Firstly sorry for being so quiet, I have been working on a pet project that I thought was going to be easy and turns out it is the most impossible concept I have ever had. I will keep working at it but not sure I will ever get an answer that I will be comfortable with sharing. However I felt today I needed to put a couple of things out there, so it has got me back into the flow of things. It is nice to get my head back round the day to day stuff rather than trying to fix the world.
So firstly good luck to @ethicalstripper who is up for a sexual freedom award, this is for her work with ELSC to mobilise change for dancers. She recently gave a view to a parliamentary committee discussing this and other things including Decrim of sex work. Because of the issues with licensing and social stigma it has been almost impossible for dancers to stand with their sex worker sisters because of the stigma that attaches and would feed back to the clubs. In the UK the strip industry has become more and more challenged and a minority of very loud voices has created an environment where clubs cannot allow any touching so clubs police their dancers. On a personal level I would say that any choice a person makes should be treated as valid and not policed by the moral minority.
We should stand together and fight to achieve personal freedoms but the way the industry is policed it makes it a major challenge. I can't think of a dancer I have met over the the last 25 years who would go ewwww and look down on prostitutes but because they don't want to have issues with the clubs they can't come out and say it. All sex workers are stigmatised to one degree or another and many cannot come out and say what they feel because of the judgemental nature of society. So yes TonyN stands up for Decrim because the right for a person to decide what they do with their body is a human right in my very no so humble opinion. Society is busy trying to divide various aspects of the sexual entertainment /adult businesses because they are easier to control if they are fighting each other.
So to all those workers out there no matter what aspect of the sexual entertainment industry you are in remember a divide front is a lot easier to combat. It will put words into others mouths to create a situation where people who should share common ground are pushed apart.
The strip industry needs to have its business practices and regulations reviewed, how this might be affected by Decrim I don't know but both parties dancers and prostitutes share more common ground because of stigma and portrayal by the press and other forms of media. Supporting Decrim should not preclude supporting change in the strip industry given the regulations clubs and dancers currently face. And certainly supporting reviewing and changing the strip industry legislation should not preclude supporting Decrim. I am just a humble man who feels the world has changed but we are still guided by laws written in a time when the church and it's morals had way to much influence on society. If people want to follow a religion I would never deny them that right but society has changed and it is time we recognised that and moved forward.
TonyN (tonyprince@acdcfan.com)
Showing posts with label stigma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stigma. Show all posts
Monday, November 9, 2015
Friday, July 19, 2013
Lap Dancer Versus Stripper
It's TonyN here and I am going to let Chasmal lead on the Leeds aspect. Today I want to pick up on a discussion I had on twitter with an ex dancer and a current one. Yes I know the title sounds like a porno film but it should give google some fun.
I made reference to strippers as a job title and I had it explained that not every dancer likes that term some prefer Lap dancer although not every dancer likes that term either. The reason being is the imagery and connotations that each term brings and yes there is a stigma that affects people for exercising a free choice, however Edie has done a fine piece about stigma on moronwatch (here) so would like to concentrate on the perspective that come up in discussions.
So I went to see striptease for the first time in a pub in Battersea and 90% of my personal experiences come from the London pub strip scene. In that time I grew up with the term stripper so it is probably natural that is the one I subconsciously identify with. So in the 80s' and early 90s' striptease was the pub and working mans club with the only exceptions being Carnival and Sunset Strip both of which were in Soho (London) and were laid out like cinemas were you paid once and could stay as long as you like. But in general the pubs didn't have stages and the dancers walked around. Come 1995 with Lap and Table Dancing coming in from America there was a push to change the industry from where the pub paid the dancers to bring customers in to dancers paying clubs to work there and one on one dancing being how money was earned.
So you have the walk around customer interaction compared to the bump and grind lap dance (dancers don't shoot me yet please). Both have been stigmatised stripper supposedly being cheap uneducated working class girls who can't earn money any other way and Lap Dancers supposedly up market drug addicts who will do anything for their next fix. Strangely this is still the view of places like Mumsnet where the feminist section will insult anyone who dares question their beliefs and if anyone seems to be posting stuff they can't answer they will soon get banned. And these myths keep on rolling on and on and on because people can't deal with the truth that there are dancers who are intelligent, articulate and educated who work both aspects of the industry.
So the discussion we were having on twitter did lead to the issue of pubs being more working class that the clubs or they targeted at a different audience. And for a while this was true but London adapted and many pubs moved to a more club like environment. But there are still the traditional strip pubs just that they have stages and dancers can't get close to the customers.And in the club we no longer have any physical contact and the concept of a lap dance as an accurate description of what goes on is laughable.
So stripper, lap dancer or exoctic dancer (which is how I first saw boards outside pubs in the 80s' describing what is going on) it still is a label and stigma. And yet I have met dancers from all over the world who are educated, intelligent and making a free choice. Dancers who have competed in the Olympics, have been highly qualified sports people, educated at some of the best universities in the world, who can talk about the higgs boson with authority and that are genuinely wonderful warm people. The problem being so long as people put labels on other people everyone suffers. Working Class or Upper Class. Single, married or divorced. They are people, not objects, with a wonderfully diverse nature that want to provide entertainment. Do people really believe that any label, any stigma is anything other than Objectification of the worst sort? As to are the pubs now still working class, not so much at least in london as there is a pretty big choice of where dancers can work be it the more traditional pub or the more club like pub dancers can work across the spectrum of venues and what may have been true 25 years ago has changed.
I know there was a difference between the pubs and the clubs in the 90s' and that the labels from that period still exist but I get annoyed because those labels still carry a stigma of belief even if the reality is complete different. When are people going to stop hating and start appreciating?
Okay so that is my take and it is only ever a personal opinion but I look forward to the day that the labels that are covers for hate speak are recognised for what they are.
TonyN (tonyprince@acdcfan.com)
I made reference to strippers as a job title and I had it explained that not every dancer likes that term some prefer Lap dancer although not every dancer likes that term either. The reason being is the imagery and connotations that each term brings and yes there is a stigma that affects people for exercising a free choice, however Edie has done a fine piece about stigma on moronwatch (here) so would like to concentrate on the perspective that come up in discussions.
So I went to see striptease for the first time in a pub in Battersea and 90% of my personal experiences come from the London pub strip scene. In that time I grew up with the term stripper so it is probably natural that is the one I subconsciously identify with. So in the 80s' and early 90s' striptease was the pub and working mans club with the only exceptions being Carnival and Sunset Strip both of which were in Soho (London) and were laid out like cinemas were you paid once and could stay as long as you like. But in general the pubs didn't have stages and the dancers walked around. Come 1995 with Lap and Table Dancing coming in from America there was a push to change the industry from where the pub paid the dancers to bring customers in to dancers paying clubs to work there and one on one dancing being how money was earned.
So you have the walk around customer interaction compared to the bump and grind lap dance (dancers don't shoot me yet please). Both have been stigmatised stripper supposedly being cheap uneducated working class girls who can't earn money any other way and Lap Dancers supposedly up market drug addicts who will do anything for their next fix. Strangely this is still the view of places like Mumsnet where the feminist section will insult anyone who dares question their beliefs and if anyone seems to be posting stuff they can't answer they will soon get banned. And these myths keep on rolling on and on and on because people can't deal with the truth that there are dancers who are intelligent, articulate and educated who work both aspects of the industry.
So the discussion we were having on twitter did lead to the issue of pubs being more working class that the clubs or they targeted at a different audience. And for a while this was true but London adapted and many pubs moved to a more club like environment. But there are still the traditional strip pubs just that they have stages and dancers can't get close to the customers.And in the club we no longer have any physical contact and the concept of a lap dance as an accurate description of what goes on is laughable.
So stripper, lap dancer or exoctic dancer (which is how I first saw boards outside pubs in the 80s' describing what is going on) it still is a label and stigma. And yet I have met dancers from all over the world who are educated, intelligent and making a free choice. Dancers who have competed in the Olympics, have been highly qualified sports people, educated at some of the best universities in the world, who can talk about the higgs boson with authority and that are genuinely wonderful warm people. The problem being so long as people put labels on other people everyone suffers. Working Class or Upper Class. Single, married or divorced. They are people, not objects, with a wonderfully diverse nature that want to provide entertainment. Do people really believe that any label, any stigma is anything other than Objectification of the worst sort? As to are the pubs now still working class, not so much at least in london as there is a pretty big choice of where dancers can work be it the more traditional pub or the more club like pub dancers can work across the spectrum of venues and what may have been true 25 years ago has changed.
I know there was a difference between the pubs and the clubs in the 90s' and that the labels from that period still exist but I get annoyed because those labels still carry a stigma of belief even if the reality is complete different. When are people going to stop hating and start appreciating?
Okay so that is my take and it is only ever a personal opinion but I look forward to the day that the labels that are covers for hate speak are recognised for what they are.
TonyN (tonyprince@acdcfan.com)
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