When strippers tell you we’re in a recession, believe them

In my time at the strip club some four years ago, my fellow dancers and I would chalk a bad night up to almost anything that could feasibly be blamed: a big pay-per-view boxing match competing for customers’ attention, a 50 per cent chance of rain, the presence of a full Moon. In reality, though, whether people decide to spend their hard-earned cash at the strip club or on any other form of leisure is dictated by that big nebulous thing known as ​“the economy”. As a result, strippers and the club writ large have long served as a reasonably strong barometer of how it’s doing – and right now, it’s not too hot.

Last May, @botticellibimbo, a New York stripper and Columbia University grad student, tweeted that ​“the strip club is sadly a leading indicator and I can promise y’all we r in a recession lmao.” She even followed up the tweet by saying that, before deciding whether it’s even worth going into a club to work on any given day, she checks stock alerts.

When she posted the tweet, her assessment matched that of the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, who reported a mild economic decline for the first two quarters of 2022, which fulfilled one traditional marker of a recession. That said, the latter half of the year was marked by slight economic growth, so a full-blown recession has yet to be called. Other defining factors, like unemployment, remain optimistic, leaving economists to hold off on declaring an official recession just yet. But as @botticellibimbo and just about anyone else engaged in the world of spending and making money will tell you, it sure does feel like we’re in one.

“This December was unusually bad, and December is supposed to be a really good month,” she tells me via Twitter DM. ​“It’s funny because when I [posted] that [original tweet] it wasn’t that bad. Things were just slowing down and you could feel it in the air. July was slower than an average July but not bad per se. I just started to get that feeling of tension. The nights where even high earners aren’t selling rooms? Those are the nights that strike fear in your heart.”

To that end, it doesn’t matter whether economists want to slap a label on this particularly precarious moment in time. Ultimately, strippers, whose day-to-day income is dependent on a continuous flow of cash, are feeling a slump. This probably means that their sprawling pool of punters, which encompasses near-enough every class and profession, probably are too.

The upside for @botticellibimbo? January was a little better than December, even though it’s a notably slow month whichever way you slice it. Even so, she doesn’t necessarily see this as a sign that things will get better from here on out – rather, it highlights how unusually bad a period that’s marked by holiday parties and frivolous spending really was.

The biggest factor, she speculates, is that the so-called ​“whales”, AKA customers who come in and drop thousands, aren’t making their usual appearances. ​“I think older customers are [feeling] less risky right now because the markets have been up and down, and the club has been like that, too,” she says.

This, of course, isn’t the first time that lap dances have been cited as a handy way of predicting where the economy might be headed, though the relationship between the two hasn’t always been so cut and dry. A 2009 Forbes article, Strippernomics, dug into a particular phenomenon: how various adult entertainment companies, from classic strip clubs to online porn sites, had all been thriving in an otherwise abysmal economy.

That same year, however, Larry Flynt of Hustler and Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild (who later served time in jail on child abuse charges) requested a £4 billion bailout from Congress to keep the adult industry alive. Of course, this may have just been a really good publicity stunt. ​“People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said at the time. ​“This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

Regardless of any pattern that emerged in the last recession of the late ​’00s, it’s possible that, in general, things have simply changed too much for us to expect repetition. Even in my time as a dancer, when the economy was reasonably stable, endless lip service was given to the good old days; of how different the industry used to be.

Political and economic turmoil could well be a contributing factor when it comes to a general sense of unease and penny-pinching. Still, sexuality as a whole and the spoils of the adult industry are far more readily available for online consumption than they have been in previous decades. This shift will likely never be reversed, which, coincidentally, perhaps makes the strip club an even more accurate measure of the economy as a whole. It’s a luxury purchase.

The good news, at least, is that @botticellibimbo doesn’t believe things are getting significantly worse in her line of work. Room sales, the real moneymaker for dancers, haven’t been great, but clubs themselves are staying afloat by selling plenty of booze. And as the success of other adult businesses in the last recession suggests, strip clubs may feel the worst financial squeeze as recessions begin. If and when a forthcoming recession is finally called, spenders will accept their reality and feel a bit more comfortable spending what money they do have on the frivolities that suit them, such as the time-honoured tradition of paying beautiful women for their time.