All the Details About Getting Naked for Fun and Profit

By Jillian Locke

Step into the world of one of the most controversial, judged, and on some levels, misunderstood professions on the planet ~ getting naked for money. Tom McCarthy, veteran DJ and maestro behind many a pole dance, offers his insights ~ which are often quite humorous ~ into the seldom explored and always shrouded world of stripping for a living.

“It’s a war on the floor baby, you win flirting with sin or you go home broke, that’s no joke,” McCarthy quotes from Missy Elliot’s “Work It” as he prefaces every chapter with some aptly fitting lyrics ~ sometimes glamorous, sometimes dark, sometimes thought-provoking ~ that set the tone for the observations he shares with us, observations he’s been able to make during his many years as a strip club DJ. He covers the gamut of the profession with a first-hand account that will either serve to prepare or scare away anyone interested in pursuing a career in the exotic performing arts. Chapters sub-sections range from Body Types and Body Art to Breast Implants and Threesome, Anyone? to Fetish Freaks and External Stress and everything in between.

McCarthy, a local chap who even mentions Centerfolds 2000 in Oxford and The Crystal Palace in Worcester as places that helped shape his career, covers everything from getting on stage to patrolling the floor to maximizing your money-making time. He lays out the differences between the Champagne Room and the VIP Room, clearly differentiates between “stripper” and “professional exotic dancers,” explains, based on talking to the ladies who had become his friends and willing research subjects, the physical and mental effects of stripping for a living, suggests the best ways for a stripper to make it in the industry and warns what happens when a girl succumbs to the dark side of the industry, even going as far as categorizing the most common “descents” of girls who cannot avoid the slippery slope (See Chapter 15, which opens brilliantly with the lyrics from Alice in Chain’s “Down in a Hole”).

McCarthy concludes each chapter with his personal recollections of “Great Moments in Stripping,” which tend to be the exact opposite, but always entertaining. He even dedicates a few pages to his first experience in a strip club, recalling his first private dance and the mesmerizing, never-to-be-forgotten effect in had on his psyche.

My only major criticism of the book is that it becomes a bit repetitious ~ McCarthy is lucky that his writing style is enjoyable and that the book is a quick read; otherwise, the repetitive stories might become tedious.

McCarthy has done something pretty exceptional with this book. He has avoided being at all sleazy, a direction it might have been easy for other authors on this subject to go.

He writes in a genuine, friendly tone, doesn’t use language that would suggest his readers are either stupid or uneducated, neither belittles nor puts the ladies on pedestals, and does not suggest a woman either try out the world of stripping nor steer clear of it. McCarthy has succeeded in his mission: to thoroughly educate future/potential exotic dancers with lessons, teachings, and examples regarding the good, the really good, the bad, the gruesome, and the complete, unadulterated, stripped-down truth about all that goes on behind those heavily guarded club doors ~ and how, if you’re a female adult with a good head on your shoulders, to turn it all into a positive, healthy goldmine, naysayers be damned.

For more on the book, check out gns101.com, where you can (and should!) order your copy.