are usually telling of what they want you to be. Further, into my Melbourne journey, it was a lot easier to speak in an Australian accent to cut the story short. This was sometimes confusing to my peers and whoever was close to me. The versatility I have coming from a multiracial country is usually an advantage because of the ability to mirror whoever I speak to but that too can be hard on me especially when I’ve been away from home for a while and it’s difficult to distinguish what home is. That and the persona you adopt in the club because I can be quite the introvert outside of work. I’ve always been an openly sexual person so being in Malaysia definitely hindered me from being my authentic self. It’s suppressing being there in the way I dress, speak, and carry myself. As Aria said, it’s been a part of your life and it will always be there and I completely agree. The best piece of advice I got was that this is a transition, not a destination and I always felt that. You can definitely become a successful full-time stripper and retire with stripper savings but I am studying and I believe that this experience will only supplement what I choose to do in the future!

Aria: That’s definitely relatable. When you’re a dancer, you have to come up with your dancer name and like Kenji said it becomes your persona or alter ego. You have to create a whole character with that and it feeds into how you dress, what your stage performances are like - I feel like my time dancing was a time for me to explore parts of myself I didn't get to, back home in Malaysia. At home, it was always "that's too much" "that's too revealing"....... through stripping, I became so comfortable in my body. The club I worked at had mirrors surrounding the stage and when you turned on the pole, you could see every nook & cranny of your body. If you didn't like what you saw, then you really couldn't expect your clients to buy into your persona - at least I couldn't. So it was almost like I had to fall in love with myself and the character I portrayed. One day I remember thinking "wow, I'm everything.” When you feel that way then people that see you feel similarly when they see you too.

That’s fascinating - so much internal growth. How did you both come up with your names?

Kenji: I always wanted the name KAYA but another girl at the club beat me to it and had it spelled differently. I wanted KAYA because being Malaysian it meant, you know, something sweet, a coconut buttery spread, good ol' Malaysian; it also means rich, and that's exactly what I want to be as a dancer - but of course no one else would know what it meant. Funny thing though, after that I ended up looking up Asian baby girl names because I wanted to market my Asian-ness. "FETISHIZE ME! As long as I'm profiting from it, but don't fetishize me outside of work, that'll piss me off”. The more exotic I was to them, the better. It’s honestly not ideal and I wouldn’t accept it outside of the strip club. Patrons would come up to me and say something like, “My friend likes Asians, do you want to talk to him? I’ll buy him a dance” and I’ll say of course, but in real life, if I were to experience that in a nightclub or a bar setting, fuck no. I will not stand for it.

Aria: Yeah, how do you balance that? I chose Aria randomly actually. With the name though, I realised quickly it was also really racially ambiguous which really mimicked my world outside of work. My name wasn’t a typical Indian name so I’d always get the “Are you Chindian?” or “Are you Eurasian” growing up. And again, you can’t really tell Aria is a brown person’s name, it almost plays into the mystery. Growing up I never felt Indian enough and at the same time didn’t feel Malaysian enough - now I realise that’s absolutely bullshit but we conflate nationality, ethnicity, and culture too often. Outside of dancing, I don’t enjoy it when people fetishize South Asian women and reduce us to just qualities instead of a whole person. 

Kenji: I feel that. The more a guy fetishizes me at work, the more of an incentive it is to milk him for it! 

Aria: Its powerplay. Who has the power in that moment? It’s up to us to make sure the men believe they do. In the moment though, I am, in fact, profiting from his desires.

Kenji: This is true. One guy pulled the slanted eye gesture and I was quick to walk away from that client. I told the guards about him and this man was apparently being a nuisance to other girls too so it didn’t take long before he was chucked out of the club. Always feels so liberating when that happens. During my baby stripper days, I was naive and genuinely thought I was only selling dances but got to learn that the whole marketing scheme was pivoted around a man’s libido. I understand that now and it’s important to find those boundaries and not let it consume me inside and outside of work.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions of what it’s like to be a stripper?

Kenji: That all strippers are loaded. We all have bills to pay so it’s not like we can dance for free and it’s actually ludicrous the number of times we get asked to do a free dance for whatever reason as if we’re partying with them and not working laborious hours in 6-8 inch heels.

Aria: Another one is that we’re all very sexual just because we’re sex workers.

Kenji: Yes!! We’re sexually open but I think that makes us more protective of whose energies we allow into our personal space.

Aria: When I was dating, I had to weed out the men that only saw me as a sex object. Sex work is my work. Outside of that, I’m not always trying to have sex! I’m a whole person with other interests too. Just like you.

Do you have any favourite clients or stories about them?

Kenji: I love foot fetish guys! They don’t make you dance or anything, they just want to admire your feet. It’s an absolute blessing to have a break in the night where you can put your feet up, literally, and have your feet rubbed and not to mention get paid for it!

Aria: Oh who doesn’t love the simpler clients! My favourite client definitely had to be someone that booked me for 3 hours to just sit and talk. So a regular of one of my good friends at work, let’s call her Lila, walks into the club. He already booked Lila out for the remainder of the night but also had a friend with him and asked her to find a girl to keep his friend company. So she pulled me to the side to see if I was free. That’s where, you know, it’s so important to build good rapport amongst other workers because they can also bring clients and good business to you. It was the best because all this guy wanted to do with me was talk! Lila was fully naked enjoying her time with her person and in my head, I was down to do the same for mine but he turned to me and said, “could you just maybe keep your clothes on and we just talk instead?” so hell yeah! We made great conversation and went on the most interesting tangents - anxiety, his addiction to cocaine and how it fuelled his anxiety which he tried to subside through masturbating to pornography, his struggle dating because most milked him for his wealth.

Kenji: Yes! Completely forgot about those kinds of clients as they’re a lot rarer these days. Some men, typically older and more established tend to just want a chat and have a good time. These men are the best because you can drop your guard and essentially have a break from your usual stripper act. International clients with experience in foreign clubs often come in and you can observe the differences in stripper culture, typically American or European club etiquette... So you have to learn to be assertive of your boundaries and the rules at your club because they come in with their own preconceived rules; especially if you’re in a non-touching club vs a touching club. Clubs have their own set of rules, some have table bookings, some have tipping dollars, some make it compulsory to tip if you’re seated around the stage.

Final thoughts and final words for the people?

Kenji: To anyone that wants to join the sex industry, do your research. It’s so important. It will definitely have an impact on your life. I’ve definitely grown to love my naked body more from this experience. You can say I’m vagina positive - I’m a huge advocate for vagina lovin’, no pun intended. I’ve come a long way from being ashamed of it to be able to recognize that there are so many different types of vaginas and that they’re all beautiful; whatever shape, size, or colour.  Anyway, it’s good to know what you’re going up against. For both myself and Aria, it seems like we dove head in. I think it’s done more positive than it has negative for us personally. But many girls do lose themselves in the process, some really hurt themselves because it’s a tough job. Know how to protect yourself while you’re in the industry. Some girls get stuck and don’t know which way is out and it’s difficult when there’s a huge gap in your resume. I feel similarly but I know it’s a means to support myself whilst studying and it’s important to keep a goal in mind and stick to it.

Aria: Sex workers are all different and multi-dimensional, like any other workplace and community. We’re such a diverse background of people. There’s the perception that there’s just one type of person that goes into dancing or goes into sex work, but in reality, people come from various backgrounds. Whether it’s a lifestyle, whether it’s survival work, whether it’s a side hustle; we all deserve respect. To decriminalise sex work and reach a point of respectability, it’s not just us who need to speak out. Clients and patrons need to also try to be unashamed about buying sex or seeing sex workers. People that date sex workers need to call out whorephobia within their circles and address it. Pay for your porn when you have the means to, don’t ask for discounts from sex workers. Respect the work.

It was so lovely to listen to both of their stories. Both Aria and Kenji both talked about how being sex workers pushed them to come out of their shells. Kenji had friends that complimented her newfound assertiveness and Aria personally became a lot more comfortable with her skin suit/ her body. I hope if you’ve made it this far into this piece of writing and conversation that you learnt a new perspective. This isn’t just a story about two sex workers, it’s also a story of two women of colour who are students in a foreign country.