Man, I'm getting stripper envy.

I wish my nephew's girlfriend didn't have so many other problems. Her stripping was not a good lifestyle or career for her--mostly because it led to her increasing drug use. She often invited people from the club back to their apartment to party afterwards and it led to some other problems. She was too young (18 when she started) and had too many other issues, unfortunately.

I'm ambivalent about the porn industry. I think porn is fine but unfortunately, the industry is riddled with abuse and the young people (mostly women) that are being exploited outnumber the women who are in control of their bodies, their lives and careers.

When I was a stripper, the attitude towards the clients was mostly thinly veiled contempt. As one girl said to me "Most of them wouldn't in here if they could get a real date." There were some clients we liked, but not to date.

This mostly. Also hated the guys in there for business meetings. @@~forever. But there were some ok guys. I remember one guy who was a 30-some odd year old virgin. He was nice and really geeky and would buy me gin & tonics, but order them as Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters. He gave me a going away card my last night there.

I did come away with some pretty good stories though.

I have, in my youth at times, seriously thought, "If I had a better body, I would try to be a stripper right now." The industry is certainly not ideal, but I have known a couple of smart cookies who used it to get through grad school. One, a lesbian sociologist, paid for the down payment on a house that way, too.

I dunno if my feet could handle the shoes, though. Or the Brazilian. The hours would be great.

I see nothing inherently wrong with being a sex worker (yes, and I know that stripper and prostitute are NOT synonomous, but the are both in the sex industry, IMO); I see many things wrong in the ways that lead many into the sex industry.

So she finds it hard to hate the adult industry in general as a Feminist.

I love your friend. So few radicals really examine their beliefs.

She's freaking awesome, I do have to say. I am glad I have the sense to be friends with her.

Wow, Zenkitty. Your current boss is quite the asshat.

I'm with Calli, except in my head I used a more colorful expletive.

That's perfectly appalling. Can I ask what the context was?

As briefly as I can: I was assigned a journal last year that works on a ludricrous set of rules. Pagination has to be done manually. I told my boss this was not a good fit for me, because I am not good with numbers. I tend to transpose or replace numbers when I'm looking at them; 609 becomes 699, for example. I ended up screwing up the pagination twice, which - as a fortunate side effect - got me taken off that journal. (Darn.) This morning, I was trying to fix the effed-up table of contents for the last issue of the damned thing I have to handle (usually someone else creates the TOC, but as the journal is in transition, it fell to me), while my boss was on the phone giving me instructions (argh) and refusing to believe me when I told her that what she was telling me to do wasn't working. At some point in this fraught conversation, she remarked that she couldn't understand why I couldn't "get" how this journal worked because I'm "so good at everything else", and that she intended to assign another similar journal to me someday to force me to learn it, at which point she made the "break like a wild horse" comment. Then I said, "Do you WANT me to find another job?" and she said, "never mind, I'll do the table of contents myself!" Which was fine with me.

Wow. My bosses do some shit that Ain't Right, but nothing has come close to that.

Yeah. That was just one of her many She Said What? statements.

I'm kind of tickled to learn that we have so many! I love us.

Me too!

Lots of strippers, including me, get into the business because they're emotionally screwed up, and the environment can become destructive. I don't mean to portray it as if there's nothing bad happening there. The last couple years I danced, it got really bad for me, for a number of reasons, the main one being that I didn't have good boundaries and didn't know where to draw the line. (At one point I looked back and saw the Line way behind me, and decided to turn around.) But it's our society's overall attitudes towards sex and women and gender roles that make the sex industry demeaning and destructive to both women and men, and also cause people who are emotionally unstable to be drawn to it.

I think examining one's beliefs closely is inherent to being, well, a good human being. And I'll stop there but you can google intersectionality if you like.

I had no idea we had so many ex-strippers here!!

I would totally contemplate it, but (a) don't have the body for it (b) am now too old and (c) I think I assumed you have to have pole skillz, and have no idea how you learn those. But I've definitely thought long and hard about doing some burlesque.

Yeah, I've read that as an argument for the assertion that a woman can't be a feminist unless she's a lesbian

Hah. But see, even if you're a lesbian, are you a FEMME lesbian? Well, clearly you've still bought into the patriarchal notion of how you're supposed to look. You just want to PASS! And if you're BUTCH, well--that's just because you are GLORIFYING MASCULINITY, which does not DESERVE to be GLORIFIED! EVIL!!