This post over at Pith reminds me of the stupid, puritanical nonsense we have here in Nashville that strippers have to stay three feet away from you (or visa versa), thus ending, for all practical purposes, the lap dance.
Let’s just cover this in a bunch of easy points:
1. If a woman wants to take off her clothes for money, more power to her. Why should I give a fuck one way or another?
2. If a woman wants to grind on a man for money, more power to her. It’s not for me. I would not choose to make money that way, but it doesn’t hurt me or make my life harder if someone else willingly dances naked all over a man who gives her money for it.
3. I don’t even give a shit if it’s a slippery slope between grinding on a clothed man to committing sex acts with a man who then pays you. Because paying for sex should not be illegal. Being paid for sex should not be illegal.
Is it unseemly? I don’t know. Maybe so. But I’ve sat there and listened to friends of my mom’s talking about how they feel like they have to have sex with their husbands because their husbands provide them with houses and cars and grocery money and I have to say, I cannot see the fucking difference.
Both are exchanging sex for goods and services and, while I’d hope that most marriages are based on more than that–mutual admiration and caring and love and a sense of camradery–many aren’t and we don’t send police into those women’s bedrooms and arrest them for exchanging sex for the things their men provide. I mean, shoot, what would happen if we sent the police into every house in Belle Meade looking for women who are earning their lifestyles on their backs within their marriages?
The jails would be full of rich homemakers. But, we don’t, because we don’t butt our noses into the arrangements married folks make with each other. It’s perfectly fine for a woman to arrange with a man that he should provide for her and she will fuck him but that she won’t love him, as long as it happens within a marriage.
So why should the freelancers be treated differently?
Because it’s so much plainer what they’re doing?
I find that plainness refreshing myself.
Filed under: About Town, Fun with Feminism
I agree — I’ve had frank conversations with two of my students who either were or are strippers. Their argument is that, if some dope wants to pay to see them naked, who is really being used? It seems the going rate is about $20.00 for a 3 minute “song”’s worth of lap dance. Not a bad hourly rate, eh?
I’m starting an Ethics class discussion about prostituion and stripping tomorrow, it should be interesting.
[...] Cat Pants » Legalize ItPosted 110 minutes [...]
PhilosopherP, I’d love it if you stopped back in to say how the class discussion goes. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything particularly feminist about being a stripper or a prostitute. And I have a lot of problems with both from a feminist perspective. But I have problems with traditional marriage arrangements from a feminist perspective and I’m not at all interested in seeing marriage outlawed. I would not be heartbroken to live in a world where prostitution did not exist. But it does and this is the world I live in and I just don’t see anything wrong with it as long as everyone is willing and everyone is legal.
In fact, I’m starting to be convinced that it is unjust to make women who are can be very empowered by having an income lose out on a way to make money just because I have qualms about it.
I’m more shocked that a woman would feel “obligated” to have sex with her husband for grocery money than I am that a stripper would get money for a lap dance.
Geez! I just like doing it with mine for the heck of it! I guess I will start considering the grocery money as a tip, lol.
Mrs. B., it’s conversations like that which really helped convince me I needed to take some steps away from Christianity.
Read this.