Article about strip clubs in the Guardian

'I would argue that it would be better for sociey as a whole if men didn't have fantasies about objectifying women '
Assuming that we could read peoples minds and that's what us men all really do, how do you intend to change that? employ the thought police? All sounds a bit Orwellian to me.

When there are people on this forum making silly, offensive coments like Wallison for example, and the hyporctical actions of groups like 'Object' i think we should be considering the effects caused to the wider society by these people rather than keep picking on people who support lap dancing clubs.

There is a long history of women running away from wankers. Don't think you're special.

Actually Posie according to the council the clubs are. But hey hide the thread if you need to. Really find it interesting that when the debate is not one sided how some people run away.

Now am hiding the thread. I meet enough arseholes in my real life who defend lap dancing, I don't want more dicks in my online life.

HTH

Wow.... one person may have lied or misinterpreted stats.

They are not actually, I live in Bristol.

So Sausage do you take your clothes off for money?

Posie you do know that the 3 clubs you are referring to are inside a crime impact zone with a lot of night clubs, the subject was brought up in front of the council and the police even with that info made no complaint about any of the clubs. It is also interesting that the one club outside the area had practically no crime associated with it.

HTH

Posie you seemed to have ignored the article that shows the arguments Drummond created in his on mind are not in fact reality. If you going to pretend the proof doesn't exist please just admit it.

Fortunately Rosa the majority do not hold all the things you believe to be their truths, I would agree stopping anyone based on their sexuality is totally wrong. It is religion that causes persecution which is interesting as reading more about the whole banning thing we see Object (a very small group of people from what I can see) teaming up with the salvation army and a group of Muslim clerics who want to shut down clubs. There are supporting a group that has clerics that preach domestic abuse is okay. One cleric who preached that had his sermons giving out by tower hamlets council and Object went along with the tower hamlets speakers. I mean really enemy of my enemy is my friend even if they are worse offenders when it comes to the key claims.

So one again you put your beliefs forward and I don't agree with them. I believe in the long term by stifling choice you will weaken women's freedoms. I know you don't agree with that but when consultations take place so far we have seen a strong turn out in favour of the clubs (or is that a weak turn out against?).

I don't think it is a good idea to be objectifying women. If this point of view puts me, in the eyes of wankers (ie visitors to lap-dancing clubs) in the same category as people who believe in a flat earth, that doesn't much matter to me. I would still say that objectifying people is wrong, regardless and will happily disregards the views of the wankers.

Bristol:

A police report showed that in a set period sexual crime and violence against women rose by 45% , 82% in the areas near lap dancing bars (50m)

This was the findings of a police report.

^Finally avaboosmummy your comment, "Get a grip love" is offensive.

LOL. And this isn't:

Where is this invasion of pricks coming from? ^

Why is it it LOL - why is it funny to be offensive?

And you have implied that the comment about the invasion of pricks was mine which it wasn't and I think you ought to acknowledge that.

As for the accusation that Your argument seems to be based on a number of assumptions about connections within peoples' minds/brains that aren't actually true. I believe that they are true, that the way we are encouraged to think about people/things most definitely affects how we threat people/things. There are lots of examples of this such as black people being thought of as a lesser species which made slavery seem all right, disabled people being seen as not having feelings which allowed them to be put away in asylums, unmarried mothers being thought of as immoral which made it seem OK to take babies away from them and so on. Similarly, the way we treat people affects how we view them in general so not allowing gay people to stay in all hotels would imply that there is something a bit wrong with gay people. Allowing women to be objectified by men implies that women should in some way serve men's sexual needs. I believe it is obvious that there is a very clear connection in people's brains between treatment and opinions, if I didn't believe that then I probably wouldn't think there was anything wrong with lapdancing clubs (provided, of course noone was being coerced into it) and I wouldn't think there was anything wrong with letting some landladies veto gay people. But I do believe in that connection and so I would take the choices of the lapdancers and their customers and the anti-gay landladies away.

I don't think it's at all a coincidence that the market for lap dancing rises along with porn, lads mags and a general culture of objectifying women. I think it's much harder to be a young woman in 2012 than in 1982. We are really going backward pretty damned fast.

Posie here is the proof about Drummond's claims obtained under a freedom of Information request by a local paper here

So the debate about should clubs shut has become a matter of opinion as the figures don't work. Over 3,000 people responded to the consultation in Portsmouth 116 of which were for the banning. When the vast majority of people vote against the banning of venues guess we see which opinion is in the majority.

I find it interesting that all the councils that have assumed nil policies never had clubs in the first place so there was no challenge. Hackney had 67% in favour of the clubs there and it rose to over 75% based on the ward. Seems that people, in general, are much more in favour of the clubs. I don't know of the breakdown between male and female but when the nay sayers with a lot of preparation (judging by the stories on the web) can't get 35% of the people against it never mind 50% it does show that most people don't hold the view of some of the feminists here.

So as I see it now we have just points of view, the validity of any claims of violence has disappeared from the information available. And off these boards the majority of people are for the clubs. Be interested now if there is a way of changing minds when the core claim is no longer available.

Wow. I would have thought it would be obvious to anyone with half a brain that objectifying people is a problem, whether or not they then go on to commit or not commit crimes within half a mile or whatever of a lap-dancing club. Have you listened to yourself recently?

It may be. Unfortunately human history is littered with corpses of ideas that were "obvious to anyone with half a brain" but turned out to be wrong. The observation that the sun revolves around the Earth, and the idea that women are less intelligent then men just for a start...

To be clear I'm not actually arguing that mental objectifying doesn't cause problems in how people act towards each other; just that one can't assume that it causes any one particular set of problems. That assumption seems to be based on an outdated model of the brain that imagines a little homunculus sitting in the middle of it, coordinating all thoughts and perceptions and therefore affecting them all with each other. The brain doesn't really work like that.

To go any further than that I suppose one would have to clarify a number of factors. What does "objectifying" really mean? Is it something that's under conscious control, or not? Is the way we do it about sex any different from the way we do it about other things? Does doing it a bit lead one to do it more, or satiate the desire for it so one actually does it less, for a while? Does the fact that some people do it in a more obvious way (like going to a lapdancing club) actually mean that they're doing it more than other people? What other activities do with think it goes with, and is there a reason to believe that the link is causative, and not just correlative?

Or of course we could just say we don't like lapdancing clubs because they're gross. :)

I would also guess that men who visit lap dancing clubs are more likely to visit a prostitute.

a link showing research findings between men who buy sex work and men that don't Men who don't buy sex are the sort of men who wouldn't buy a lap dance.

Wow. I would have thought it would be obvious to anyone with half a brain that objectifying people is a problem, whether or not they then go on to commit or not commit crimes within half a mile or whatever of a lap-dancing club. Have you listened to yourself recently?

Interesting argument that sexual objectification, or allowing men to look and think about their fantasies of objectifying women, does not actually lead to them carrying out these fantasies so therefore we don't need to worry about it. I would argue that it would be better for sociey as a whole if men didn't have fantasies about objectifying women and that the idea that women should be there to serve such fanatasies of men is not helping to promote equality between the sexes.

FWIW it's not particularly my "argument" that allowing men to think about objectifying women doesn't lead them to commit actual sex crimes - it just seems like an inevitable logical conclusion about this particular issue, IF we accept the claim/evidence that sex crime where lapdancing clubs have opened has gone down.

There's still a problem though. Even here you don't appear to be saying that such thought-objectifying causes any harm in itself. You just seem to be saying that while it may not cause sex crimes, it DOES cause all kinds of other problems and should be stopped for that reason. The problem is that the example we've just been looking at - the supposed link between it and sex crimes - shows that one can't just assume such a link. It might seem perfectly reasonable to think such a link exists, when in reality it doesn't play out like that.

Your argument seems to be based on a number of assumptions about connections within peoples' minds/brains that aren't actually true.

Finally avaboosmummy your comment, "Get a grip love" is offensive.

LOL. And this isn't:

Where is this invasion of pricks coming from?

Interesting argument that sexual objectification, or allowing men to look and think about their fantasies of objectifying women, does not actually lead to them carrying out these fantasies so therefore we don't need to worry about it. I would argue that it would be better for sociey as a whole if men didn't have fantasies about objectifying women and that the idea that women should be there to serve such fanatasies of men is not helping to promote equality between the sexes. So even a lapdancing club which allows no touching, which has no effect either way on crime or which employs very intelligent lawyers to dance, is still promoting the idea that it is OK for men to think, to some degree, that women are there to serve them sexually. How you react to that will determine which side of the fence you come down on in this debate. Personally, I think it's an attitude which should be changed as I would like to see women and men in more equal sexual relatiosnhips generally and I also believe it perpetuates an attitude which prevents women from achieving equality with men in society.

Re the argument that curtailing choice is only appropriate regarding something that is against the law. Well that is what we are debating, should lapdancing be banned, should we take that choice away from people? In the case of the gay couple at the guest house, NOW it is against the law to discriminate against them but once it would have been perfectly legal for the landlady to choose to barr them and many would have argued that her choice was important and that they could easily have found another hotel. However, we now accept that to allow people in our society to choose to dissasociate with gay people affects attitudes to and general acceptance and equality of gay people and that it comes under the banner of discrimination so we have taken that choice away from landladies. You have to decide how important maintaining the attitudes towards women promoted by laddancing is compared to how important personal choice of those participating in it is.

Re choice about things like sky diving, should we ban it because people could hurt themselves? Again, you have to decide on a scale of importance. We have chosen to ban smoking in pubs partly beause it is bad for the individual smokers but largely because it has an effect on the health and well-being of others and because we do not wish to promote the attitude that smoking is a good thing. Personally, I don't think skydiving is much of a risk to others and can't see that it has a detrimental effect on society's attitudes to personal safety as a whole, so I would not take that choice away. I do think that lapdancing, regardless of whether it causes harm to individual lapdancers or customers, promotes attitudes which do have a detrimental effect on society's attitudes to women as a whole so I would take that choice away.

Finally avaboosmummy your comment, Get a grip love is offensive. Would you address a man like that? It is a classic way to belittle a woman who is making remarks that you do not agree with. By all means disagree with me but do not imply that I am not making intelligent and reasoned points. Also, I have not blamed lapdancers or strippers for anything, I have merely discussed the effects that I think such activities have.

@ Posie, I hear you. I hear you.

I was thinking recently about low paid work and what to apply for.. I have no qualifications and no earning potential and I wwant to be a bin man for ?40 a year or a postman for ?40 a year. I don't want to look after children for ?17 a year. THIS IS WHAT leads young women to wiggle their hips around a pole.

eeeooow. If "expressing your sexuality" results in a lawsuit then you've totally disregarded the fact that contact has to be consensual, and that the woman has to want the 'contact' then I doubt going to a strip club and purchasing the commodity of wimmen is going to help.

Posie, so true, so true. I've always thought, if men had to take longer paternity leave (equal to their wife) then employers would have less logical reason to pay men more for doing the same thing. The pay gap might narrow in time. So, divorcing fathers wouldn't feel stung for half of their pension etc..... If the mother earned as much as the father then access could be more equal and it wouldn't 'go without saying' that the low earner takes on the bulk of the childcare and leave the father 'stuck' with the role of provider for children he's not even living with.

Like you say, if men GOT that feminism would benefit them too, it could be one step forward.

Sorry, cannot find any decent evidence for him having made anything up.

In addition I would like to know what motivates you to find arguments that support men paying women for sex work, you and Frans who [boak] wants to discredit figures on trafficked women. Why would any decent human being actually want to diminish the already pretty low level importance of such a disgusting thing?

And finally I wonder why it's not on your radar that if Feminism achieves it's goals the world will be a better place to be a man too? If you do not demean women and so called 'women's work' you may find family courts a better place to be a man.

Well reasoned debate, btw Posie I am still waiting on what your opinion is of Drummond making statements up as you were so keen on quoting him.

Where is this invasion of pricks coming from?

Rosa your argument about controls apply to things that are against the Law dancing isn't. If the law changes then it will go underground as Fran said. The intelligent women will get out but then there will be those who will fill the gap and these will be the weak and the vulnerable. And we we cry out about the abuse these women are put through and forget that the people who closed the clubs down and their supporters are the ones who were a causal effect to the abuse.

We don't know why clubs seem to have a good effect on crime. We do know that nightclubs have a lot of violence and sexual crimes in and around them but we don't see people campaigning to close all nightclubs.

FastLoris I agree if no contact is taking place then the question is why do clubs have what appears to be a causal affect in crime reduction. However one of the key arguments for the closure of clubs has been "they cause sexual crimes" and if you take that argument away if comes down to points of view and personal belief.

p.s. I've read the Leeds study. Another kind MNer linked me up!