Posts by Deborah
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I have enjoyed reading your posts, Anjum.
i would like to think that we could create the space for women to express their unhappiness with sexual images & exploitation without having to take the kind of flak they do currently (not here on PAS, of course!)
That's very positive of you, but even here on PAS, when some of us have been trying to express our worries, we have been told that we are making (invalid) generalisations...
But back to thinking about choice.
There's a fascinating passage in Hobbes' Leviathan about freedom.
Fear and liberty are consistent; as when a man throweth his goods into the sea for fear the ship should sink, he doth it nevertheless very willingly, and may refuse to do it if he will: it is therefore the action of one that was free: so a man sometimes pays his debt, only for fear of imprisonment, which because nobody hindered him from detaining, was the action of a man at liberty. And generally all actions which men do in commonwealths, for fear of the law, are actions, which the doers had liberty to omit.
Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 21: Of the Liberty of Subjects
In other words, even if you throw all your property overboard because the alternative is dying, throwing them overboard is a freely chosen action.
If you are inclined to agree with Hobbes, then I suspect that you are going to be less inclined to worry about whether or not people in the sex industry, or strippers, or even just girls wearing raunchy clothes, have made a free choice.
If you think there's something dubious about Hobbes' claim, then I think you are going to be more inclined to worry about what constitutes consent. That's what's driving my concerns about consent. I'm just not so sure that it's always freely given.
Part of the problem is, when it comes to sex and sexuality, the choices we make can have rotten consequences (and fabulous ones too). The problem is that unlike lots of the other choices we can make (where to live, what type of work to pursue, what sort of food we eat), sexual choices can be very intimate. Sex can be just a casual and fun transaction, but it can also be one of the ways we get closest to another person, and reveal ourselves most intimately to another person. We can be very vulnerable through sex, and the sexual choices we make can have enormous consequences. And of course, what may be one person's fun can be another person's anguish. All of which tends to explain why we can be deeply ambivalent and worried about raunch culture and strip clubs.
Another thought - raunch culture makes things very difficult for boys and young men too. I'm told that many, if not most, teenage boys and young men think / fantasize a lot about sex. And at the same time, here are (some, not all) girls wearing incredibly sexy clothes, sending a heap of signals that they are sexually available. So what's a young man to do? Yet some of those girls may not really want to be sexually available - they just like the clothes, or feel that they have to wear the clothes in order to fit in. The young man propositions them, and gets turned down, or comes on too strong, and the young woman feels forced into a situation she doesn't really want to be in (in the worst cases, we call this rape). Now of course this is not what happens all the time, or even a lot of the time, but I assume that it happens at least some of the time. What a terribly confusing and risky position for young men to be in.
-
Despite what I have been saying over the way, or perhaps because of it, I snickered all the way through this piece.
And at your headline, Jeremy Andrew. Guess I'm still a 4th former at heart.
-
Thanks for the link, Deborah.
Its from Butterflies and Wheels, my favourite aggregator site. I recommend it.
-
I also don't agree that all women who have ever been to a strip club are being peer pressured into it, or are only there for research purposes for that matter!
Neither do I. In fact I tried very hard to avoid generalisations like that. My big issue is what constitutes consent.
-
You might enjoy this article, Craig. it's a conversation with Deborah Lipstadt and a couple of other people, on Holocaust denial.
-
What Heather said.
But to back track a bit, someone (Stephen Judd?) made a comment about false consciousness.
I find it obnoxiousness to tell a woman (or a man) that what she (I'm going to ditch the careful gender equity in pronouns now, and just use 'she' - a conscious revesal of the position taken by 17th century grammarians who decided by fiat that 'he' comprehended, ie. included, 'she'), anyway, to tell a woman what she thinks about herself is wrong, and my own view of her is the correct one.
But there was a point to the consciousness raising groups espoused by 1970s feminism. When I read The Female Eunuch a few years ago, I was struck by Germaine Greer's description of women who were only just starting to realise that there was something rotten going on when they went out to work all day, spent their lunch break running errands, and then came home to cook and clean while their husbands, who had also been working all day, came home and put their feet up in front of the tellie.
I like the idea of just being able to wear what I damn well want - that's why I'm wearing my MaryJane-style purple Docs today. But it seems odd when "I will wear what I damned well want" turns out to be "and that will be shoes that hurt, skirts so short that you can see whatever I am wearing, or not wearing, underneath, crop tops, and pouty red lips," all on a 16 year old girl. There's an odd undercurrent there, of turning girls into sex objects. And I wodner if they are even aware of what's going on.
I really don't have a particular issue with strip clubs, even if I do think they are tacky. But I think there's a continuum here, from raunchy clothes, to dancing at a strip club, to lap dancing, to close contact lap dancing (or whatever), to going out to a back room for a 'special' massage, through to ... well, you get the point.
There's two thoughts here - that raunch culture really might be part of the pornography / sex industry culture, and that it's not quite clear where to draw the line, if anywhere. Like I said, the key criterion is consenting adults, and while we might be clear enough about who we deem to be adults, I don't think we have a good understanding of what might constitute consent.
-
Was a (possibly ironic) reference to Raunch Culture, not sex workers. I think it's important to keep those as two separate (albeit possibly related) issues. It's the alarmism over Raunch Culture that I'm really, well, over.
I'm not over it. But then, I have three little girls.
There are some issues of consent tied up in raunch culture too. You know what peer pressure is like, how as teenagers and young adults most people just desperately want to fit in. So how many of the kids dressing in an extremely sexualised way and going along to strip shows in mixed groups really want to be there? If the alternative is to be derided for being a prude, or for not being able to take a joke, then it's not so clear that kids really want to participate in raunch culture.
That's going to hold true for lots of teenage / young adult activities. You can gurarantee that if the culture was all about saying the rosary every night and going to church on Sundays, there would be some nascent atheists who nevertheless felt they couldn't do anything but get down on their knees in front of the group's god.
-
What I am finding a bit disturbing about the public discussion of this (in the MSM and in one or two other blogs, not here on PA) is the blokey attitude of hey, everyone is doing this, and lots of people have done it, so it must be okay, and afterall, we are all consenting adults.
Well, yes, these are all consenting adults, and I'm not inclined to interfere in the choices of consenting adults. But I hope all the strippers, and the audience, are at least 16 (age of consent for sex), and preferably 18 (if there's alcohol being served). That would take care of the adult criterion, legally at least.
But consent.... That could be a mixed issue for the dancers - some of them could genuinely enjoy the work, others of them might find that they make better money there than they could elsewhere, some of them might have no other way to make an income. So the degree of 'consent' might vary. If it's 'genuinely enjoy the work' consent, then whatever. But 'no other way to make an income' consent tends to exploitation.
As for the audience - I know, mixed groups go along to strip shows and bars, but I think that at least some of the women in the groups might feel pressured into it. Sure, they can always bail out and refuse to go, but they risk exclusion from the group, and being told that they are frigid prudes who can't take an ironic joke. I am so over irony - how the hell can you tell whether a punter is being ironic or getting his rocks off.
Sounds like your uni students are having a fun time together, Emma, and they are not doing it because it's the only way to earn an income. Which takes me straight back to consent...
So what do I think about strip clubs, and going to strip shows? If it's a sin at all, it's a venal sin, not a mortal one, and most likely a sin against good taste rather than anything else. The whole thing is so damned tawdry.
-
Oh, read the whole post, I/O. The very next thing I said was, 'But I take your point."
And I really do take your point. It seems so sad to comfort yourself with the thought that the johns are up-market types, as if that might make the whole job okay. And maybe it is okay for some people. But based on your sample, as I said, too many people get too badly hurt for the sex industry to be anything other than exploitative.
-
Whilst I could see the reality of their lifestyle/workplace and they obviously couldn't;
Ouch - patronising
all they wanted at the time was not to be judged and for me to accept the fantasy of their statements.
but I take your point.
One now works in the corporate mainstream, one went down for 3 years for her boyfriends drug dealing, and the other one I never heard from/of again. So she's the one I often worry/wonder about.
And there's the rub. The worker-damage rate in this industry may just be too damned high.