Nobody likes to be trivialized. So I wasn’t too surprised at
the Strippersphere’s level of irritation at the Miley Cyrus performance at the
MVAs. I saw a lot of dancer tweets that ranged from snarky to genuinely angry. Personally
I could care less what Miley Cyrus does on stage. I never watched her show,
never listened to any of her music. I’m not even sure how relevant MTV is. As
the joke goes, the last time I watched MTV they still played videos.
Twerking is heavily associated with stripping. Dancers
regularly tweet they are going to “twerk”. They post video clips of themselves Twerking.
I’m not exactly sure what constitutes “Twerking”. Is Twerking a subset of booty
popping or vise versa? It doesn’t really matter to me. It does to dancers
though. People who's ability to pay rent depends on it.
I don’t think it’s specifically Twerking that upset people. I
think it stems from the larger misconception that it doesn’t require any real
skill to be a good stripper. All you have to do take you clothes off, strut
around stage then collect your bucket of money. It ignores all difficult parts the
preparation it takes. How many other jobs require that you either trim or shave
off every piece of hair from your eyebrows to your ankles on weekly or daily basis?
Then throw in walking around in seven inch plus heels for hours just so you can
make less than minimum wage on a slow night. Not to mention the all too real
risk of sexual assault.
To have Miley Cyrus prance around on stage mimicking
stripper moves badly is insulting. It trivializes
what they do. Yes, there are dancers that do nothing more than take off they
clothes and walk around stage. But they don’t collect buckets of money at the
end of their sets. Stripping is like every other job. There is a direct
correlation between how much effort and skill a girl has and how much money she
makes. Add to that the down turn in the economy and it can be really a tough
job.
Personally, I get really frustrated with all the people who
think they are experts in computer programming. I don’t even consider myself a
programmer. I’ve had a couple of projects where I had to write about 15,000
lines of code. I wasn’t very good at it. When you compare that to code monkeys,
who crank out thousands of lines of code on a regular basis, that’s a small
amount of work. I get really irritated when some goof who took an introduction
to programming class proceeds to tell me how I should have written the code or
what development system I should have used. When you write software there are literally
thousands of logic and hardware problems you have to solve to make it work
correctly. None of which anybody will ever notice unless they have actually
done something similar. They just look at hundreds of man hours of effort and
nitpick some trivial issue. Then you want to kill them.
