Neon Girls audiobook

Quick and interesting read exploring a world that I know very little about. Quickly came to realize I know even less than I thought I did. When it comes to biographies I often find myself dragging my body to my bed and laying down to begrudgingly read about someone whose life has more ambitions than I could dream of. But something about Jennifer’s style of writing hit differently. Describing the hardships and inner workings of the lusty lady so efficiently and eloquently. I felt like a friend who was listening to the story at a San Francisco coffee shop. Maybe it’s cause I can relate to that feeling Jennifer first had on stage. That feeling of being two different personalities at work and at home. Something about neon girls just gripped me to the page and had me wondering how I can form a union within my own job. Motivating yet provoking. I am glad I read this book.

This book is a good hard look at a specific group of workers the general populace tends to look down upon (to put it mildly). I’ll be honest, the demand for people in these types of positions will more than likely NEVER cease. I honestly cannot applaud Jennifer more for all she accomplished during her nearly ten years as a stripper all the while going to school in hopes to finally achieve her Ph. D. Reading a different angle of the sex industry than my first plunge into it (How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale) was no less enlightening."It was wearing, though, having to assert, again and again, my own humanity, to prove myself a person dozens or scores of times each shift. It sometimes seemed as if all the large and small degradations of existing while female in this world had been simmered and reduced to a thick, too strong, too sour elixir that fed us in a steady drip, drip, drip."How is it so easy for society to deem others beneath them, dismiss them as unintelligent, and exploit them for personal/business gain? The ladies employed by the Lusty in Jennifer’s history are a brilliant reminder as bright as neon itself that society should really know better about stuffing people into conveniently labeled boxes. I found the dynamics of the Lusty versus Chez Paree interesting – I’ll admit that all I’ve ever heard about are businesses like Chez Paree where the women have little to no control."I hated the idea that men I didn’t know or trust now had records of the work I did, that they could carry Polly, naked and unawares, from the safe refuge that had birthed and nurtured her, into that other world where I had to live my life. Would others meet her out there? My professors, students, college friends, people back home? Polly was mine, and she belonged in here, not out there."Neon Girls: A Stripper’s Education in Protest and Power did an amazing job at highlighting the industry for both sides of the coin – exploitation, and empowerment. I highly recommend to readers who find memoirs/autobiographies, sexuality, history of the sex industry, protests, reform, and feminism interesting topics. I would like to thank Harper Perennial and Jennifer Worley for this eye-opening book – the courage and relationships of the women recounted in this book is truly something special.

When I read the synopsis—a story about a stripper fighting for unionization while getting her PhD in the 1990s—I was intrigued.I really enjoyed so much about this book. I learned a lot about the sex industry but so much more about the people participating in it, especially Worley. I loved that Worley told it like it was, her doubts and feelings, her experiences, her relationships with coworkers. Even the details of code words and phone lists were included. But I loved that at its heart this was a story of feminism and empowerment.I highly recommend picking this one up if you’re a nonfiction/memoir fan.(I received an advanced copy in exchange for my review.)

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest reviewIn one of my college classes, The Commodification of Gender, we studied the unionization of San Francisco’s Lusty Lady, learning how the women fought back against their management (unfair rules, hidden cameras in the dressing room, etc) to create the world’s first ever strippers’ union. We studied their legal proceedings, magazine features, and interviews. Jennifer Worley’s first hand account of her experience in the unionization gave me an even greater insight into this topic, movement, and achievement. A must-read for anyone interested in the topics of gender, the sex industry, sex workers, feminism, capitalism, classism, and power dynamics.Blog | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest

Not me listening to the audiobook in my car, cheering out loud from the sheer force of girl power happening here.Not me getting all emotional and literally tearing up at the thought of former strippers coming together, years after the fact, for a final reunion dance before their club is closed for good. This is freaking fantastic. Everything I "knew" about strippers clearly came from movies and, um, is wrong. Loved learning about experiences completely new to me, from someone who lived it. 4 stars

Loved it! Quick, engaging read. Interesting to explore the empowering and unifying vs degrading and dehumanizing aspects of stripping. It's complicated and I really enjoyed learning about the stripping industry. Still definitely did not convince me to ever want to be a stripper though lol.

Absolutely amazing!!! The audiobook was great, and this was a nonfiction book that really has a storyline which made it all the more engaging

How is everyone not talking about this amazing memoir!? I was fascinated by Neon Girls and finished this in a day! I loved reading about the author’s changing feelings along her experience in the sex industry, and how there really wasn’t a conclusion regarding if stripping is empowering or exploitat

This book!! This book was very special to me. I worked at a strip club in my early-mid 20’s and the book brought back so many great memories (scroll for a pic of me in those days); the female comradery between waitresses and dancers, the empowerment, fun times, and the friendships built. Jennifer Worley not only had experience as a dancer, but she did her graduate work on the industry. This book was jam packed of the real life experience, as well as the history and background of burlesque and strip clubs. I never thought that I’d gain my first understanding of unions and union negotiations through a book about strippers, but there it is! “I was learning a lot more at Lusty than just the ins and outs of hair removal and how to apply lip liner. I was also learning about solidarity among women and how much power we could wield by standing together “

A topic I knew nothing about beforehand! Not only did it help me understand and humanize the work of these women, but this book will make you want to unionize your own workplace.

An eye-opening and surprisingly uplifting read about sex work and feminism. It was charming and readable, and filled with nuance. I also liked the local aspect of it, since the Lusty Lady was started in Seattle before opening it's infamous San Francisco chapter.

Oooh I recommend! A look into stripping culture in the 90s and one woman's experience with its simultaneous empowerment and challenges.

Thank you Harper Perennial for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.I absolutely loved this memoir. I had a feeling that I would when I read the synopsis. Yes, it's about strippers, but it's also about feminists and workers rights. This was about unionizing a strip club. There was also a bit of history of the trade. Burlesque dancers were unionized along with other entertainers and stage actors in the early 20th century. I had no idea. Along with learning a lot, this book had an easy flow and quite a bit of humour. Worley was able to tell her story, that was at times quite serious, in a very entertaining way. If this memoir was turned into a film or mini series, I would 100% watch it.

Reeeeally good. I couldn't stop."Eventually being spoken to by coworkers, supervisors, and complete strangers while naked would feel normal...soon nudity would become my natural habitat, my default state.... But today in the face of Jospehine's breezey nonchalance I felt awkward and shy then invisible when my nudity went utterly unremarked.""In retrospect I suppose my performance was a way of trying to show Jospehine - and maybe myself - that I was no shrinking violet, but a bold brazen wildflower unafraid to bare my petals to the sun or to the leering gazes all around.""She explained 'At a lot of other clubs there's an expectation that dancers need to perform sexual favors for managers or other employees. But we don't tolerate that. And if a dancer tells me a support member did something that felt like harassment, that's it. If it's a he said she said situation we go with what she said.' This was the mid 1990s, just a few years after the concept of workplace sexual harassment had entered the popular consciousness via the Anita Hill hearings and workplaces were just starting to develop sexual harassment policies. Most of them were toothless, more concerned with the possibility that men would be unfairly accused than with the treatment of female employees. But here, at a pornographic nudity show where women could wear 'an attractive top or attractive bottom' but never both, the policy was that women were to be respected and taken at their word.""I learned to see such gestures as the licky loo face, used so frequently by street harassers, as blatant sexualized threats, expressions of aggression and contempt packaged as desire. Now confronted with the gestural shell of this harassment bereft of the aggression and contempt I'd come to recognize in it my understanding was shifting again. Was I just being re-indoctrinated into accepting again what I knew to be abuse? Was this job demanding that I unlearn my hard won feminist analysis?""When I step back and look at the process of creating Polly I realize that it mimicks the very process by which identities are formed outside the peep show. We watch, we imitate, we try things on, we notice how others respond, and we adapt to those responses until we land upon a way of being in the world that works. That way of being eventually becomes so automatic that we forget the trying on and casting off, the learning, so that we mistake it for the truth, a truth we call 'myself'.""Polly gave me a confidence that sometimes looked like cockiness, a power that sometimes looked like brazenness. Polly showed me a new vision of myself and taught me to inhabit it.""I began to realize that I wasn't just some fraud pretending to be a stripper. Not because I wasn't pretending, but because we were all pretending. That's what it meant to be a Lusty Lady: to pretend. And in pretending to become.""Laying myself bare for myriad strangers day after day had begun taking a toll. It was becoming more difficult to make myself vulnerable enough to feel desire or even to be desired after spending several hours, several times a week naked, vulnerable, open to all who projected their lust upon me.""For all the confidence and authority I was gaining in the classroom [from Polly], on stage I began to feel desiccated, sucked dry of my former brazen vitality as if my teacher persona was vampirizing Polly, stripping her for emotional parts.""While the chance to work less and make more was a draw, this motivation was really a cover for a more emotional, more seductive force. The sex industry is built upon seduction after all. It seduces not only its patrons but its workers as well, whispering in the same alluring tones that echo in the ears of gamblers, promises of something more, something more. I didn't need more. But I felt pulled nevertheless to see the rest of this underworld, learn its ways and squeeze from it all that was coming to me, all the riches girls like Alex promised were waiting if I just laid down one more bet.""I just couldn't take the unrelenting rejection for one more day...In many ways stripping inverts the dynamic of the non-commercial, heterosexual pickup. At the lap dance club women pursue and try to pick up men while men swat them away.... But whereas men have been socialized to expect sexual rejection most of the time, women have been socialized to be sexually perused. So the sheer volume of rejection an exotic dancer experiences can be grueling in spite of all the desire and admiration that might also come our way. While most of us think as the three song stint on stage as the substance of the job - the glitter, cheap spotlight, brass pole, desiring eyes all around - the work of this work is elsewhere. The work of this job is walking in your underwear and heels for hours, smiling and weedling for tips from men who glance briefly at your tits or crotch or face, judge you insufficient then wave you away dismissively. It is emotionally wearing and at times humiliating for those like me who lack the steely confidence."(on co-ops and slacking members) "For the rest of us it felt uncomfortable to intervene and tell a coworker to shape up because, also socialized into the hierarchies or capitalism, we expected the boss to do that. Without a boss it just felt bossy to intervene.""To spin amid an unlikely sisterhood of women called Octopussy, Amnesia, Justice, Peace, and Chaos. Women who burned brightly and hotly and briefly in that grubby, sleazy little dive then cooled and ossified back into Allisons, Stephanies, Lauras, and Megs."