How long have you been a stripper?
I’ve been dancing since August of 1988. That makes me 60 in stripper years.

How long have you been a stripper activist?
I first went public in Raw Talent, a newspaper article written in March of 1996. I’ve been vocal about it on a personal and individual level for much longer than that.

Do you speak for all strippers?
No. I speak for myself. I think my experience has been very good, I've been in the business a long time, and I have a pretty good idea of how it works. There are as many stories, ideas and opinions as there are dancers, though, and not everyone feels the same way I do. I don't think stripping has to be or even should be a political statement. I just feel compelled to make my own statement and tell my own story, because I think most of the world doesn't really have a very clear idea of who strippers are, what we do or why we do it. I've had a long, eventful and fascinating run, I have loved what I do, and I want to share my thoughts about that.

How long have you been a feminist?
Pretty much since the moment I understood the meaning of the word. Most of my life, I guess. I was raised in the 70’s by a hip, smart mom. I’ve always been a voracious reader and other feminist family friends made sure that things like Gloria Steinem’s “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” made their way into my young hands, where they affected me profoundly.

What made you decide to build this site?
It started out pretty innocently. My ex-boyfriend and longtime friend George Webber had built me a website in the early part of 1999 as part of his own site, which now seems to be defunct. I wrote a couple of essays about the sex industry, which had sprung from a long and heated dialogue I had been carrying on with an acquaintance of mine. She saw the pictures on my fancy new site (specifically a very tame art nude that showed nothing and a shot of me at the club playing pool) and was deeply offended. She accused me of dabbling in pornography and told me that those pictures absolutely were not art; she could see the ‘intention’ in my pose and knew that it was lewd. Pornography doesn’t offend me; the idea that her inaccurate image of me as a person had completely overshadowed her ability to understand and interpret real information from me really, really did. It was an ultimately rewarding, sometimes painful and frustrating journey and less than satisfying in its outcome – but only personally, in the context of my relationship with this woman. She eventually died of cancer, and she and I were unable ever to reach any kind of common ground. Her feelings about pornography affected her feelings about me and made it so that communicating with her before she went would only have upset her. This still makes me terribly sad.

At any rate, those e-mails helped me to do something I had wanted to do for years, which was to write about my experience as a stripper. They gave me a starting point and an endless supply of things to explore and articulate. Suddenly I had found fertile soil, and ideas I had cultivated for years took root and began to grow.

A while later I discovered that Yahoo! Geocities offered 15 megabytes of free webspace (although now, with the trouble I've had, I wouldn't recommend them very highly, to be frank) and decided to try my hand at designing a little page for myself. I felt bad every time I found something new that I wanted to change on my site and forced George to go back AGAIN and fix another spelling or punctuation error, or add some new thing I wanted to say. I had just had some new pictures taken and wanted to post them, so I signed up. After I put the pictures up and saw how much I enjoy (clumsily) designing my own site, I thought I might as well do ‘a little something’ about strippers, just for fun. I wrote The Feminist Stripper and realized that it needed its own page. Then I kept thinking of other things I wanted to say and understood that there must be other strippers out there who wanted to say something too, and then I thought it needed a name. Alysabeth’s Feminist Stripper Site, my weird little brainchild, was born. Feed it. Love it.

You seem to take this so seriously. It’s just stripping. In a world full of hunger and war and countless other grave and pressing issues, what makes you think this one is so important?
It is important. Of course there are problems in the world that are much more serious. Certainly there are other things that need to be changed and improved. I couldn’t agree more. This site is about the sex industry. There are plenty of other issues that get a great deal of my time and attention.

That said, though, the roots and ramifications of this particular issue run far deeper than one might think. It’s not just about the thousands of poverty-stricken workers who go blind toiling their lives away in the platform shoe factories, who depend on strippers and drag queens for their daily bread. It’s not just about the defunct and aging hair band Motley Crue, who remain in the public consciousness largely through their song Girls, Girls, Girls – the staying power of which cannot be attributed to artistic value but instead to its acclaim as a kind of strip bar anthem. It’s not just about the companies that manufacture glitter and hair, body and foot spray, who depend on the sex industry for the bulk of their revenue.

No, it’s really about much, much more than that: it’s about our right to erotic expression and recreation without stigmatization or oppression. It’s about our right as women to qualify and define our own experiences and make our own choices about our lives and our bodies without the loss of power or dignity or social standing. It’s about our society’s bizarre and unrealistic need to punish ourselves for enjoying the very impulse that creates life. It’s about the fundamental essence of gender relations. It’s about looking past stereotypes and evolving beyond knee-jerk judgments.

Not only that, but simply by virtue of my humanity, my experience is part of the Human Experience, and part of our existence as sentient creatures is our compulsion to record and therefore immortalize it. This experience of mine is as valid as yours is. If you disagree, don’t waste your time bothering me: get a website. They’re free.

Just who the hell do you think you are?
I’m just me. If that makes you feel threatened in some way, perhaps you should ask yourself that same question.

Sometimes you sound angry and hostile.
Sometimes I feel angry and hostile. Other times I feel warm and friendly like a little bunny or a sunbeam.

Your occasionally harsh tone makes it hard for me to hear or care about your information, even though you make really good points.
Clearly the points managed to make it through despite your emotional trauma. Try listening with your heart, like a Care Bear. How do you think people should sound when they’re talking about being stereotyped and stigmatized?

How do I prevent ingrown hairs and razor burn?
Honey, I wish I knew.

You make a living with your body… why does it bother you so much when people ask for nude pictures?
Well, let’s go over what you just said. I make a living with my body. Don’t you think it’s kind of rude to ask for freebies? Not only that, but I’ve been very clear about my feelings on that subject, so it’s nothing but bad manners to press the issue. I don’t believe that my nudity prevents you, Gentle Surfer, from taking me seriously; I do believe that it distracts from the purpose of this particular site. As I’ve said before, this place is for ideas, and naked women make it hard to concentrate.

I see that sometimes you go weeks or even months without a new journal entry. Why?
Writers’ block. Lack of time. Lack of inspiration. Other interests. Apathy.

Will you send me an autographed picture?
Eventually I’d like to start doing that, but I just haven’t gotten around to having a bunch of them made up. As soon as I stop being such a lazy slug about it I’ll be happy to send you one. I’m flattered that you asked.

I'm doing a paper/project/report. Will you please send me everything you have that pertains to strippers and feminism?
You mean, 'I'm a useless, apathetic parasite; will you do my research and hold my hand so I don't have to read anything to get a good grade?' No. I won't. That's what the site is for, just like books. You'd have to be pretty stupid to write to the author of some book or another and ask them to please rewrite it all JUST FOR YOU and your homework assignment. Of course, I assume that's true of you simply by virtue of your having asked me the same thing, so who knows? Here's the thing: if you're really this lazy and ignorant, this report isn't going to change anything anyway. You're going to be a failure, in school and in life, unless you change the way you do things and quit half-assing it.
I don't bear fools tamely, so don't bother me with this.

Why do you have that e-mail disclaimer page?
Well, think about it. The internet is a big, not always nice place. Anyone can say anything to you under the cloak of anonymity without fear of repercussion. I’m a stripper, and as you might have gleaned from reading here, some people have very strange feelings and ideas about women in my line of work. I have no desire to weed through hundreds of obscene messages and requests for personal relationships in my inbox to get to something worthwhile. As you can see from the Morons’ Gallery (actually, you can't since the site is in a somewhat abbreviated form just now, but it'll be back eventually), even after I’ve made myself perfectly clear there’s always some maggot who feels that it doesn’t apply to them, who gets a little thrill by doing something icky. I just like to weed out the weenies. Anyone who has decent intentions is sure to realize that.

Why were you so mean to the people in the Morons’ Gallery?
Somebody had to do it.

Will you…?
Probably not, no.

Can I…?
No. No. Absolutely not.

Have you ever…?
That’s none of your business, Bucko.