“A Stripper’s Guide to the Modern American Boomtown”

Susan Elizabeth Shepard, a writer and stripper from Texas and co-founder of sex workers’ site Tits and Sass, chronicles her yearly sojourns to “boomtowns” such as Williston, N.D., to work at clubs as the regular influx of oil workers come into town. The “logical progression of a service economy,” she writes in an excellent piece at BuzzFeeᴅ, is that it eventually begins to look “like migrant labor.”

“If you can make $30,000 more a year driving heavy equipment in North Dakota instead of in Louisiana, and you need that money, you go”:

Williston is booming right now. I’ve worked there since 2007, and oil has changed the town both completely and not at all. Whispers’ transition from typically tiny, haphazard small-town strip club into one trying to balance down home and big city is not working out too well, and it’s an example of the boom–bust cycle writ small. Capitalism’s inherent gamble plays out on a small stage with a chrome pole while lessons in second chances and knowing when to cut your losses are there to take to heart or ignore. It’s more America than anywhere I’ve been. Some oil workers think improvements in drilling and fracking technology will sustain the economy for decades, but that’s not my area of expertise. What I do know about is what it’s like to revisit a place you hate again and again over the span of six years, watch it change, and realize you’re watching history repeating and that you’re just another camp follower along the frontier, profiting from mineral extraction booms, chasing opportunity and running from stagnation.

[BuzzFeeᴅ]