The Price of Presence

The Price of Presence: Notes From Atlanta’s Strip Economy

Collage by Black Women Radicals

Notes From An Urban Feminist

A year ago I landed in Atlanta, Georgia without my three children, my husband or community. I arrived with four luggages in tow, and although I considered myself a fully realized feminist whose identity could stand alone, I felt like something was missing; like they were missing. I exited Hartsfield-Jackson airport, welcomed by a humidity that hung heavy in the air like a past lover. At 36 years old I had just been accepted into a Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies graduate program at Georgia State University. 

After more than a decade of working with Black women and children in various capacities, I was finally getting the opportunity to pop my shit on a full ride to become the academic I always wanted to be. The reasons why I came alone are not what this piece is about, but I thought you should know that the stakes were high, and I was without the comfort of my people. My journey through academia before this point had already been an interesting one. I did not complete anything in the timeline folks usually associate with success, and I was not a cookie cutter student. I had no interest in code switching just so folks could respect my intellect. 

I am an Oakland girl, cultured and hood adjacent whose family had worked in group homes, nonprofits and prisons with those that society had deemed unfit. So advocating for myself and for the communities I grew up in was simply legacy work. Focusing specifically on Black women was a call to action that came naturally to me. I put on for the ghetto girls, for the hood adjacent, the suburban, the middle and upper class. The American black girls from the city and those from the country. The black girls from the West Indies and those who represent all the many faces of Africa. For the ones that speak pretty on panels and the one weaving spells with their bodies in the back rooms of strip clubs. 

I can not speak perfectly for everyone, but I can lend my voice. I am always learning the languages of what it means to be a Black woman, and I’m committed to becoming well versed. I understand that offering my intellectual property to academia was a transaction when I accepted the offer to come to grad school. To be a Black academic is like any good or service Black women offer for sale to make due. 

Notes From A Dancer Named Lyrics

Jessica Miglio/ Starz

When I saw her, our eyes locked. Her gaze was intense — a Beauty of the Week straight out of Jet Magazine. Her sex appeal felt vintage, an effortless 90’s kind of girl though I’m sure she was Gen-Z. No weave, no plastics, her body was tea; tighter than mine had been in years. Matter of fact, I saw no one in the club that afternoon whose body looked like mine. I’m round, imperfect, some might call it thick — a body much heavier than a freshman fifteen. Yet although our bodies differed in scale, we both carried the weight of our womanhood.

I couldn’t hold her gaze, so I casually shifted my eyes downward, letting them settle on the sugared rim of my lemon drop and the appetizers on the table. I wondered if she could see my insecurities as easily as my curiosity. I wondered what mindset a woman needed to be in to parade a pussy that pretty around for minimum wage.

A few of us from the artist cohort sat there having our midday meal as artists, civic servants, and voyeurs — watching, listening, wanting to know more. Woman after woman approached our table as if it were a throne, honored to chat, to be paid for their intellectual property, and to offer a small window into their world.

They explained that at this club the daytime shift paid more for conversation than dancing. Companionship was as enticing as fantasy, and here cattiness and fighting would not be tolerated. Etiquette between girls was business infrastructure. Having a clique was part of getting to the bag.

Speaking of business, each woman moved like a sole proprietorship in stilettos — women fluent in investor relations, whose confidence rivaled any man in a boardroom. Their stride communicated, I know what you want, and if you ask correctly, I might give it to you.

Their knowledge of their own assets paid the bills beyond the club’s hourly wage. The art of who is buying and who is selling is something women in this profession understand intimately. It is deeper than the popular question of what women bring to the table when it is quite possible that we sourced the lumber.

Lyrics’ coworker, an OG at the club at the ripe age of 26, told me her brand was expanding into sex therapy. A married couple had approached her wanting to open their relationship, but the wife wasn’t sure if she was attracted to women. She requested a private session to explore her desires without her husband’s gaze present.

The dancer talked her through it. She crouched into a deep squat, exposing the place where dark thighs and salty waters meet. Softly she instructed: “Look at it. Look at me. How does it make you feel?”

She told me people come to the club to decompress, to explore their egos, to experiment with desire. But they also come searching for clarity — processing identity, attraction, and vulnerability in a space that allows questions without consequence. She was an entrepreneur, a stripper, a guide operating within the parameters of the room.

RELATED: Black men need to abandon “pimp” culture and support Black women sex workers

I spoke with a younger dancer that day, newly hired and still in school. After cycling through minimum wage jobs, she chose dancing as her next venture. The stereotype of low self-esteem didn’t align with what I witnessed. Confidence was survival. Comparison was bad business. Each woman became an expert of her own brand rather than measuring herself against the next.

When Lyrics finally approached our table, I pretended to be unbothered though I had been watching her the entire time. Her therapist friend mentioned her podcast, Coochie Cocktells, and I was eager to learn more. She explained that her platform centered sex positivity and challenged the stigma surrounding pleasure and sexuality.

Listening to her, I struggled to locate a meaningful divide between the work she was doing in the club and the work I hoped to do in academia. We both sought to liberate women and be compensated for our labor. We both wanted platforms that allowed women to speak loudly and take up space.

Later, walking into a coworking studio for her podcast recording, I saw the architecture of her brand — cameras, curated décor, signature drinks, herbal tea blends marketed for intimacy and wellness. Dance, media, product, and personality braided together.

In that moment I thought: these Atlanta girls don’t play. Teach me how to negotiate my own value.

Because of these women, I began to see sex work as industry and as lens. It illuminated negotiations around visibility, embodiment, and compensation that many Black women navigate across sectors. Strip culture made visible what often remains unspoken — Black femme presence, attention, intellect, and physicality operate as economic instruments whether institutions acknowledge it or not.

That realization followed me months later to Charleston.

Illustration by Inge Snip. 

Notes From Charleston, Sc. A Historical Look At Sex Work

Over the summer I traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to study the history of slavery with a focus on Gullah Geechee culture. Spanish moss draped from live oaks like memory suspended in air. I found myself wondering how a place so visually stunning could hold such layered histories of violence and survival simultaneously.

Charleston’s port economy brought together enslaved and free Black people, white elites, Indigenous communities, and indentured servants within overlapping marketplaces. This economy operated within a chattel slave system that positioned Black bodies themselves as property, labor, and capital simultaneously. We are often taught about sexual violence under slavery, but less frequently about the micro-economies Black women built within constraint.

Historical accounts describe women who cultivated crops, sold skilled labor, and in some cases exchanged sexual services within Charleston’s marketplace culture. These activities complicate rigid narratives of total economic exclusion while never erasing the violence that structured their lives. Agency here was partial, negotiated, contingent.

Visitors documented a red-light district that existed alongside the commercial life of the port city, shaped by the same contradictions that defined slavery itself. Standing in Charleston, Atlanta felt less like discovery and more like continuation.

RELATED: I became a sex and consent educator with Black youth in mind

From Charleston’s port economy to Atlanta’s nightlife circuit, Black women have navigated markets shaped by desire, labor, and power. What persists is negotiation — the ongoing work of defining value while systems attempt to define it for us.

Strip culture in Atlanta makes that negotiation visible. It shows Black femmes setting prices, building brands, managing attention, and crafting livelihoods from presence itself. The work is relational, strategic, embodied, and economic all at once.

Strip culture does not create the economic significance of Black femme bodies. It reveals a lineage already in motion.

Works Cited

Chakrabarti Myers, Amrita. “Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston.” The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Morgan, Phillip. “Black Life in Eighteenth-century Charleston.” The Institute of Early American Culture, (Williamsburg, Va.);1984.

Tiara Mbonisi is a Women’s, Gender & Sexuality studies scholar, a writer, artist and educator. Connect with her @TiaraMbonisi