Sounds of clinking dishes from restaurants and bars pour out onto bustling sidewalks and neon lights announcing “Live Nude Girls” glitter the skyline—this is North Beach on a Saturday night. And The Lusty Lady waits on the fringes, where Kearny Street meets Broadway, where party-goers typically turn back toward the bars.

As Saturday becomes Sunday morning, the women inside The Lusty Lady tend to their business. Inside a small, mirrored room, a few of the women wait for customers to feed dollar bills into slots on the walls of private booths. In turn, the customers wait for a wooden door to lift, revealing the fully nude dancers from behind a glass panel. Other women, the Madams, lean over desks in the basement, creating schedules and working on training outlines.

Two drunken college-age men walk into the dark lobby from the cold, noticing the seductive pictures and stage names of the dancers on the wall.

“Give me one of those bitches,” one man demands. He’s looking for a prostitute. “I have money, and I want a bitch,” he shouts non-stop. The man also gives his name and announces that he’s a local college football player, assuming his clout will get him what he wants.

“That’s not how we work here,” responds the shift’s desk-staff, who also doubles as security. “You can’t buy a woman, and we don’t call our women bitches.” The young man again demands that he be brought out a dancer. The answer from security doesn’t change.

“Then let me talk to your owner,” the football player quips. It’s a common threat used to intimidate employees of strip clubs into giving the customer exactly what he wants.

Tired of the nuisance, on-staff security guards drag the men out to the sidewalk and lock the doors, but not before letting the men in on something they didn’t expect: “We are the owners.”

The Lusty Lady is the only unionized worker-owned cooperative peep show in the United States. Everyone who works at the club, from the janitorial staff to the dancers, has the opportunity to be a part-owner. This, unlike the majority of sex work, gives the Lusties, as they call themselves, complete control of their own business, money and schedules—everything. And the Lusties, among a flurry of controversy from varying schools of thought, think of themselves as feminists.

Princess, who has worked at the club for four years, believes The Lusty Lady is worlds apart from other strip clubs. To her, The Lusty Lady stands as an example of female empowerment in an industry that she admits can be degrading and damaging to women.

“At other clubs, it’s like goats at a petting zoo,” Princess laughs. She’s dressed in black pants and a sweatshirt with her pink-streaked hair pulled back neatly in a ponytail. Her shift starts in a couple hours, but no one on the street would know she’s a dancer. “I found it humiliating [at other clubs]. You’re begging for scraps from some stranger, and there’s so much competition. All those girls care about is themselves.” She says new dancers often had their lockers super-glued shut by bullying older women, and that on rainy nights when customer flow was slow, club managers would call in extra dancers to make money off the women’s stage fees, an illegal charge certain clubs require dancers to pay to work a shift. This caused even more competition. “The Lusty Lady is in every way opposite. If I make money, it goes into my co-workers’ paychecks…Instead of feeling like everyone is pecking you down, here, they’re picking you up,” she says.

The money-pool Princess refers to is The Lusty’s revenue-based pay system. At The Lusty Lady, the dancers are paid an hourly wage in addition to splitting the revenue from tips and show charges among the dancers on the shift. Unlike the majority of strip clubs, where every woman fights for her own cash, and where the dancers have to pay out the club and tip out the bar, doormen and DJs, the Lusties’ paychecks are steady. This, according to the women at The Lusty Lady, fosters camaraderie.

Miss Muffy, the club’s lead Madam and a Lusty for over five years, knows exactly why her co-workers chose The Lusty Lady over other clubs. Sitting in the warm, puzzle-like basement of the club, Miss Muffy and a handful of Lusty employees discuss stage etiquette in between jokes about nicknames for regular customers. Boxes of new stilettos are piled in the corner, and black-and-white photos of nude women adorn the walls.

“Some of the women who work here felt exploited at other clubs,” says Miss Muffy. Everyone listening in agrees. Her bright red lips match her sweater and form a smile. “They come here wanting to work in a place with no customer contact. Some people are excited about our history. Some people are attracted to the woman-centered business. We’re definitely the most radical sex-work club in the Bay Area.”

Commercialized sex work, which includes pornography, prostitution, toys and dancing, is a $20 billion a year industry in the United States. Adult nightclubs, which total about 3,000 in the U.S., pull in nearly $2 billion a year, according to the L.A. Daily News. And most clubs, including those in San Francisco, are corporately run by a handful of owners. According to Miss Muffy, The Lusty Lady’s history stands out in the industry as an “incredible political feat.”

The dancers at The Lusty Lady unionized 10 years ago as a way to combat corporate and management’s unfair treatment. Miss Muffy recalls incidents of emotional abuse before the unionization and says the longer a dancer worked at the club, the more criticism she received—especially regarding her physical appearance.

As a result of the dot-com crash and dwindling profits, the old management decided to sell the club four years ago. The dancers bought their own business. Today, the Lusties attribute the worker-owned banner to the type of women the club employs and to the woman-friendly environment harbored at The Lusty Lady.

Tristan, a member of the club’s support staff and Board of Directors, says one of his favorite things about the club is the role reversal he witnesses in Lusty customers. One night while he was cleaning used tissues out of booths, a couple came into the club. Used to listening to women argue with their husbands and boyfriends about watching nude dancers, Tristan wasn’t surprised when he heard raised voices from inside a booth. Instead of the woman storming out, though, the man rushed to the entrance of the club.

“He was yelling ‘What? What was that? Why the hell would you want me to see that!?’” Tristan laughs. “[Women] feel like they can support [stripping] here.”

But in an industry catered to meeting mostly male customers’ desires, can an adult club be the epitome of feminism? The Lusties believe that because they determine the boundaries of what they will do on stage, because they take away valuable skills learned from running a business, and because most of them work nine-to-fives on the side or attend school, they are empowered. But others disagree.

Sarah Thomas** worked at The Lusty Lady for several months and at numerous other clubs in San Francisco for a few years. She got into dancing as a fun way to pay off some bills but left after she started to see the industry as unsavory. She believes that even though The Lusty Lady promotes wage sharing and contrasts the “mafia-men run” joints in the City, the club is not a positive place for women.

“Men view women as sexual objects in strip clubs in general,” Thomas says. “It’s absolutely no different at The Lusty… If anything, it’s worse. Men see these girls in a glass box as being even more in-human, like caged sex slaves or animals.”

Thomas has witnessed dancers at all of the clubs where she’s danced give after-hours sexual favors to customers and come to work during alcohol and drug binges just to make dealing with lewd customers bearable, both of which are prohibited by most clubs. No job in the sex industry, she says, can promote woman empowerment.

“Just because we could tell a customer no, I don’t think it made a difference,” says Thomas of her days at The Lusty Lady. “It gives the girls a false sense of empowerment. You’re still selling yourself. You’re still giving yourself up. It’s not sex-positive in any way, shape or form.

“You’re being forced to play this character on stage. For some women who have been in the industry, they eventually can’t separate that character from real life. They can’t have normal relationships,” she says.

But the women at The Lusty Lady stick to their guns. They say that sex work is just work. It’s like any other job, and they aren’t dancers because they have to be—they’re doing this because they want to. They prepare for work and invest in their jobs just like anyone else, they say. They wouldn’t have bought The Lusty Lady if they didn’t believe in it. And the Lusties, including the men on the staff, think it’s insulting for feminists to call their work degrading.

“They’re coming from their own experience, and I defend their right to have an opinion,” says Princess. “But they won’t defend my right to have mine. [Feminists] go around talking about giving women the right to do what they want, but they’re ignoring the fact that this is what we want.”

The Lusties also feel that the club has taught them valuable lessons, like self-confidence and positive body image, something people like Thomas say is a false sense of empowerment prompted by the characters they are forced to play on stage. The Lusties, though, continue to challenge their critics, saying they and their customers know that the character they play at work is just that—a character.

“You think retail workers really give a shit about the clothes you’re buying from the store? You think people don’t suck-up to their dick-head bosses? You have to fake it in any job you’re in,” says Princess. “I know I’m playing a part when I put on my costume. I know I’m putting on fake eyelashes and silly shoes…But I’m also used to working for myself and being independent. And that’s something I got from sex work.”