The Business of Being Interesting

“You may know the roles I've played, but don't mistake them for knowing me. Your assumptions are not my identity.”

November 1, 2022. I shared a reflection on Facebook about something I had learned during my fifteen years, off and on, working as an adult entertainer.

Four years later, the lesson hasn't changed.

It wasn't about dancing, costumes, or how much clothing a woman was wearing. It was about understanding people, knowing your business, and recognizing the difference between attracting someone's attention and keeping their interest.

When Facebook brought those words back to me, I realized something: I wouldn't change the lesson.

I spent many years, off and on, working as an adult entertainer. And if there's one thing I learned, it's that attracting someone's attention and keeping their interest are two entirely different skills.

People see the dancing, the costumes, the performances. What they don't always see is the intelligence behind the work: reading a room, understanding human behaviour, holding conversations, building relationships, and knowing how to turn a moment of attention into a returning customer.

There was an art to it. There was also a business.

I understood that a customer might walk through the door because of what he saw, but what brought him back could be something entirely different. A conversation. A laugh. Being remembered. Feeling that, for a little while, someone had taken a genuine interest in him.

And I understood something else: a returning customer was often worth more than a passing admirer.

As I put it in 2022, "Why? It paid better!"

Society has a peculiar habit of deciding where intelligence belongs and where it doesn't. Apparently, a woman can demonstrate exceptional interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and business instincts, but if she's wearing six-inch heels and very little clothing, somehow those abilities don't count.

Funny how that works.

The skills I developed didn't disappear when I left the industry. Understanding people, recognizing what motivates them, communicating effectively, and knowing the value of relationships are skills that travel with you.

Yet somehow, when we speak about women who have worked in adult entertainment, the conversation rarely begins with what they know. It begins with what people think they know about them.

And that brings me to the danger of the single story.

A person can know something about your past and still know very little about you. The trouble begins when they mistake that one piece of information for the whole person.

Perhaps that's what The Stripper's Couch is really about.

Not defending my past, apologizing for it, or dressing it up to make anyone comfortable.

It's about recognizing that every chapter of a woman's life has something to teach, including the chapters other people would rather she kept quiet.

I have been many things in my lifetime. Being an adult entertainer was one of them. It wasn't the entirety of who I was then, and it certainly isn't the entirety of who I am now.

But I would never pretend those years taught me nothing.

Some of my most valuable lessons came from places nobody would think to call a classroom.

Carla Rodney | Grandma Knows Best | The Stripper's Couch