Randi Newton, like many unfortunate white-collar women, found herself unemployed six years ago and knew she would have to make a career change. A former financial analyst for Morgan Stanley, Newton, thankfully, found a new job. This one is a lot more exciting, and she no longer has to wear a business suit. She probably still has to wear heels, though. “I never planned on becoming a stripper,” Newton told MSNBC.

When Newton was laid off from Morgan Stanley, one of America’s largest banks, not to mention one that has received approximately $10 billion in federal bailout money from the TARP program, she could not find a single job anywhere. Now, dancing 3-4 nights a week at Rick’s Cabaret in Manhattan, Newton is making over six figures a year in tips alone.

Newton isn’t the only professional woman who has traded a cubicle for a pole. She says Rick’s Cabaret has recently had as many as 50 applicants a week, mostly women who’ve lost their office jobs due to the economic crisis. Gentlemen’s clubs across the country have seen increases in applicants from the professional world as well. And it makes perfect sense; they can wait and hope the economy turns around in a few years and get back their old jobs at similar or reduced salaries to what they used to make, or they can dance topless and make as much as $1500 a shift.

Consider that the unemployment rate for April 2009 was at 8.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which marks an increase of 563,000 people in just one month, to raise the total to 13.7 million unemployed persons in the United States. In the past 12 months, the number of unemployed has risen by 6 million, and the unemployment rate has grown by 3.9 percent. Credit card debt continues to grow in the US as well; in 2008, Americans’ total credit card debt climbed to $972.73 billion, up 1.12 percent from the previous year. The average credit card debt per household was $8,329, according to Nilson Report, April 2009.

With numbers like that, it’s no mystery why more women have tried to find work in gentlemen’s clubs. It pays well, often times in cash. Even better, there’s no time clock to punch. Newton, a classically voluptuous brunette who fills out a black dress as well as any gal you’ll ever see, doesn’t regret becoming an exotic dancer one bit. She says she has not experienced any sexual harassment, a common misconception of the industry, and she can make her own schedule. “If I want to take month off and go to Vegas, or if I want to go to France, I can.”

Eugene Dupont, owner of Dancers Royale Club in Orlando, says the new waves of applicants are many times women from industries that have crumbled from the housing market bust. “I see mortgage brokers. [I see] mortgage appraisers. People that have had their lifestyles based on personality and linked to the real-estate industry. Obviously, they’re not going like gang-busters like they used to.”

Of course, out-of-work women who have become exotic dancers don’t always just do it to support themselves. Just ask Aequila “Jasmine” Ray. All of five feet tall, if that, Ray still stood out at the “Jobless to Topless” job fair at the Cabaret Royale in Dallas, Texas. How could she not have? Wearing what Dallas Morning News reporter Joanna Cattanach described as “impossibly high heels” and a tight top that “[put] her bosom on display to the fumbling hands of a cameraman trying to place a microphone on her shirt,” Ray, who works three shifts a week stripping, was attending the event to help get a friend of hers a job. “She's from Ohio,” Ray explained of her unemployed friend. “I'm trying to introduce her to the life.”

Why such a ringing endorsement for an industry that is sometimes regarded negatively by certain elements of the public? Because Ray, 20 years old and already dancing for a year at Cabaret Royale, says she earns more than enough to support herself and her young daughter, not to mention her love of shopping. “I keep up with a pretty lavish lifestyle,” she said, her enormous earrings shaking as she spoke, a Louis Vuitton purse dangling from her forearm.

Ray admits she began dancing only as a stop-gap measure. She thought she would do it only until she found another job. Over time, she found the lifestyle, not to mention the money, to be too good to give up. “I haven't looked for another job yet.”

Rakesha Mitchell, Dallas resident and mother of two, applied for a waitress position at Cabaret Royale. “I need a job,” she simply said. Mitchell, as any job-seeker at a job fair would, came dressed to impress. Applicants at the job fair were, incidentally, not required to undress, dance or display any other “talents” they might have. All they had to do was fill out an application and leave a résumé if they brought it.

Many women seem to find themselves in the same boat as Randi Newton found herself; becoming a stripper was not necessarily what they had in mind when they thought of starting fresh. “I tried to apply at McDonald's,” Bernice Williams told The Dallas Morning News, but was not given a job there. Williams, now out of jail after serving a three-year prison sentence for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, says her last job, which was at a chicken shack, paid $139 a week. That was barely enough to cover her cell phone bill every month. At the “jobless to topless” fair, though, she was hired immediately. “I'll be nervous to get on stage,” said Williams, one of hundreds of men and women to attend the job fair. “[But] I'm gonna get up there.”

A good number of men turned out for the event as well. Cabaret Royale was looking to hire more than just dancers. Strip clubs need bartenders, management, kitchen staff and bouncers, too. And as Ramon Salinas observed, in this economy, job opportunities don’t grow on trees. Salinas was laid off in February from his job at a food processing company. “A job's a job anyway,” he joked. “It's good money. I mean, who hates working around a bunch of girls?”

Steve Craft, vice president of Dallas-based Burch Management that helped organize the “Jobless to Topless” event, didn’t sound at all surprised by the turnout. “We've got people that are looking for a job that have been looking for jobs for four months,” said Craft.  He believes that the negative perceptions of the adult entertainment business have waned in recent years.

“People who had not considered going into the entertainment industry are now considering it.” Craft also said that exotic dancing is a safe working environment, contrary to what many new applicants may have heard about it. After all, what do you think all the bouncers are for? Besides, if a woman is making $1500 for a single shift, can we really say that she’s the one being exploited?

Craft did also acknowledge that some have criticized the industry for what it perceived as exploitation of women, but he noted positive changes. “In the last few years, this industry has become a lot more acceptable,” he said, adding that more and more couples attend clubs and women attend in groups because the atmosphere is comfortable.

Craft said Burch Management would more than likely host another such job fair in the future. “You can never have too much help.”

Speaking of help, Newton offers some advice to women who might feel intimidated by the thought of baring all (or most) in front of a crowd of strangers. “Taking off your clothes in public the first time is scary,” she jokingly told FOX News. “Then, after two or three shots of vodka, you kind of get confidence in stuff like that.” The commentators didn’t appear to get her jest.

“Because of the recession and the economy right now,” she continued, “I think this is a great option; y’know, if you’re a single female supporting yourself, try it…”

Women like Newton and others who have chosen exotic dancing as a career display both courage and a sensibility that cannot be understated. Instead of wilting in despair, instead of crumbling along with the economy, they dared to believe that their lives could be different. Social stigma and reactionary ignorance were not enough to keep them from providing for themselves and their families.

Even if the ill-repute of “the industry” Steve Craft speaks of is not, in fact, as much a thing of the past as he claims, and stripping is not quite the liberating reclamation of sexual power and gender control that some third-wave feminists believe it to be, the money is still there regardless.

Writing a truly remarkable perspective piece for AlterNet in May 2007, former exotic dancer Sarah Katherine Lewis, author of Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire, explains that stripping is not going to change cultural views of gender issues. It may well, however, spare women from other forms of humiliation that have little to do with g-strings, strobe lights and gawking patrons.
“When I wasn't able to afford the things I needed to live,” Lewis writes, “I didn't feel like a feminist. I didn't feel strong and proud—a sister in struggle to the kind of college-educated white-collar women who would run me ragged and then sail out of the restaurant without tipping me [when she worked as a waitress]. I didn't even feel human. There is nothing more objectifying than poverty.”

While stripping didn’t make her feel like much of an empowered individual either, at least it afforded her a much needed sense of stability. “I was raised to believe that feminism means respecting the choices women make for themselves…And every month when I write my rent check—subtracting the money from my checking account without the teetering, freefall sense of dread I remember from when I worked long hours on my feet, waiting tables and making espresso, desperately trying to make ends meet—I am thankful for the freedom I had to choose sex work, in all its polarizing complication.”