About
Not a natural-born stripper
My name is Lucinda and I started stripping in my late thirties. I had considered doing it for a long time before that but in my early 20s, when most people start dancing, I wouldn't have felt it was consistent with my ideas of feminism. I feel differently now.
I have also always been interested in holistic health. This continued when in 2015 I started to retrain as a therapist. I added a mindfulness meditation qualification to that in 2020. I have many more qualifications I want to get.
I was not a natural-born stripper to start with and the job presented all kinds of mental, emotional, physical and social challenges before I could make a success of it.
No more barriers to proper healthcare
I soon became aware of the barriers to getting appropriate health care and wellness support. If you don't tell the practitioners what you do for work they might be missing information that's vital to helping you; if you do, you might encounter inappropriate judgements, a weird fascination, or the attitude that you must be mentally ill to do this kind of job anyway.
I started researching the idea for Ess Wellness, or Stripper Wellness as I first called it, in 2019 but had put it on hold. Then the pandemic came along and I saw how much Covid 19 was going affecting the sex work community, sidelined from society as we are. I started the Instagram account to get some support out there, though progress was been slow as I was also busy focusing on ways to make up income lost because of the pandemic. Self-employment is hard.
Reproduced with permission from ELSC. Photo: Millie Robson
Finding strength in community
I dabbled with organising events for my customers in response to being shut out by many managers because of my age and for dancers with a stripperwear fair in 2019. I have also been involved in dancer-led campaigns to stop the abolition of strip clubs by local councils in the UK and other UK-wide sex worker activism groups.
Graphic: Samantha Sun
But it isn't all about me
Through these groups I've been fortunate to meet many amazing people, many of whom are also involved in wellness, therapy etc - no surprise to us in the job since sex work often has a therapeutic benefit to the customer.
Some of them have contributed to the Instagram account and I frequently collaborate with them. Look out for more details on and information from trusted practitioners.
I am also respectfully appreciative of the other players in the sex worker wellness and activism space who are leading the charge for change.
Values
- This is about practical and non-judgemental advice.
- Sex work, erotic entertainment, adult entertainment - whatever you call it - has always been a part of human society. The rights and wellbeing of those involved in it must be respected and our pathologisation as mentally ill, deviant or criminal people is backwards, misguided and doesn't represent the truth. It needs to stop.
- This is a safe space for sex workers and their partners, where every contributor is vetted for their ethics and voyeurs are discouraged.
- People's right to confidentiality, both in the usual therapeutic sense, and as it relates to their sex work and legal personas, is observed.
- Evidenced-based and ethical approaches to the provision of holistic health information are observed.
- Wellness information must be made available to all, whatever their ability to pay.
- It's about collaboration not competition with other sex worker wellness providers.
- Political and religious affiliations have no place in the provision of therapeutic care and health information, except that supporting the human rights of anyone doing sex work is a political act.