In her upcoming documentary, License to Pimp , filmmaker Hima B. Hima B. Filmed in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, License to Pimp chronicles the battles strippers face as their places of work transition from strip clubs to, essentially, brothels. The primary cause for this shift is the stage fees strippers are charged in order to even be able to dance in clubs in the first place. Dancers must, in effect, pay for the right to work.
This fee is compounded by the fact that strippers are not paid a minimum wage. Both of these acts are, by the way, illegal. As it is extraordinarily difficult to meet the stage fee requirement and leave a shift with any earnings of their own from just stripping or lap dancing, License to Pimp shows how women struggle with the alternatives.
In the film, Lola quickly realizes that her co-workers are making up the financial shortfall by prostituting in the clubs β a decision that although not always verbally mandated by male club owners, is endorsed in other ways beyond the leveling of stage fees.
For example, when Hima speaks to a strip club manager about the cameras in private rooms, he tells her they are less a means of security and more a tool used by the club to demand additional payouts based on the prostitution they observe occurring between strippers and customers in these rooms.
The choices women working in strip clubs must negotiate can seem foreign to anyone unfamiliar with the adult entertainment industry and the contradictory priorities that can emerge in the lives of working women. Daisy Anarchy, Lola and Mariko, the characters animating the central narrative threads in License to Pimp , reflect three very different responses to the illegal labor practices in San Francisco strip clubs.
