Friends who have been to stripclubs.

• yeah, so your question back at you. I know whereof I speak and I know you're wrong when you rubbish my post. The one you bothered reading, that is. I'm not going to ask you about your experience, because I think you will lie. I'm telling you to query the motives of whoever painted your image of strip clubs; they did not tell you the truth.

I've been to loads of strip clubs. It was preferred client entertainment in my old job. After a while I figured out my clients were just as happy to be taken for a big dinner, so I did that instead. I posted this upthread.

I've been to the full range of them, too, from super plush & exclusive to sticky-floor grotty. This: If you are rude to a dancer, or come out with some sexist remarks, then you will be booted out of the club in no time, is a hundred percent shit, I've witnessed rudeness at all of the establishments. Not many bars boot out paying customers for being a bit mouthy or pushy. You sound like you think strip bars operate to different rules - more like a school than a licensed premises!

An erotic performance suggests something performed on a stage of some kind, not inches from an audience of one. The only other performance I can think of (off the top of my head, admittedly,) like this is a magician. The magician, however, wears clothes and performs to the gathering at large while addressing individual punters.

Garlic have you really been to a strip club or are you copy and pasting some crap from the Object web site? because what you have said thus far is quite frankly a load of rubbish. If the strip club experience is all about this flawed objectification theory (that always gets wheeled out on just about every thread that involves women getting their kit off). Then why on earth do people spend so much time chatting to the dancers? Yeah that's right peeps, 95% of the time spent in a strip clubs is chatting, not getting private dances. If you think i'm talking rubbish, then get down to your local strip club and see for yourself. I ain't making this up, i promise you.

Oh yeah and you do realise that you don't buy someone or rent them out in a strip club? , You pay to watch an erotic performance or some call it a striptease. It's entirely up to the dancer with regards to the performance, not the customer. As a customer you have zero input and are merely a passenger in the whole experience. If you are rude to a dancer, or come out with some sexist remarks, then you will be booted out of the club in no time. However generally people tend to behave themselves, even very drunk people on stag do's.

No need to be patronising Rosa.

Well, I shall observe you and hope to absorb some of your wisdom.

Not at all, I think, if you read back. lots of posters have answered all of their points too. The thing is, with a debate, to answer the points rather than keep going off on a tangent each time. It's a skill than some take time to master.

And what about the posters who agree with me? Are they to be ignored?

But, presumably, as you did get the opposite effect and lots of posters, rather than being silenced, have pointed out why going to strip clubs and working in sweat shops are not quite the same thing, you are no longer seeing the parallels.

Dark, no, I don't think she should have to put up with that. I would not expect a considerate partner to do something that upset their other half. That includes, but is not exclusive to, going to strip clubs.

It isn't emotional blackmail either, despite what you think. I saw parallels and brought them up because I thought it was interesting. I don't want to silence anyone. I was hoping for the opposite effect actually.

You are joking, SGB? You make it sound like the dancers are posing on a plinth, like some 1920s fantasy. Of course it's sexual interaction, with the women placed in a subservient role both by their duties and their nakedness.

Knowing what I do of you, it seems unlikely that your entire knowledge of strip clubs is based on family-friendly Hollywood films, but your post certainly makes it look that way.

Oh FFS people objectify each other all the time. Women are objectified as housewifes and particularly as mothers - all the endless guff about controlling what PG women eat and drink and do. Men, to an extent, are objectified as well: the physical appearance of some famous men is gone over in as much detail as that of famous women - got fat? Got thin? Bad haircut? Wrong clothes? They are not assessed on their intelligence or honesty or kindness etc.

Strippers, specifically, are displaying themselves to earn their pay: sex workers who charge for sexual interaction are not the subject of this thread. People display themselves for pay - is it always wrong to be looked at, to want to be looked at, to earn money by displaying yourself? Or is it only when genitals are shown that it becomes problematic.

I'm pretty amazed that NCG is comparing somebody making sure a child has clothes with a man paying for sex. If I beat somebody up, would it be okay for me to say nobody should criticise me for it because I had beaten up an adult whereas they had made a seven year old sew shoes for them in Bangladesh? What about if I pay a child for sex? is that equivalent to somebody buying their child shoes from Primark?

People don't need to beat people up or pay to sexually exploit people. It isn't equivalent to needing to dress a child.

I think it would be impossible to buy my children school uniform that was entirely organic. As a consequence, somebody somewhere is being made ill through working with crops sprayed with pesticides so that my children can attend secondary school. I don't feel good about that. The way around that is to work on improving international farming standards for workers, not to think you can avoid buying clothes for kids.

If I was actually getting somebody around my house, making them process cotton sprayed with dangerous chemicals in the garden for 12 hours a day because I found it emotionally enjoyable to see them go through that, and kept pointing it out to other people, then I'd be in a similar moral position to a person who buys sex.

Nice answer to name change guys emotionally blackmailing silencing tactic.

She should only put up with it if all the costumes, furnishings and trappings at the strip club are made in Europe from sustainable resources

name change guy i see what you are saying but does that mean that you think a working class woman working in a supermarket and having her wage topped up by tax credits should put up with a partner going to see strippers lap dancers etc just because she cant afford to shop for a blouse at Karen Millan rather than New Look/Primark etc.
You said yourself it costs more.

I don't understand why it's double standards to care deeply about one issue and less deeply about others.

Perhaps we should criticise nspcc for not caring about old people or animals too?

Is only the Dalai lama allowed to object to anything?

Yup, what Garlic said and also that bodily integrity thing: there is something incredibly demeaning about the commodification of the human body - I am totally opposed to people being allowed to sell their kidneys on the same basis.

It's not just an emotional response I don't think, it is also a rational one. In the world we live in, if we accept that there's nothing different about selling sex or a kidney, a) we ignore the socio-economic and emotional context in which that sex or body-part is sold and b) by ignoring it, the implication is that we accept it - there's nothing to fight against, because there's nothing wrong.

It's difficult to imagine a world which was really, genuinely just, where the resources of the planet were shared out fairly equitably. In such a world, would there be a large pool of people willing to sell body parts or sexual services? Maybe there would, we'll never know until we have that just world.

I wonder if the people who think there's nothing wrong with selling sex, also can't see anything philosophically wrong with selling a kidney?

And there is that other thing - we all need to wear clothes, use computers etc. and while we may try to buy ethically, we can sometimes find that lack of money and other choices lead to going to shops we might not want to because underwear shoes, etc. are actually urgently needed. But no-one urgently needs to go and look at someone else objectifying themselves.

Sorry! Not subjected to ....

I would say the difference is that it's much harder to go about your daily life without unwittingly contributing to the exploitation of workers but it's easy to go through your life without going to a strip club.

I would hate it if DH went to a strip club. It would make me feel insecure in the same way DH would feel insecure if I started paying to see other men naked.

I don't think men can truly understand that because for them it's hypothetical and they're subjected to the same body insecurity that women are.

To shop ethically requires additional resources: time to source ethically produced goods and money to spend on such goods.

To not go to strip clubs is both cheaper and less time consuming than going to strip clubs.

And - what garlic said.

it would be nice if all forms of debate were encouraged here.

Erm, start a thread about sweat shops & ethical consumerism? There have been several :)

I don't think anyone's tried to say sweat shops are "not that bad", Wallaby! But we never get anywhere by saying we needn't address one problem until another is dealt with, do we?

I disagree that it's only to do with sex. (I don't even think it is about sex! It's more complicated than that.)

You know people in other countries can get paid for giving blood? (Coming soon to an NHS trust near you, btw.) As I'm sure you're aware, folks who are desperate for the money sell blood faster than they can regenerate it. The paramedics who take that 3rd or 4th pint have a similar problem: seeing fellow humans as less-than; as mere 'resources'. They would say the donor was willing, came of their own accord, signed the forms, I checked they were fit enough to walk out after taking their blood. But what they did was abusive.

Think about those dystopian future films, where baying crowds pay (or select groups gamble) to see 'players' torture each other, preferably to death. All that has really happened in our recorded past, but we grew out of it. Vestigially, we still pay & bay to see women expose themselves sexually and men to damage one another's brains through boxing.

*half agree not have agree!

Side note: it would be nice if all forms of debate were encouraged here. I've posted several times here under different names and have often been made to feel bad or patronised because my view isn't a perfectly rounded one. Please - I'm here to learn too. Wisest man knows he knows nothing at all and all that.

Garlic - while I have agree with you, people working in sweat shops etc - that exploitation is bad. Really bad. And some of them are exploited far worse -treated as objects or 'machines'- than a willing woman who chooses to work in a lap dancing club rather than somewhere else.

But it would be no bad thing if the market for sex work of all forms dried up.