I have two friends who are addicted to The Men's Club for their $1.50 happy hour well drinks, and their dinner buffeet.

As a self-admitted potentially pathetic strip-club goer, let me defend my kind.

All strip clubs are not alike. Most are decidedly pathetic. And not surprisingly, the patrons are as well.

Some are not nearly so pathetic and the clientle not nearly so.

But I must say this: there is nothing on the internet, free or not, that can take the place of the interaction between two live people.

Back in AK, I went to the Bush Co at least once or twice a month. At times, once a week. So I grew to know some of the girls fairly well. I'd check the board to see when my fav dancers were going to be on stage and plan accordingly--or just leave if I didn't like who was there.

If I was in a foul mood, I might stare dead-eyed. More likely, mesmerized would be a better word. The combination of good, loud music, flashing lights, THC, alcohol and a woman disrobing can be magical.

Interesting article on the legal implications of being a stripper http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/crime...y/1033586.html

that sentence disturbs me.
as if women were accessories to fun, like booze and strobes.

They are. Don't you watch hip hop/rap videos? Women are the ultimate accessory; one is simply not bling if one does not have the latest car, pistol and decorative female.

the most astonishing/sad factor is that lots of them would enjoy being the ultimate decorative female.

i'm not ashamed, but i am not a feminist, i am a humanist

this reminds me that i havent been out to see any naked ladies recently and i need to do something about it...i love strippers

its kind of the same thing tho, being a humanist.

i mean you cannot deny there are specific relevant groups of people you have to defend in order to promote human rights. Women, poor, immigrants, homosexuals, mentally ill etc.

none of the specific movements to defend their rights is irrelevant or implies that it is more important than the other.

but if you don't focus on their needs, the whole humanism thing is just an utopic ideal, it would be even harder to make any progress come true, specially if you realize what we need the most is the creation of specific laws.

ultimately, feminism is not saying that women rights are more important than anybody else's rights, but it is pretty obvious that there won't be any equality or respect for human rights if half of humanity is still being somehow opressed.

if you tackle women rights, you're directly interfering with poverty, education and the like.

for example, everybody knows women make less money on average, and a lot of women in this world are single mothers, so dealing with that would be dealing with poverty as a whole.

creating mechanisms to defend these groups is not favoritism, any improvement benefits all.

getting equality for women is crucial for any idea of humanism.

Well, put the foo on the other shut. Can a guy be an accessory to fun? I would hope so. (I know I'd like to be...)

But I guess I stand by that statement. Yes, the reason I'm there is to see the woman dancing. But it really is the synergy, the confluence of all the elements that >makes< the event.

If the girl is doing her job right, she's not real--she's a fantasy come to life.

ahh ok, so they aren't real people.

and we were about degrading a mere fantasy!

Oh i see now, lol.

This thread makes me want to get my objectifyin' on.



peew peew peew peew peew peew


Also, humanism suxxx.

Women aren't real people because if you look in the OED it has the following as the definition of human:

"Human (noun): an individual of the genus homosapiens; characterised by the ability to urinate through the protruding phallus whilst standing ."

Can't argue with dick-tionaries...

I read flashing lights as 'flashing tits'

truth.

Thank you

i told you, i love strippers, and if you wanna strip & have the stomach to do it i think it's great, you should do what you want. i just think the standards of conformity are a bit ridiculous but that's society, not just sex workers.

I feel that prostitution should be legal, but pimping should be HIGHLY illegal.

as far as stripping, as james brown said "a woman's got to use what she got, to get just what she wants, HOT PANTS!"

make ya dance!
hot pants, UHH, smokin! waaaooowwwwwwww

not only prostitution should be legal, but it should bring the workers the same rights as any other profession.

Tenure in prostitution.

exactly. the thing is that human rights discourse often ignores women's rights. culture is transmitted on women's bodies. cultural relativism is total crap when you are talking about fgm, honor killings and even more minor stuff like women stripping for rap videos. saying that something is just "the way of the culture" is a total cop out. then again, saying anything gets tricky because it is also really not cool to go in and try to colonize different cultures to purier/whiter/more christian ways. and that's what is usually comes come to.

so yeah, it's complicated shit. saying that you are just a feminist or just a humanist is not enough. the two concepts work together. there are some good books written on the topic. the tittles are currently escaping me. sorry!

as long as MAN continues to prop up the antiquated and repressive patriarchal religions of the descendants of Abraham, most women worldwide will get the short end.

I'll speak for Britain - there's 'black culture' and there's the exaggerated version of something resembling 'black culture'. Anyone who thinks you can't criticise hip-hop's misogyny because it's 'black' doesn't know enough black people.

Having said that, I tend to treat it as a pantomime and assume everyone else does likewise.

what i like about hot pants is that what you see is what you get

to rob - eh, it's not just Juedo-Christianity though. i don't think that men have the intention of hurting women, but they perpetuate things that give them power. women are persecuted practically every where you go. statistically, the only country where women earn the same $$$ per hour as men is iceland.

It's very easy to point to these statistics; and I'm not saying they're not true, but I would say that it wouldn't surprise me if the 'glass ceiling' of higher management/ entrepreneurship was enough to tilt the gender balance in wages generally.

how are the stats calculated? is it average for the country, or taking different professions into account etc.

oh yeah, i'm talking more about when rap stars or islamic leaders claim that this is their culture. idk, once again it's really iffy territory because it's really wrong to colonize and insist that your culture is better culture. we are all fucked and misgonistic.

it's all good being against sexism but don't ruin rap music people

i mean honestly it's not something which you can really quantify. things are always changing. if the glass has been pushed (in terms of equal pay for equal work and whatnot) that's great, but there are still countless other problems. there are shitloads of systems which are misogynistic. problems such as women making less money than men are the result of dualistic thinking - women historically being treated as a different class/entirety than men...femininity being associated with passivity and masculinity being associating with active strength etc.

the point i was more trying to make is that misogyny is totally infused everywhere and that human rights discourse tends to ignore women's rights a little bit. it's important to continue to actively think about issues of gender (and race, and class etc.) if you are to claim humanism. being a humanist should mean that you are an active feminist.

and to wellcharge - my professor told me those statistics (in 2008 i think...or maybe it was late 2007 but you get the drift) I'm not sure exactly where she got them from but she is extremely active in the international feminist movement (that's her field of expertise) so i trust her word. also, i enjoy a lot of rap music. i think that treating women like shit has nothing to do with making good beats. i respect rap artists which actual talent who don't resort to calling women bitches and hoes and putting them in bikinis to sell albums. real rappers dont need to do such juvenile crap.

Yeah, I wasn't getting at you. Just unnecessarily isolating non-flaws like a prick.

Having said all that, I'd take a million Kool Keiths over just 1/3rd of Ani diFranco (unless it was a mercy killing third, obviously)

okay, as much as i'm certain that those problems exist, without an indepth explanation of the statistics they don't mean anything. If women are being paid less for the same job that's terrible but if it's a natural average then it's likely due to the type of work people are doing, i've never worked in iceland but i haven't ever seen women getting less for the same work anywhere i've been,although i'm sure it happens.alot of higher wage jobs are in industries like construction,automotives, manufacturing and that could be a large factor in the statistic if it's a national average, the best paying job i've seen that doesn't require education and connections etc. is the oil rigs, extremely high wages many thousands of men there but almost no women are willing to do it; something like that could affect the average hugely.Maybe the glass ceiling thing mentioned by glice isn't in play if that stat is only wages and doesn't include salaried jobs, although if it does include them then he's probably right,hard to tell without a source

i mean i don't even necessarily disagree with you on anything but you should never point to statistics if you don't know where they came from or what they mean, stats without explanations are as bad as a lie

I'm a left-handed robot in a right-handed world.

statistics show that left-handed people have a higher incidence of violent death.

where's my support group?

:(

alcoholics anonymous

yeah, i mean i wasn't tryin to point to statistics. bad example, but what i was trying to say is that sexism is everywhere. it's not just the product of juedo-christianity. :-)

of course, and i'd assume alot of the judeo-christian sexism is the direct result of prevailing attitudes that were long ingrained into society before the religions formed, i doubt that there was no misogyny until the guy who wrote the torrah decided to invent it,although he certainly perpetuated it

As for women making less money, it's illegal in most countries that work places would have men and women doing the same job for different wages, so no that's not how it works. Women are usually associated with a certain kind of job that pays less, mostly. You will not see a male secretary very often, but you will see female ones doing a whole shitload of work that goes way beyond the definition of the job and so on.
The stats are taken by tax declarations, surveys and the like. Something like: among the people who make minimum age, 60% of them are women, for example. Women are majority among the poorest in the world obviously, and specially because many of them are single mothers, having to raise children on one income, or even with some $ help from the fathers they take care of the kids, making their career and education pursue more difficult, they are also the ones to perpetuate poverty.

with such a small population, bjork is probably skewing the statistics

i haven't personally seen that before,but i have worked with women where they get to slack off and the men have do to the hardest parts of the job alone. it's certainly because i do physical labour and it's not easy for most women, but i can't tell you how many jobs i've done where half the work is heavy lifting and there was women working there full time who couldn't/wouldn't do a major part of the job