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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

India Knight has changed her mind about lap dancing clubs

44 replies

sethstarkaddersmummyreturns · 24/10/2010 16:48

It's in the Sunday Times (which I still haven't cancelled Blush) so I can't link, but I thought you'd like to know.

she used to think they were empowering and liberated and stuff but now she has decided they're degrading.

she wouldn't ban them though, just put them in an out of town area so her 6 year old daughter doesn't have to see them.

OP posts:
huddspur · 26/10/2010 19:22

I don't like lap dancing clubs and would never considering going to one but I don't believe that they should be banned.

ColdComfortFarm · 26/10/2010 19:31

God, I love that stuff from Hackney council. It makes me happy. Ban the fuckers. This damages all of us, not just India Knight's six year old. No, I don't want to explain how women are sexual objects to six year olds in any context (I find trying to explain the hijabn and burkah to my own one an utterly disgusting experience for example and they are all over the place). I can't work out what took India so long. Presumably she was 'flattered' by being taken by men to these places. No man has ever suggested this to me, and I wouldn't be bloody simpering and feeling 'included' if they did. I think that's the key difference.

Eleison · 26/10/2010 20:07

Thanks for the C&P on the thread. Gosh, she really is slow off the mark isn't she. I've never read her before today. Don't think I will bother again.

sethstarkaddersmummyreturns · 26/10/2010 20:10
OP posts:
Quattrocento · 26/10/2010 20:17

A message to India

"I object to explaining to my six-year-old daughter that taking your clothes off for money is a career option" It isn't a career option. It's an option for those with no career options

"We became complicit in the pornification of our world ? and, worse, did so with a fixed ?ironic?, ?post-feminist? smile" No India. You did. I didn't.

"even as we frowned at children?s T-shirts saying ?Porn star?, even as we trotted off to pole-dancing class or a burlesque night" Gosh, me I prefer a night staying in. Or going out with friends, or going to the theatre. Burlesque nights have never featured in my life and tbh, I'm rather surprised that they feature in yours

You have become slightly degraded. Please don't help other women along the same route., Burlesque nights aren't normal. They're for sleazos

JessinAvalon · 26/10/2010 21:59

!

MyBoysHaveDogsNames · 28/10/2010 15:53

I am so happy. I have just checked Haringey's proposal and they also have a nil cap!

JessinAvalon · 29/10/2010 07:44

MyBoys-that's good news. Bristol's is very disappointing. They will be considering each application on a case by case basis. They say that in an application they will take account of the "brand and reputation". I think that means that it's preferable to sell women in a Stringfellow's than to sell them a tinpot lap dancing. How considerate of Bristol City Council!

openminded · 24/02/2011 13:40

I assume that most of you on here are mothers. I also assume that most of you have never been inside a lapdancing club, or ever even talked to a dancer.

I interpret feminism as this: empowering women to make their own choices.

What gives anyone the right to tell someone else how to live their life?

Working as a dancer in a lapdancing club is simply one option open to women. I know single mothers who dance and earn enough money working 2-3 nights a week to support their child. As a result they have their days free to be with and look after their child. I know one dancer who is a Cambridge graduate, very intelligent and capable, and also a single mum to a disabled child. She works as a dancer for exactly this reason.

WHO ARE YOU TO TELL HER SHE SHOULD NOT HAVE THIS CHOICE?

PLEASE, GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSES AND STOP PREACHING TO OTHERS HOW THEY SHOULD LIVE.

If lapdancing clubs get closed down it will disproportionately negatively affect women. What you are doing is, therefore, by the legal definition, sexist!

I know other dancers who make over 250K a year. They don't have to sleep with customers or do anything illegal or anything they don't want to do. What gives you the right to try and deprive them of that income? Just because of your own prejudices. And they are prejudices - because if you've never been into a lapdancing club, you can't possibly know what they are like!!!

It's a shame that people who hold extreme views or views based on ignorance, should have any say in other peoples's lives at all.

Live and let live, I say!

poodlerockin · 24/02/2011 14:00

india knight, for example, is a twat

SmellsLikeTeenStrop · 24/02/2011 14:03

Dammit, I was going to post ''in before the ''i know somebody who is a lap dancer and works one day a week and earns 1 million pounds a year, how dare you try and stop her from doing this'' post'', but I see I'm too late. :(

DirtyMartini · 24/02/2011 14:26

"If lapdancing clubs get closed down it will disproportionately negatively affect women."

Eh?

Contrary to your assumption, I have been inside lapdancing/strip clubs many a time, because several of my good friends in my early twenties were strippers/dancers. (I was not, but I sometimes went along to sit in the bar and wait for them so we could hang out afterwards.)

Yes, they made good money compared to my waitressing wage. Yes, they were there by choice (although the wider perspective here is obviously, why were their options for making decent money so limited as to make that their best choice?)

But it was a corrosive and undermining environment in which to work. There is no getting around the fact of the seriously anti-woman attitudes of the men I saw in there.

Even the bouncers, whilst always maintaining that they respected the women and were there to keep them safe, would chat to me (as token woman in clothing sitting at the bar) and say things like "Of course, the girls are great, but I'd never actually go out with one of them". Their contempt wasn't far under the surface at all, though they hid it from the girls as long as it suited them to do so.

For a while, as a young woman, I thought - well, to each her own, it's not for me but if these women want to make good money this way, fair play to them. They were beautiful women, and they were capitalizing on that to pay the rent instead of pulling shifts at McDonald's. It's only as I've grown up in terms of maturity and seen more of life that I've come to realize that sort of short-term gain doesn't come without a price tag; it's naive to believe any such thing. The job was dehumanizing for a lot of reasons, even leaving aside the immediate risks that come with earning your living as a sex object. I really wish my friends had seen that they had more options.

And I haven't even scratched the surface of what these clubs represent and what they mean for the communities in which they're located, or what you're supposed to say about them to your toddler when he/she points and asks about the neon woman-shaped signs, etc. In fact I know I am forgetting loads of my best points but I am hurrying to type this ...

So there you go, openminded (which you are obviously not if you're making such wrong assumptions about anyone who disagrees with you); I may not have been a dancer myself but I have been into these places and seen them, many times, and I still think they're bad news. And I would never in a million years go out with a man who frequented them. My contempt would be right there on the surface too.

sethstarkaddersmackerel · 24/02/2011 16:32

I see you have joined Mumsnet just to talk about lapdancing clubs, Openminded.
May I ask what your interest is in them? Are you a dancer? A club owner? A user?

EmmelineSpankfirst · 24/02/2011 16:37

I never did think lap dancing clubs, pole dancing lessons - and now the dreaded 'but it's an art form' burlesque - were anything but degrading to women..

Prolesworth · 24/02/2011 16:39

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn

sethstarkaddersmackerel · 24/02/2011 16:57

I don't think 'empowering women to make their own choices' is much cop as a definition of feminism tbh.

it says nothing about making the environment in which those choices are made an equal one; OTOH if you take campaigning for an equal environment as read on the grounds that they're not true choices otherwise, it would encompass campaigning against objectification and therefore against lapdancing clubs.

there are also many negative choices women can make (the choice to self-harm, the choice to not remove herself and her children from a violent partner) and fetishing choice in those situations would be perverse.

EmmelineSpankfirst · 24/02/2011 17:13

Very few educated, financially independent women make the choice to take their clothes for sweaty office men or fuck strangers for cash. OK some do, but very few.

That says it all, really.

sakura · 25/02/2011 07:26

Yes, but they still get to choose who they fuck.
How many educated, financially independant women make the choice to take their clothes off for sweaty office men or fuck strangers that disgust them for cash?
NOne, I would say.

sakura · 25/02/2011 07:31

Wait a minute ... Scrap that. What I was trying to say (!) was the worse your economic situation is, the more weirdos you're going to come across as a prostitute or a lapdancer, simply because of the law of averages. WOmen who strip as a side hobby Hmm whoever they are, wherever they are, are somewhat protected in a way that the vulnerable majority in this industry are not.

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