Former Club Worker Says Wives and Sex Workers Are Blaming the Wrong People

A former gentlemen’s club employee who later discovered her fiancé was cheating says the experience exposed a divide she believes benefits unfaithful men: Women betrayed by their partners often direct their anger at sex workers rather than at the men who broke their promises.

Megan Thiele Strong, a sociology professor at San José State University, draws on both experiences in a personal essay arguing for the decriminalization of consensual adult sex work.

Her central contention is that marriage and commercial sex are treated as entirely separate worlds, even though both can involve complicated exchanges of money, intimacy, labor and financial security.

That comparison is provocative. Strong presents it as a sociological argument, not a description of every marriage or every relationship.

Her introduction to the adult entertainment industry came hundreds of miles from home. While waiting for a job interview at a club, she recognized one of her sister’s former athletic coaches walking through the door.

It was not the last familiar face she would encounter. Customers included university students and the owner of a restaurant where she also worked as a server.

The experience revealed how easily respectable public lives could overlap with activities kept private.

Inside the clubs where she worked, Strong describes a workplace in which women generated the attraction but men controlled nearly everything else: scheduling, music, drinks, security and money.

She says employees had little privacy. Dressing-room doors were absent or left open, and a bathroom stall lacked a door. Despite the business depending on women’s labor, she felt management treated them as replaceable.

The financial incentives nevertheless made leaving difficult.

Strong recalls earning substantially more waiting tables in clubs than in conventional restaurants. Club shifts routinely brought her about $25 an hour, including tips and wages. Some dancers earned hundreds of dollars a night after paying the establishment its share.

Discretion became another job requirement.

She learned to keep her club work separate from other parts of her life, fearing that disclosure would undermine how others perceived her. She remembers a dancer who recognized her child’s school principal among the customers, hid and begged to leave early.

Years later, Strong encountered a different kind of secrecy when she discovered her fiancé’s infidelity.

She sought support in groups for betrayed women, but says some participants expressed greater hostility toward sex workers than toward the husbands who purchased their services. Her employment history complicated her place in those communities: She could conceal it and receive sympathy, or disclose it and risk rejection.

For Strong, that experience raised a broader question about whose conduct attracts the most condemnation.

She argues that women providing sexual services are stigmatized while the men paying for them can preserve their reputations. In her view, pitting wives against sex workers allows customers to avoid responsibility for their own decisions.

Her essay also challenges the sharp moral distinction between marriage and paid sexual labor.

Historically, she argues, marriage has often linked men’s financial support to women’s domestic, emotional and sexual labor. Marriage receives legal protections and social approval, while commercial sexual exchanges frequently expose workers to criminal penalties and fewer practical avenues for seeking protection or payment.

The comparison has limits. Marriages encompass affection, shared commitments and responsibilities that cannot simply be reduced to a transaction. Strong’s argument concerns the economic expectations surrounding relationships, rather than a claim that every wife experiences marriage as paid work.

She advocates removing criminal penalties for consensual adult sex work, arguing that doing so would give workers greater freedom to negotiate conditions and report abuse. Decriminalization of consensual activity would not mean permitting trafficking, coercion or exploitation of children.

Strong also contends that greater openness could make it harder for customers to conceal their behavior. She recalls club payments being processed under generic merchant names rather than recognizable business names.

Her broader claims about decriminalization improving safety and reducing trafficking are policy arguments; the personal experiences described in her essay do not, by themselves, establish those outcomes.

Now a single mother, Strong connects the issue to women’s financial independence. She argues that limited earnings and the difficulty of supporting a household on one income can constrain women’s choices, both within relationships and in the workplace.

Her conclusion is that women should have greater control over the work they undertake and should not lose dignity or protection because that work involves sex.

For married women confronting infidelity, her message is more immediate: The person who made the commitment is the person responsible for keeping it.