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Catching Up with the Canadian Woman from the Viral Threesome Video at Her Strip Club Debut

After Alexis Frulling became famous for having sex, getting a normal job in her hometown became impossible—so she's going on a tour of strip joints to pay the bills.
Alexis Frulling. Screenshot via YouTube

Alexis Frulling stands center stage at Peelerz, a self-titled "rig pig strip club" located in the small industrial town of Nisku, Alberta, just south of Edmonton. An announcer is on stage and asking the crowd whether or not they want to see her naked.

The announcer turns to Frulling and asks her if she enjoyed her Stampede.

"I did," she says with bravado. "I saved one horse and rode two cowboys."

The packed crowd roars in approval and, as the Big & Rich country song starts to play, Frulling readies herself for her first dance.

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Later, when Frulling sits down next to me in the hotel lobby connected to the strip club, she seems a far cry from the bombastic and proud girl who was just on stage. Dressed in jean shorts and a flannel cut-off shirt, she seems overwhelmed and, above all else, tired.

A month ago, Frulling was a young woman just living her life in Calgary. That all rapidly changed when, on the way to a Wiz Khalifa concert, the mood hit her and the two guys she was traveling with and they decided to have a three-way. They chose an area between two buildings they thought to be discrete and had, well, a threesome. Probably not the best decision in the world—the location, that is, not the sex act itself.

Long story short, someone spotted them, filmed them, and promptly posted the video online, an action that may be illegal in Canada. While the video isn't explicitly graphic, it is clear enough to see what is occurring. The video seemed to strike a chord online. It started getting shared with tags like "stay classy Calgary," or the phrase Frulling would eventually use on stage, "save a horse, ride two cowboys." At first it seemed like just a typical internet meme—an anonymous occurrence making the rounds online—but then someone tagged Frulling and dredged up a picture from earlier in the day showing her with one of the men, and her life as she knew it changed.

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The internet reared its ugly fucking head. Thousands of people from all corners of the internet descended on the young woman from Calgary, calling her a slut and a whore, and saying that she was a waste of life. Indicative of the clear double standard that exists in our society, the two men in the video were seen as heroes and received metaphorical high fives, while Frulling was labeled a tramp. It was gross, it was misogynistic, it was cowardly, and it was completely predictable.

Recently British journalist Jon Ronson published a book about online outrage, public shaming, and the consequences that arise from them. He found and interviewed people who went through experiences similar to Frulling's. "The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow—deeply confused and traumatized," he wrote in an adaptation of his book in the New York Times Magazine. People often don't realize the real-life consequences for others when they type "slut" from behind their glowing blue screen.

"There are always those thoughts that you feel like fucking running away and offing yourself," Frulling tells me. "But really… You can't let them tell you what they think they know. These people don't fucking know you."

Peelerz. Photo via Facebook

So Frulling almost immediately stood up to her anonymous tormentors, even though she does admit that "the first three days felt like a dream." She stepped in front of the barrage of social media the night her identity went viral, making a YouTube video calling out her "haters." She embraced what happened, trying to absorb the damage, and came out on top.

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Frulling never thought she would end up dancing at a strip club. But at this moment, she now has one of the most searchable names in Canada. She is unemployed, and the attention from the video has significantly hurt, if not downright eviscerated, her job prospects in her hometown.

"I can't get a job in Calgary because all of this bullshit that's going on," she says.

For a young woman freshly out on her own who needs to pay the bills, having no income is not an option. In the days after she became a public figure, her phone kept ringing—on the other end of the line were people offering her money to come "entertain" at clubs. She said no at first but finally relented after days of offers. The calls got to be so much that she had to get an agent. Prior to this evening, she'd worked in strip clubs as a bartender, but never thought she would be the one on stage.

"What was I going to do? I need to work," she tells me as country music blares from the closed door behind us. "In a way, yeah, I had to do this, but I could have not done this and kept living and doing nothing. So at least I'm doing something. People disrespect strippers and don't give them the time of day. At the end of the day, everyone has their own type of job."

"I don't want to end up like…" she trails off. "I used to work in a strip clubs, and some strippers are classy, but it can go the complete opposite way."

So here we are, in a well known strip club located in essentially a large industrial park near the Edmonton International Airport. A place whose only real claim to fame is that Fubar 2 was filmed inside these walls. This is a fact enjoyed by the establishment so much that, shortly after the film's release, the name was changed from the original "Airways" to the fictional one in the film, "Peelerz."

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Now, Frulling is topless on stage, surrounded by young men crowding the stage, cheering for her, and willing to part with some money for a picture. She has a dance background, so being on stage isn't strange, and she looks natural as she dances. She tells me that she tries not to have a routine and tries to keep it purely improvisational.

Up until her final dance of the night she kept her bottoms on and only went topless, but this dance is different. Everyone in perv row acting as if with a group mind—not that different from the online masses that got her here—begin banging the chrome siding in unison to create a thunderous noise. It reverberates through the whole of the bar shaking the directional oil rig signs that hang upon the walls. It almost overwhelms the music that's being blasted at far too loud of a volume. Frulling takes a few steps and without hesitation strips completely.

"Oh it looks like we have a pantless party here," the announcer chimes in.

After her shows, because there are no posters for Frulling to give out, they put a pitcher in the middle of the stage to play a game of "last loonie in the bucket." Patrons throw one-dollar coins into the bucket and, as the name states, the person who throws the last one gets to take home a pair of Frulling's panties.

For the next minute or two in this 200-person strip club in Nisku, it rains loonies (Frulling must have made hundreds). As the announcer counts the last few seconds off, a young man named Mattie in a tight black T-shirt and a cowboy hat at least two sizes too small for starts tearing open multiple rolls of loonies worth $25 each and throwing them by the handful. At this point, he knows he's going to win so he starts shaking.

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"I fucking love strippers, man!" Mattie yells, while banging on the siding.

Mattie ends up taking home the underwear.

"Tonight is her first time on stage. We're all going to be gentlemanly, alright?" the announcer would say this night.

Frulling is all alone here in Edmonton; she made friends with several of the dancers but otherwise she'll be solo for the majority of her quick but exhaustive tour of Albertan clubs. The tour will see her make stops in Lloydminster, Red Deer, Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray, and Medicine Hat. The agent responsible for booking all these shows was at Peelerz for her first dance to show support, but Frulling will be making most of this journey by herself. During our conversation, I ask if it's hard being away from her family for so long and she broke down.

"I'm not really living at home right now. I kind of moved out. Giving them some space."

I ask if she moved out because of what happened at the Stampede.

"Yes and no. It's just giving me time to grow," she says. "I think it's like a big step for me to just, you know, move out and start fresh."

She looks at me as some young men come walking out of the strip club en route to a cigarette.

"Do you have any more questions? I'm so fucking tired of interviews."

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