Trivial Pursuit

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.

I am not a criminal

I’ve met you. You sneer at from your car as I walk into the club. You roll your eyes when I talk about my friends that strip. You shake your head in disgust when talking about strippers. You decided that I am some sort of deviant because I go to strip club. To all you folks that feel they can judge me because they are morally superior: Fuck You. You are not. You are ignorant.

I am not a criminal

I pay my taxes. I donate $1000 dollars a year to the humane society. I’ve done jury duty twice. I pick up litter. I recycle. I don’t speed. As a matter of fact the last time I was pulled over by the police Ronald Reagan was president.  I also like to look at naked women.  I’m pretty sure 99% of the male population likes to look at naked women (or men, depending on their preference). There is a multi-billion dollar industry built around this aspect of human nature. So why am I ostracized for doing what the rest of the world spends billions of dollars on. I just prefer to see naked women in person.  I am the same person in the club I am at work, at the store, at home. I’m not altered or corrupted by the club.

It amazes me that people will make a value judgment on this and ignore everything else. If I were to tell you I have a friend who is in their early twenties, self employed, and making good money you’d probably be impressed with them. Most people in their early twenties are struggling to get by. Mention she is a stripper and somehow the money becomes tainted. If you don’t think stripping is a something people should do. That’s fine, that’s your opinion.  Not liking something is not a valid reason to label it immoral and condemn it. If it is truly something terrible then let the facts demonstrate that, not an emotional reaction. Out of all the world’s ills is stripping really something that we should be focusing on?

I am not a misogynist

I don’t hate women. I don’t want to own them. I’m not a puppet master trying to bend people to my will with a twenty dollar bill. I am not part of a grand conspiracy to suppress women. Most dancers I know aren’t victims. They weren’t smuggled into the country on a container ship. They aren’t being held hostage in the back room. Everyday they wake up and make a decision to work at the club. If things had gone perfectly in their lives would they being stripping at the Dolphin? Probably not, but life is seldom perfect.

Is there some corruption bout stripping that is so completely ingrained that anybody associated with the industry will be destroyed for life? In my opinion, no there isn’t. Any job can be exploited. The strip industry hardly has the lock on that. I used to work as a gas station attendant. I spent eight hours a day working with toxic chemicals and moving vehicles for three dollars an hour (OK that was a while ago).  The job sucked. But it was my decision to do the job. At that point of my rather less than perfect life it was the best option for me. If it wasn’t I would left. Maybe a dancer can’t leave because she can’t make that kind of money elsewhere, but would it be any different if she was an accountant?

The only thing that is fundamentally flawed is people’s perception. The dancer does not do anything she does not want to do. She isn’t being picked up by her pimp.  The idea that women are being sold off as chattel is simply wrong. It's simply insulting to assume all these women are helpless victims.

I am not an animal

I am not a slave to my impulses. I would love to run through red lights when there is no traffic. I’d love to eat nothing but beer and pizza every night. I’d love to take a shot of whiskey, scream, and smash things when I get frustrated at work. But I don’t. I’m part of larger society. My actions have consequences to other people. There is nothing that I can see at a strip club that is going to make me not act like I live in a society. Compared to what I can see on the internet with a click of a mouse, strip clubs are tame. In Missouri (ironically nicknamed the show me state) It’s illegal for uncovered areolas, exposed labia and alcohol to be located in the same bar. Do people really have that little impulse control? Does this law really make a difference?

If you are going to judge me, judge me on what I’ve done, not on what your prejudices think I might do. To be willingly ignorant is the greatest failing a person can ever have.