The Night Shift, Fewer Clothes, Better Pay

Higher education got expensive enough that the economics of stripping started making genuine sense. That’s the simple version of what a study published in the British Journal of Sociology found: roughly a third of strippers working in the UK were students or pupils, with 29 percent still in some phase of formal education. The main drivers were predictable—tuition costs, the flexibility of club hours, the scarcity of other jobs that pay enough to matter.

What’s less predictable, and more interesting, is the secondary finding: not all of them were doing it out of financial desperation. Some came from comfortable backgrounds and could have funded their degrees without ever setting foot in a club. They stripped because they wanted to. Sociologist Teela Sanders drew the line carefully: these are dancers, not sex workers, and the cultural standing of stripping has shifted enough that the work carries less stigma than it once did.

I don’t have strong moral feelings about any of it. What does interest me is what it says about how we’ve priced education—that for a significant chunk of students, the calculation now seriously includes taking your clothes off for money. One British city with two universities had twelve strip clubs. That’s not a coincidence.

The work is physical, the hours brutal, the environment not always pleasant. But serving drunk middle-aged men watered-down beer at 3 a.m. for minimum wage also has its obvious drawbacks. At some point certain spreadsheets start looking very clear.