Single Mom Stripper/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Basic Trope: A single mother who moonlights as a sex worker of some kind.
  • Played Straight: Alice and Bob get divorced, and Alice must find a way to pay the bills (and all the divorce-related legal fees) and care for her children. She takes an ordinary day job, but auditions for a night job as an exotic dancer.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is not only a stripper, but a prostitute.
  • Justified: Alice is a divorcee, and she receives little or no child support or alimony (either because Bob is a deadbeat dad, or because she did not receive any of those things in the divorce settlement), so she needs more money than her day job can give her to pay the bills.
  • Inverted: A stripper or prostitute leaves the sex industry behind when she finds out she's pregnant or gets married.
  • Gender Inverted: Bob (recently widowed or divorced) takes a job in the sex industry to support his kids.
  • Subverted: Alice takes a second job after the Toilet Seat Divorce.
  • Double Subverted: The job is as a phone sex operator.
  • Deconstructed: This could bring shame upon Alice's kids, as they are judged for what she does to feed them. (It could also put Alice and/or her kids at risk from belligerent clients.) Not to mention, what kind of example is she setting? Sure, she could tell the kids she's a waitress, or a dancer (but not what kind of dancer, letting them assume she's a ballerina), or simply that she has a job (but not what that job is), but that would be lying. She may also lose her regular day job if she has one, and someone finds out about her night job.
  • Reconstructed: Alice takes classes at a local community college or online, or gets her high school diploma or GED if she doesn't have one. Through her education (which she may receive grants, loans, and/or scholarships for), she eventually makes a better living for herself and her child. (The stripping/porn/prostitution may be a means to that end.)
  • Parodied: Alice does a presentation at her child's Career Day event at school... about her job at a strip club.
    • Alice participates in "Take Your Child to Work Day," either in celebration of that holiday, or simply because she has no one to babysit.
  • Lampshaded: "Yo momma's a ho!"
  • Averted: Alice does not take a job in the sex industry, not even so much as working for a billing company that deals with porn sites.
  • Enforced: "We need to make our Hooker with a Heart of Gold a sympathetic character. Let's make her sex work a case of I Did What I Had to Do in order to survive and feed the kids."
  • Invoked: Alice is divorced, and does not receive alimony or child support, or even a lot of assets in the very messy divorce. She either hasn't been working (or hasn't been working at a high-paying job), and needs money for the kids, the house, and the legal fees. She decides to put her good looks and sex appeal to good use.
    • Alice is an unwed teenage mother, thrown out onto the streets by her traditional parents. She has no money, no diploma, and few marketable skills, so she decides to put her good looks and sex appeal to good use to earn money.
  • Defied: Alice doesn't want to set a bad example for her kids, or risk her day job if she has one, or risk her safety, so she doesn't work in the sex industry.
  • Discussed: "I heard Alice is working at Sexy Time to pay the bills..."
  • Conversed: "What about the kids?"
  • Played For Laughs: Alice's teenage son, Charlie, visits her workplace to hire a stripper for a party. Hilarity Ensues when he the stripper arrives and is found to be his mother.
  • Played For Drama: Almost always is.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Single_Mom_Stripper/Playing_With?oldid=1727881"