In 1990, radical feminist musician and artist Cammie Toloui took a job working at the Lusty Lady, San Francisco’s famous women-owned strip club, to pay her way through San Francisco State University, where she was pursuing a degree in photojournalism. Seizing the opportunity to document a world few knew, Cammie turned the camera on her customers inside the ‘Private Pleasures’ booth, creating an extraordinary series of portraits and journal entries collected in the new book 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes (Void, July 2021).
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“Stripping is the patriarchy and capitalism laid bare — the intersection of the two in your face,” Cammie says. “The men felt like they had the power because they’re standing there with a lot of bills, and we’re on the other side of the glass like, ‘How do I get it?’ I think that that’s what makes the pictures so compelling — you’re looking behind the curtain, and the Wizard of Oz is just this dude who looks a little needy.”
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As a member of the punk band, the Yeastie Girlz, Cammie saw sex work as a natural extension of her “pussycentric” persona. “We’d talk about things that seem radical, even in a punk club,” she recalls. “We would get on stage with a speculum and show women how to give themselves a self-examination or talk about our period — all the things that made boys really squirm. It wasn’t that big a jump for me to perform in a strip club. I wanted to be as punk as possible, and at the time, that was where the really wild girls went.”
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