I’m a Stripper. My Boyfriend Saw Me Through the Eyes of a Customer.

I was 24 when I started stripping. A friend and I were sipping tea on the couch, two young idealists in Berlin discussing how we needed money. From there, things went surprisingly fast, as they tend to do in this industry. My friend saw an ad on Craigslist, and not long after we found ourselves staggering half-naked down a smoky, strip-club hallway in high platform heels.

Now that I have six years of experience, my perception of the industry has become more nuanced than it was during that teatime chat. What hasn’t changed are the questions I am routinely asked as a stripper, most commonly: “Do you have a boyfriend? What does he say about your job?”

In whatever variation this question is asked (“Is it possible to find a boyfriend with this job?” “Isn’t your boyfriend jealous?”), it always assumes a boyfriend. The possibility of me being attracted to women is rarely mentioned.

Strip clubs are still bound to traditional gender norms, at least in my experience. The expression of nonconforming gender is not welcome, and a jarring transphobia soaks the clubs’ smelly, champagne-stained carpets. Female-presenting strippers are expected to perform hyper-femininity while male customers exhibit hyper-masculinity through expressions of machismo and financial power, whether real or staged.

In this context, heterosexuality is taken for granted. Yet what I realized throughout the years is that the strip club is not a parallel universe; it’s more a mirror of society, amplified by bright lights. And so was my first relationship with a straight man as a stripper.

When I first met the man who would become my boyfriend, I told him about my job and my bisexuality and he claimed to be cool about both. He called himself a feminist. He told me he found it “cool to date a stripper.” It was when our relationship became official that the problems started, and he began expressing displeasure with my career choice. I had seen this happen to so many of my colleagues, yet unlike my colleagues’ partners, my man called himself a feminist.

“Why don’t you like my job?” I asked. I had given him the “Game of Thrones” cookbook, and we had spent a wholesome day cooking odd recipes that we would never cook again. I had been holding back asking that question for about six months until it finally erupted.

“I never thought about it,” he said. “I just don’t like it and probably never will.”

I put my fork down. The food didn’t taste interesting anymore.

Nevertheless, I stayed with him. Relationships, I knew, were made of compromises.

I stayed, and I tried to make it work. I thought that if I showed him my world, he would realize he had nothing to worry about. When I introduced him to my stripper friends, who had become some of the most important people in my life, he sat at the table with his head down and didn’t speak a word to them.

I started producing events aimed at destigmatizing stripping and exploring its creative side. I invited him to each one of them, but he never showed up. Every time I went to work, he was at home with a headache.

A year into the relationship, he still dropped sentences like, “My friends ask me how I can be with a stripper.”

He had the chance to listen and learn from my experience. Instead, he regurgitated the judgment of his friends who had never spoken to a stripper in their lives.

I decided to go for shock therapy.

On a quiet weeknight at work, I met a funny, rich customer who stayed until the club closed. When the bartender announced last call, this man offered me money to continue the party at his hotel, meaning a social, not sexual, engagement, and one that I handled with all the precautions I’d take on any date, like sending my location and hourly updates to friends. The hotel turned out to be the Ritz Carlton.

As a country girl who grew up in a working-class family in northern Italy, I am not used to fancy places. Stripping has the remarkable capacity to bridge the gap between classes; it introduced me to the world of fancy hotels, champagne and expensive dates.

Still, the working-class girl in me never disappeared, and when I saw the marble bathroom in his suite, I thought it would be epic to send around a picture of my near-naked butt at the Ritz. I got out of my jogging pants, stripped down to my lingerie and posed. The customer took the picture, and I sent it to my boyfriend. It was 7 a.m., and you could see the customer’s knee in the frame.

I know this sounds insane, but there was a logic to me sending him the picture. By showing him where I was, I was trying to indicate that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, because why would I send him a picture if I were?

But apparently that logic wasn’t so sound, because all my friends said my reasoning made no sense. And the truth is that I wanted to provoke him, to make a statement. He was so skittish about my stripping, and critical of it, that in a way I hoped bombarding him with this kind of content would eventually normalize my world for him.

After sending the picture, I didn’t hear from him for three days. That’s what made me realize: My boyfriend saw me through the eyes of a customer, the kind who doesn’t understand stripping as a performance of hypersexuality and hyper-femininity, and as professional entertainment.

I see it like this: If a flight attendant smiles at you when asking if you want orange juice, do you think they are really into you? Or do you think they are smiling because it’s their job to smile? It’s the same with stripping. We aren’t taking off our clothes and acting seductive because we have fallen for our customers; we’re doing it because it’s our job.

If my boyfriend had ever gone to a strip club, he might have been one of those customers who asks you for your number or to go out to breakfast after your shift because they mistake a transactional connection for a real one.

In the end, we broke up. The paradox is that he should have felt safe about our relationship with me working at the strip club, because the more I worked, the less I was attracted to men in my free time. In truth, it’s my stripper colleagues he should have worried about me falling in love with, but, contrary to his attitude toward my male customers, he never saw them as a threat.

The same way he fetishized me as a stripper, he also fetishized my bisexuality, as many straight men do. People often see bisexuality as being open to the idea of having sexual relationships with people of either sex. This perception has always stung me as invalidating, and it irks me.

I am not “open to the idea” of being with a woman as well as a man. I fall in love with women. I yearn for them. My boyfriend should have been aware of the difference, after having spent hours listening to the stories of my past homoerotic heartbreaks and how I had cried over colleagues who had friend-zoned me after giving me confusing signals.

Still, his jealousy was never directed toward women, and he never perceived them as competition, which means he never took my queerness seriously. His fetishization showed, and he liked it when I commented that this or that colleague of mine was hot, comparing his taste to mine.

He may have never thought about why he didn’t like my job, as he said — but I did. And what I thought is that he saw my body as his property. He couldn’t stand the fact that strangers saw me naked, disclosing the secret that he thought should belong only to our bedroom intimacy. His early words were revealing: “It’s cool to date a stripper.” As if I were a trophy to be put on his shelf, a hot statue wrapped in lace underwear.

He did not see how stripping gave me financial independence and allowed me to travel the world. He did not see how it healed the wounds of a strict, religious upbringing, freeing me from a lot of Catholic shame. He did not see how it uplifted the insecure child I used to be, making me the self-confident person he liked.

The only thing he could see were my naked breasts displayed for strangers. Stripping for him was reduced to the crime of making my flesh public — for other men, because other women didn’t matter as much. In the end, I’m not sure he saw me at all. The person inside the skin who is proud, and loves fully, and, like anyone, is merely doing her job.