Is stripping more acceptable nowdays?

11 comments

• FONDL

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  19 years ago

  But just like ying and yang, it's hard to know which one is the cause and which one is the effect. Like I said, we're bifurcating on this issue, like so many others. Just your typical generation gap IMO.
• LapFanM20

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  19 years ago

  Actually I think it is becoming more main stream in response to the Evangelist Christian BS that is being pumped out by the goverment nowdays, sort of the yang to the ying
• AbbieNormal

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  19 years ago

  I started this topic because I was thinking about some of what I see in public lately on teen girls. Tatoos, belly piercings, those I can dismiss as the latest fashion. Some things have kind of shocked me though. Regular dance clubs now often feature small go-go stages and stripper poles for the patrins to use. The fashions are almost indistinguishable from stripper costumes in some cases. (Not to mention the current, uhmm, below the waitline hair styles.) I will stipulate that this is confined to major cities, but I may have mis-stated the question. Is stripping now considered cool to the point that girls want to look like or behave like strippers (or their idea of strippers) even if they don't actually want to strip. Kind of like everyone dressing like prep school refugees back in the '80s. I think it's also possible that this is a secondary effect that comes from Britney, Christina, Janet, etc, etc, using almost a stripper persona on stage to seem "edgy", and that is what is copied. Interesting thoughts in any case. I think that stripping does have a certain bohemian cool now days, and that is why there seem to be a lot of young girls going into the buisness who aren't very good at it.
• FONDL

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  19 years ago

  I agree that some girls keep it from their families, but many don't. I've known several strippers who got into the business because their mother or other close relative had worked in a strip club and encouraged them to do so. For many girls it's a almost a family tradition. I actually think these girls make better strippers because they're more honest with themselves about what they are doing. Also a lot of the girls who think they are hiding it from their parents are kidding themselves - us older people understand a lot more about what's going on, especially with our own kids, than younger people think we do. But we often pretend not to know to avoid embarrassing situations.
• chandler

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  19 years ago

  One front where acceptability doesn't seem to have made inroads: the parents of strippers. At least among my tripper acquaintances, it remains almost universal that they conceal what they do from their parents and live in dread that they might be found out. One girl who started 3 years ago, joining her older twin sisters, used to tell me that they hadn't told their mom but she's sure she would be cool about it. Well, just recently her mom found out through the girl's ex-fiance, and from what I hear, she wasn't very cool about it. All three sisters are now out of stripping.
• Yoda

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  19 years ago

  I think that MTV, Shock Jocks and Tabloid television have given stripping a higher profile. That doesn't neccessarily mean that the general public has any more of a clue about what dancers and dancing is really like. As far as the proliferation of women going into dancing, I think it's a bad thing. Too many women who are either emotionaly or physically unqualified are getting naked for money and it's had an adverse effect on the industry. Women who are willing to strip for slightly better than Wal-Mart money are flooding the clubs. Club managers hire these girls simply to collect a daily house fee from them and could care less about what kind of earners they are.
• FONDL

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  19 years ago

  I think that in general people tend to become less tolerant and more critical as they age. And our society is aging. So I think that as a society we are less tolerant today than in the past. We've also become more nosey and think we have the right to tell others how to live, thanks to our wonderful media. Stripping is probably more widely accepted by young people, given ongoing changes in our morality, but for society as a whole I think there is less acceptance. Many years ago a local bar used to have strippers on weekends and nobody cared. If they tried that today they'd be run out of town.
• jabberwocky

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  19 years ago

  Well yes and no. Is society more acceptable than they were ten years ago? Yes. But most of my friends at work we rarely tell people outside the club (at least those of us who go to the University) that we dance. People immediately get a first impression of you and go, "Oh." and think all you care about is money or are easy. And when it comes to jobs most dancers leave their dancing history off their resume because it makes them look bad, even though it is a legitimate legal job. Then again I see a lot of guys (and some girls) glorify dancers. If I go into a bar and people know I dance, I am offered free drinks and people treat me different. If they don't know, they are a little bit more reserved which I like. I would rather them get to know me personally than just like me because I am a dancer.
• chandler

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  19 years ago

  There's acceptance, and then there's the cartoonish glorifiying of strippers as role models that's been in vogue for years in movies, music and bad cable TV shows. Pimps have been ironically celebrated in a similar way, and yet I don't think there's wider acceptance of actual pimping. I wonder how many of the young singles who flood the strip clubs on weekends playing hipster hold deeply tolerant convictions that will last. I suspect in a few years after the vogue fades, and after kids and a mortgage, many will be signing petitions to keep clubs out of their communities and bar strippers from living next door.
• FONDL

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  19 years ago

  Like so many other facets of our country, I think there's a real bifurcation here - for some people it's probably more acceptable but for a lot of others it's less so. In general I think that many people in our society have become more critical of others, we've become a nation of busybodies, where we think it's our right to tell others how to live their lives. There are definately more dancers than there used to be. But I'm not sure if that's a sign that dancing is more acceptable or that the industry has lowered it's standards. Personally I think it's a little bit of both. And I think it is bad for the industry - there are too many dancers and too many who aren't qulaified, so it's harder to make money at it, and as a result extras are becoming more common. And that strengthens the case of those who oppose strip clubs. It also strengthens the competition from escorts and other forms of adult entertainment. I personally would like to see extras disappear from the scene, at least from inside the clubs.
• davids

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  19 years ago

  I think in some sense stripping is becoming more acceptable. I think it is partly superficial though. It very un-PC these days to criticize anyone for anything they do which is not illegal. But if you scratch below the surface even the "doesn't affect me, why should I care people", and those who are close enough to strippers to know them well (eg boyfriends, family, non-stripper coworkers), still think there is something wrong with the job: Both the sexual aspects of it, the "what is your work contributing" aspect, the "what kind of environment are you putting yourself in" aspects, etc. Below the surface I don't think most people's attitudes towards strippers is all that good. I don't think most strippers attitudes towards themselves are that good either (witness the kind of guys they date/support). The most prolific posters on this board are an exception, but I think part of what they are seeing is what they want to strippers to be (and thus validating themselves) not what strippers really are.