That isn’t the difference between a stripper and a construction worker: that’s the difference between societal views of stripping and societal views of construction work.

Except that, to the degree that the stripper and the construction worker also embody the societal views of their professions (and we all embody those views whether we like it or not and in ways that we realize and don’t), the difference is also between them.

(This is one of those days when this kind of nitpicking gives me great pleasure.)

Hmm. I really, really, really need to nitpick this language.

But there is a difference between a stripper and, say, a construction worker:

That isn’t the difference between a stripper and a construction worker: that’s the difference between societal views of stripping and societal views of construction work.

The framework in which a stripper must do her job, I would agree, is problematic.

The language here seems to ascribe the difference to the qualities of the individual stripper or construction worker who’s suffered and survived a rape. I’d like to avoid making that implication.

Yes, it’s hair-splittingly pedantic of me and I admit it right out! But I’m a pedant because every word has its own subtle meaning, and I find it important to examine the meanings in clear focus.

End nitpick.

—

Oh, yes, that makes her a stripper, subject to all the derision and power deficits found in that position. Definitely. And I once helped a friend research law in regard to his bankruptcy case; I must be a lawyer.

Feel free to continue to have your own personal beliefs that strippers are “whores” and “sluts”.

Richard has made it clear, again and again, that he is describing how he believes society views strippers - not how he himself personally views strippers.

At this point, I can no longer believe that you’re making an honest error; you’re simply lying about what Richard said in order to insult him.

I’ve been allowing you to post on “Alas” because you’re usually polite and I think it’s valuable for me to have posters here whose reflex is to disagree with me and question my views. However, if you’re no longer going to be polite, then I don’t want you here. You’re therefore no longer welcome to post on “Alas.”

“Halle Berry, I should not have to point out, is not an actual stripper…”

Actually Halle Berry did perform in a strip club when researching for a role.

And yes, society is accepting strip clubs as more and more acceptable. And yes, women are frequenting them more.

In Gail Mitchell’s Billboard Magazing article “At Strip Clubs, hip hop is big business” she writes:

“Perhaps most important for the record promotion business, plenty of strip clubs break the stereotype of lecherous men in raunchy, smoke-filled haunts. At Sue’s Rendezvous in Mount Vernon, New York, for example, DJ Carl Blaze … plays the hits to a smartly dressed crowd. And while women — ones not on poles — are a minority, there are still plenty of them.”

Feel free to continue to have your own personal beliefs that strippers are “whores” and “sluts”. But you are ignoring that in the emerging society at large that doesn’t.

Richard, for what it’s worth I have to agree with you that azbballfan is willfully misreading you. Considering this, and the insults he’s kept heaping, you’ve been way more patient than I would’ve been.

Your insistence on labelling the dancer as a “hooker with a heart of gold” was as revolting to me as someone using the term “Uncle Tom”. You don’t know her and are not in a position to judge her.

I did not judge her, nor have I ever judged sex workers for their profession in the terms you accuse me of. What I have done is talked about how she/they is/are judged by the culture at large and whether you like it or not, that is precisely how she and they are judged. You, on the other hand, by your own admission, did once judge them in precisely the terms you accuse me of using and, by your own admission, that judgment changed not because of any concern you had for women per se, but rather because of the “libido-freeing” experience you had. In the interests of preserving the integrity of that libido-freeing experience, you focus when you talk about the sex trade exclusively on the pleasures and empowerment to be had there by both the men who are the customers and the women who perform there (and I will say this again: please note that I am not denying the reality to the individuals concerned of those pleasures or empowerment). You are unwilling and/or unable to see the sex trade, or, more specifically the club where the woman you have talked about worked, in the context of the sex trade as a world-wide phenomenon in which the bodies of girls and women are commodified and made sexually available to men. It is telling that what started out as my critique of a statement you made about male heterosexual arousal has become an argument in which what is at stake is not male heterosexuality per se, but rather your need to defend the status quo in a sex industry designed to cater to male arousal as you have defined it.

Using pop culture as an indicator of cultural norms, I’ll point to a few indicators that strippers are not considered less than human “whores” and “sluts”.

1. I don’t know Striperella and so I will not comment on it.

2. I saw the Full Monty as well, though it was some time ago and since my memory of the movie is foggy, I am going to say only that there is a big difference, culturally, between what it means for a man to work as a stripper and what it means for a woman to do that work. Men, especially heterosexual men, simply do not face the same kind of scrutiny and double standards that women do when it comes to our sexuality.

3. Halle Berry, I should not have to point out, is not an actual stripper and is in a position of sufficient privilege and power that she does not need to worry that the particular expression of female heterosexuality you cite will somehow brand her in the way that, say, being a stripper has been used to brand the victim/accuser in the recent Duke rape case.

4. The scene you cite from Save The Last Dance also makes use of stripping, but the woman in question is not an actual stripper.

In each of thes examples, you conflate stripping as an expression of sexuality with what it means to work as a stripper

5. Diablo Cody is fortunate to be in the privileged position she is in. However, I would say these two things, neither of which denies the reality that stripping has for her as an individual: Were she to be raped…and I of course do not wish this on her…you can be sure that her profession and/or background as a stripper would become an issue in the same way that it is an issue in the Duke case; again, you are conflating individual circumstance and experience with social and cultural reality. More to the point, however, the fact that someone like Diablo Cody can write a book–and there are other women who worked as strippers who have written books as well–and the fact that she has been able to get that book published and insist, thereby, on her respectability as a person (and good for her; like any other human being, she deserves that respect) is also a convenient way for people who want to preserve the sexual status quo not to have look at the underbelly of her profession.

Later he runs from his own inference demonizing strip clubs and anyone associated with it in a thinly veiled attempt to promote certain stereotypes. He lays the groundwork to associate strippers as being pro rape and helping kidnappers in South Korea. Yes, this is a solicitor of shameful acts.

Yet one more wilful misreading of what I wrote and one more insult. This is the last response you will have from me.

Notice the lack of my saying there’s nothing wrong with it.

I’d really like to live somewhere less fucked up.

He didn’t provide any thoughtful analysis of the sterotypes or their impact on women’s issues. He just reapeated the boorish sterotypes as broadly accepted. This is a blog. And if you didn’t notice, it promotes the discussion of opinion.

Richard’s opinion which I still contend are the impetus for promoting the stereotypes was clearly stated in an earlier post:

It’s very easy to talk about allowing people to express their desires as they choose with willing partners; but neither those partners nor that expression takes place in a social vacuum. A strip club and the men who go there, perhaps especially “the men of good intention” whom you say you are speaking for are no different.

Later he runs from his own inference demonizing strip clubs and anyone associated with it in a thinly veiled attempt to promote certain stereotypes. He lays the groundwork to associate strippers as being pro rape and helping kidnappers in South Korea. Yes, this is a solicitor of shameful acts.

Using pop culture as an indicator of cultural norms, I’ll point to a few indicators that strippers are not considered less than human “whores” and “sluts”.

First, Stan Lee’s television cartoon show Striperella, where the stripper in question is also a superhero saving people.

Second, the final scene in The Full Monty provided an interesting look at the public support garnered by men making money from a strip tease act. In that last scene, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and certainly not considered less than human. The movie actually seemed to glorify some of the men’s transformation from revulsed participants to gleeful teasers to be a genuinely human moment.

The popular female band The Pussycat Dolls is also a burlesque troupe. They are portrayed as being very empowered.

It is becoming more and more popular for women to put stripper poles in their houses. One of the emerging workout trends is to practice stripper moves and pole dancing.

In Thomas Carter’s movie, Save the Last Dance, the lead character is a young lady facing opposition to her inter racial romance. She is accepted to the Julliard ballet school based on a dance tryout which starts off in a traditional ballerina style and transforms into a graceful rendition of popular hip hop and stripper moves. Her use of the chair in that scene is a clear allusion to a striptease.

In her popular book, “Candy Girl, the Life of an Unlikely Stripper”, Diablo Cody recounts her journey from working in the advertising wold to living the life of a stripper. She is now living the life of an author but in a recent appearance on David Letterman, she said as soon as writing stops panning out, she’s headed straight back to the pole. (and suggested Dave should give it a whirl himself) She is funny, smart, and quite witty. Diablo will be featured in an upcoming article in Elle Magazine.

And, the Oscar winning actress Halle Berry performed an extremely provocative mock lap dance for a male burlesque actor when she accepted her Woman of the Year award from Harvard’s Hasty Pudding club. Halle is also a former Miss Ohio USA, Miss World, and happens to be a Harvard graduate. Despite all the foregoing, Halle insists that she is not a sex symbol, but someone who should be appreciated for her brains. She seems to say that it’s okay for women to act sexy from time to time without having to be called a sex object.

Certainly these are signs that the tide of popular culture embracing strippers as acceptable in our society. There, I’ve given personal accounts as well as third party evidence to refute unsupported claims that society condemns all strippers. This is what you asked for, I wonder if you’ll reply as promised.

Your insistence on labelling the dancer as a “hooker with a heart of gold” was as revolting to me as someone using the term “Uncle Tom”. You don’t know her and are not in a position to judge her.

QGrrl,

Probably an honest depiction of how some of the girls feel. However they can also get work waitressing or bartending which may not be as lucrative on an hourly basis, apparently isn’t appealing enough. I suspect they are mostly very tired as dancing can be quite strenuous.

I chose a “no touch” policy which the initial dancer certainly violated. I told her and she then complied. Very visible and aggressive bouncers enforce a strict no touch policy for the men. I later asked about what they do when a customer starts to make them uncomfortable. Apparently at clubs, there are certain pre-arranged moves and signs dancers use to get the attention of said bouncers.

I was also seeing a therapist (as noted in my original tale) but the therapist was not as helpful. For a time, I made weekly trips to the club to mostly sit and watch. I maintained a policy of always offering to buy some water for any dancer who wanted to sit and talk a while. (It’s illegal for dancers to drink alcohol in Arizona, which helps keep things cleaner. And the club in question takes advantage of said dancers by charging them double the customer’s price for water. This way they promote dancers to talk to customers when they rest.) I’d make sure I spent enough in the club to maintain a good reputation. This is what I found to most prevalent in the club. Men who are willing to spend money for some time with a pleasant woman without any of the politics of dating or a relationship outside the club. Some dancers and customers prefer flirting encounters. I don’t. I viewed my encounters as a wonderful random social exploration. I haven’t been back in quite a while, but one woman used to always stop by to swap recipies.

After spending some time and money for a fifteen to thirty minute relationship, I don’t have to worry about hurting her feelings by not calling her or asking her out. As soon as she leaves my table, she just stops at the next one.

I wonder if by exploring my libido through discussion, my therapist’s libido was affected. Interestingly, the dancer with the 7 inch heel (dancers would never wear stilleto’s, they have special shoes) said she chose dancing to help herself explore her own sexuality. She said she enjoyed the sense of freedom and empowerment it gave her to contrast with the pain, shame and submissivness imposed on her by her father.

Yes, I expect the dancer’s libido is affected by all the exposure. Then again, my libido is certainly hampered by a tough day at the office.

And no, that’s not what my brother called me. What he called me was a term that others would find offensive, but commonly used in our relationship as a loving way to say “hey, wake up!” When we were kids, we rough housed a lot and we now use a hard punch on the shoulder to remind each other of our special connection.

. However, those professorial types ignore that repeating sterotypes reinforce them, regardless of the ambiguous intentions. You have still not admitted that you don’t consider all strippers to be whores or sluts. You instead try to fall back on ambiguity.

It’s called social science. Ignoring and failing to discuss the mores and beliefs of society perpetuates those mores and beliefs. Repeating, discussing, and analyzing them, gives tools to those who want to challenge them. Your particular regressive and ignorant strain of anti-intellectualism is abhorrent.

Idea and Bryn, before I knew a stripper, I could understand how you could read Richard’s post and feel what you do.

What arrogance! How do you assume I don’t know strippers? How do you assume I’m NOT a stripper? I find you completely offensive.

I have not insulted you personally in anything I have written here. You have now insulted me twice. (For anyone else who is interested, “Impudens es leno” from azb’s post #35, it means “You shameless pimp!” and it is a serious insult.) Nonetheless, I am going to bother to engage you one more time, not because I think it will change your mind…clearly you are deeply, deeply invested in male heterosexual privilege…but because you have made me angry enough that I need to say what I have to say.

You continue, wilfully, to misread what I have written and to take what I have written out of context. If it is not clear to you from my comments that I do not consider sex workers anything other than human beings possessed of full human dignity who should be treated accordingly, then the statement I have just made should suffice. More to the point, it is precisely because I believe this that I have the social/cultural/political analysis that I have. I have not introduced my own experiences knowing strippers, bar girls, hostesses and other sex trade workers into this discussion, and I will continue not to introduce them here, because those experiences are not relevant to the points I have wanted to make; I am not invested in them the way you are invested in your experience…though I will say, just to be clear, since you have assumed otherwise, that the experiences were not negative ones.

You are desperate to justify the existence of the sex trade, to defend the status quo in which it exists…which means, whether you want it to or not, that you are jusitfying a rape culture that creates and is created by male heterosexual privilege…because your experience with the stripper you mention was, for you, therapeutic and liberating. I do not doubt your account of your own experience, as I do not doubt that stripping was in its own way liberating for the woman you talked about above. What I doubt is that either of these personally liberating experiences in any way represents social justice for women; your refusal to look at that question suggests to me that social justice for women is not what you are really interested in anyway.

Finally, you seem to think that I have some moral objection to the sex trade. I want to quote back to you something I wrote at the beginning of this exchange:

Were it the case that the women who work in strip clubs were seen by the culture at large (that’s important; I am not talking about how you or any other individual man sees them) as legitimate professionals, practicing a respected trade, as individuals worthy of respect and possessing full human dignity, etcetera and so on, [your] statement [about there being nothing wrong with men and women expressing their sexual desires in the context of the sex trade as long as no one is being abused or forced] might be accurate when applied to [women who work in the sex trade] and the men who are their customers. As it is, that is not the case.

Nothing you have written has addressed what I say here; nothing you have written has demonstrated that women in the sex trade are treated by the culture at large as anything other than the less-than-human “sluts” and “whores” male heterosexual privilege defines them as. Address those issues, stop insulting me and maybe we can have a conversation. Otherwise, this is the last response you will get from me.

You could have just as easily paid for a therapist — you went for the ball crusher and ensuing tumescence instead. That woman wasn’t paid to be nice; she was paid to get you hard. Which she did.

Do you ever stop to think how many erections that one woman produces per night. And night after night. Dancing. Stepping on crotches. Do you ever stop to wonder if *she* even has a libido anymore? Where does she go when, after seeing or feeling her 50th boner for the night, her libido “flags”? Do you ever wonder about the psychological schism that dancer must go through every night she dances? The divorcing of her own sexuality from her body and from her environment?

But don’t worry. Her body is a commodity; and obviously the money was well spent.

Now I see you are using a tactic used by the professorial type to talk about an issue without putting yourself into it. However, those professorial types ignore that repeating sterotypes reinforce them, regardless of the ambiguous intentions. You have still not admitted that you don’t consider all strippers to be whores or sluts. You instead try to fall back on ambiguity.

Idea and Bryn, before I knew a stripper, I could understand how you could read Richard’s post and feel what you do.

But try reading his post using a different circumstance you may be closer to:

“but this does not change the fact that, in the larger view of things, the stripper (colored) who became your friend is … a “slut”(”nigger”) or “whore” (”darkie”) or whatever epithet you choose.”

or,

“The hooker (”nigger”) with a heart of gold (or, in this case, the stripper (”colored”) is still a hooker (”nigger”), with everything that implies about how she is seen by the culture at large.”

or,
“The Uncle Tom is still a nigger, with everyting that implies about how he is seen by the culture at large.”

All statements which I find equally abhorrent.

Interesting tactics, teacher. Try to use your profession for better causes. Impudens es leno

Q grrl,

While I like your post and find it funny, in my case it’s not quite accurate.

I was not happy with my vacant libido, but dismayed. I am much happier and productive having it back. An eight year relationship with an abusive spouse had mentally castrated me and having the opportunity to spend time in an environment where women explicitly get paid to be nice to people removed a barrier of fear that my ex-wife had successfully built up.

This nice gal’s response was to stick her seven inch heel platform on top of my privates and daringly asked: “Are you saying you don’t want a dance from me!” She successfully broke my spell and my privates responded in something akin to a fight or flight response. My libido suddenly returned.

Oh, what a tender rendition of the social quagmire men find themselves in. You were fine with your libido, you said so repeatedly; you were against the objectification of women, you said so repeatedly. But one word from your brother, one word that castrated your manhood in a way only brothers can do, opened the door to your sexual release through the purchase of a woman’s body.

He called you a PUSSY, didn’t he?

Irony much?

You were so distraught at thinking that other men would put you in the same sexual category as women (i.e, the fucked, not the fucker), that you went against your organic sexual state (low libido) and your explicitly stated morality. And I can only imagine your innocent wonder when your erection blossomed under the dancer’s stilleto. Ah that sweet tight swelling, freeing you through humiliation and moral castration.

Congratulations!