To strip or not to strip

In class on Tuesday we talked a little bit about strippers and I found it to be interesting. My ex girlfriend’s best friend is a stripper and I have always wondered why she chose to do this. When I first met her I remember thinking that this woman is beautiful and smart and has so much potential and I wondered why she started to strip in the first place.
Before I met her I had never even been to a strip club, that environment just didn’t feel right to me. She is only two months older than I am, and to see and hear about how she is living, I could not do it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad, it’s just different than what I’m used to. I took the college road, she took the independent road. She grew up in a less secluded household than I did and was much less restricted than I was as a child. Showing off your body was nothing new to her, but I was raised to believe that your body is yours and should not be exposed in the way that she does. She is comfortable with her body and knows that she can use it to her advantage and I can’t say that there is anything wrong with that.
Seeing her onstage and seeing her offstage is a complete transformation. Onstage she is a star. She stands tall and moves her body to seduce the men. She knows what she can do and she does it. The ball is completely in her hands, literally She goes to work and it’s up to her how much she makes a night. The crowd could be big or small, but ultimately how she acts is how she earns her money.
A lot of her customers are regulars so she knows what to do to get what she wants. And the new people, she has a routine to figure out what earns her the most money.
At the end of the night, depending on where she worked that night, she goes home with anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars. She usually works three nights a week, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. She goes to work somewhere around 10pm and get offs around 2 or 3am.
She chose this job because to her, it’s an easy job. All she has to do is look beautiful and dance. She controls when she works and how hard she works. She wants to do more, but she said for now she’s happy. She wants to continue stripping because she knows she’s good at it. She does not consider herself a whore because of what she does, she considers herself as being smart because she works so little and makes so much.
Yesterday, one of my best friends called me and told me that she was thinking of being a stripper for a week so that she could buy another car. She has another job now and she’s going to school to be a nurse, yet she wants to strip. I guess stripping has become less of a “no no.” I always thought it was a degrading line of work but I see it completely different now. It's all about control. You have to be in control and know what you want and take it.