Which is what makes New Orleans interesting, because it is quite common to see teenagers publicly drinking - there are bars known as teen bars, and in the Carnival parades out in the suburbs, you’ll seen packs of teen girls walking up and down the parade routes ahead of the parades, drinking strong drinks together. Having grown up in Alabama with all the bullshit cotillion stuff, Mardi Gras is a whole other animal.
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I often hesitate to post to this thread; not my place, and I don’t want to be obnoxious. But I do come across a lot of interesting feminism-related debates during my political news obsessing.
As well as the Bourbon Street thing, there are also interesting arguments on Twitter today about F1 “Grid Girls” and a big blowup around Rose McGowan losing her shit with a trans woman.
SWERF and TERF seems to be a hot topic right now.
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Regarding Rose McGowan, she was heckled and she yelled back and security had to remove the heckler. Its being painted as transphobic and I think thats a shame. Don’t come to book readings and scream at authors. Its a bad look on anyone.
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There have been rumblings in the trans community about Rose saying TERFie things for months; there’s history under this. And Rose is throwing petrol on the fire today…
“Paid”?
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I’m more troubled that she wants an apology from the audience. How does that even work?
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Heckling a survivor ain’t cool. Thats all I’m going to say.
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There was more than one survivor in that conversation.
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Yes, but you still don’t do it, regardless of your reasons.
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An example of how a false equivalency can be used to make it seem that things are worse for men:
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Okay, I’ll bite. In the grand scheme of things, how are fast-casual restaurants like Chili’s (or is it Chili’s specifically?) a more regrettable blot on the pinafore of humanity than your garden-variety strip club? I’ve been to both venues (neither by my own choice, come to think of it) and been served some halfhearted pandering meant to appeal to some of my least-civilized appetites by underpaid students busting their asses for an exploitative boss in both places. In my experience, the soundtrack is slightly better at the titty bar, and the upholstery is slightly less suspect at the Chili’s. I suspect I’d rather work at the Chili’s, since I don’t imagine I’d attract the high-rolling tippers even at Jumbo’s Clown Room.
I’m sure I’m missing a larger ethical point, but y’all are my pals, and I hope you’ll enlighten me.
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Maybe I wasn’t fully serious, but I wasn’t fully joking either.
I’ve been subjected to a lot of nimbyism about strip clubs, casinos, etc moving in and destroying communities or whatever, and I’m unconvinced. Just as long as they’re all in one place, I’m fine with it. When I posted that comment, I just had a weird thought that maybe nimbyism worked in reverse. If fast casual restaurants came into a vice district, would they be planting a flag that the neighborhood is all of a sudden “family friendly”? Of course, this is all highly theoretical.
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The Chili’s is a chain store. The owners may well be hard pressed to even point out that location on a map of Bourbon Street. And there will be precious little about it specific to Bourbon Street – more likely the menu will be virtually identical to those of the Chili’s in Boston and San Antonio and Kalamazoo. Thus, it’ll make a Bourbon Street a little less Bourbon Street.
A strip club… they can be same-y, but they tend to be independently owned (or be made to seem to be). Independent businesses generally make more of an effort to be part of the neighbourhood.
There’s a PK Dick story about a society where chain stores and mass production have been encouraged by the government to ensure everyone’s lived experience is similar, no matter their physical location, and to discourage travel, in the hopes that a populace deprived of an exchange of novel ideas will be more placid and pliant. Something to consider.
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As someone who last a beloved aunt to breast cancer, fuck cancer.
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Honestly, I’d rather have a strip club vs. a Chilis because a Chilis is a corporate behemoth that has a tendency to destroy localized competition. A strip club is going to be a locally owned and run. Plus, strip clubs tend to be surrounded by other kinds of locally owned clubs (at least here in ATL) with lots of gay bars being around the same community.
I’m not saying that strip clubs can be problematic, they can be. But they also tend to be more tied into the local economy than a chilis where more of the money are going to be sent out of the local economy to corporate. Chain places also tend to benefit from local and state governments pushing community destroying tax cuts, usually not the case with strip clubs.
Plus, what @LearnedCoward said regarding only partially being serious.
Because chain places also destroy local economies as well.
Well, that dynamic is playing out right now up on Cheshire Bridge Road, with strip clubs and gay bars are being shut down due to rising rents as new apartments are being built up there.
I’m fairly certain JG Ballard covered some similar territory, although based on various forms of violence in a society that socially enforced corporate forms of mass production and consumption… Seems like that was a theme of Kingdom Come, anyway.
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It has already been said, but I find the Corporate Restaurants are just the rolling Blight of Generica.
When I travel, I try to find the “local flavor” (be that what it may be) and there were two sites I would visit that literally had no non-chain restaurants open for dinner. It was a 45 minute drive to get to something that wasn’t in every other state I traveled to.
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I’m not convinced. At best we might use that argument to support a local independent regular-type bar, like Sam Malone’s Cheers (if it were a real independent bar owned by a real retired ballplayer who also works there), in place of a… well, I don’t drink, so I don’t frequent bars, but if there were a corporate chain of bars (like a McDonalds for watered-down beer or some such) where most of the profits go to enrich shareholders somewhere, then we might have a comparison worth discussing.
But strip clubs might not be directly comparable to dive bars, and even less comparable to chain restaurants. I guess it’s nice to know the revenues of the strip club directly benefit Lefty Patterson, the owner, and the ladies and bouncers and bartenders therein, rather than some shareholders somewhere out of state. Hey, how much do strippers typically make hourly? I don’t mean the tips, which I hope (somewhat forlornly) that they get to keep 100% for themselves, but rather the rate the club pays them? Is it hourly, or per dance? Do the club’s revenues only come from cover charges and expensive drink minimums?
Whatever. The dancers (like the waitstaff and dishwashers and busers and cashiers and managers at a Chili’s) get paid locally and spend their wages however they want. The strip club owner (always assuming, as I do, that they’re an upstanding local entrepreneur and not, like, the mob) spends their money in the local economy, too, but I still don’t see a compelling ethical argument behind supporting the Mom and Pop who own The Seventh Veil over the LLC that controls a dozen locations of Scores.
Economics aside, is there no feminist argument anymore against strip clubs?
Hmm. Do any exist wherein the dancers are also shareholders? That’d be neat.
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That depends, though. Who runs it, what’s the clientel, etc. I’d argue that the infamous/famous Clermont Lounge here in ATL is as much a wonderful dive bar as it is a strip club, and the strippers are… unique. At the Clermont is the legendary Blondie:
She’s known for both crushing beer cans between her tits and for her poetry.
Wikipedia on Clermont:
And of course, you can make the argument that many strip clubs are somewhat “corporate” in that they are run by crime syndicates, as you indicate. And of course, many strippers experience sexual harassment/violence in their place of work, but so do waitresses at fast casual places like Chilis… I’d be interested to see stats for reported sexual harassment and compare that to people’s experiences of sexual harassment in both places, too. Sexual harassment is pretty common in restaurant work, at least from my experiences 20 years ago are any indication. I’d suspect that most strippers also make far more than waitresses.
BTW, I’m not trying to necessarily pick on Chilis… it was just the example that popped into my head, because it was the most recent fast casual place I ate at. But that makes them even more comparable to corporate chains, I’d argue, because the only think that separates the two is how they are defined by the law.
I think that corporate chain places are less likely to be a place of community involvement and support except on a very superficial level. The goal is to get as many warm bodies in and out on a given day, and employees and even management might be more likely to be from elsewhere or just flat out incentivized to put corporate concerns over local needs.
As for wages, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that corporate chains pay less when they can, and try to skimp on benefits by having the majority of their work force being part time workers. The manager or franchisee can also claim they are just following corporate dictates, too, so they are less responsible for the individuals they hire. It’s the dehumanizing aspects of corporate ownership that I most detest… and yes strip clubs can dehumanize their workers, but as the protest in NOLA indicates, not always…
Absolutely. But there are also feminist arguments in support of sex workers across the board, especially from the third wave (see Kathlene Hannah of Bikini Kill).
As a matter of fact, there are such things:
Much like feminist porn production companies…
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That was great! I wonder how many more there are now. Serious bummer what happened to the Lusty Lady, though. Not because of mismanagement or anything, but rather, according to Wikipedia,
The landlord, Roger Forbes (part of Deja Vu Consulting Inc. which by that time owned almost every strip club in San Francisco with the exception of Crazy Horse, Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre, and Nob Hill) refused to renew the lease after attempts to re-negotiate the rent failed.
Now there’s a guy I think I could hate.
The big and most obvious difference is that strip clubs, unlike restaurants, are built and operated for the express purpose of objectifying women, and subjecting them to perhaps the most transactional and unhealthiest nonviolent interactions with men this side of actual prostitution. It’s good that at least some strippers can make a decent wage, because holy shit do they earn hazard pay.
I get that your typical stripper probably understands what she’s in for in a typical workday, and maybe plenty of them enter the field with their eyes wide open, as opposed to lots of minimum-wage high schoolers who get their first food service job without ever expecting the leers and buttpinches and outright abuse that any random customer (or manager) might choose to deploy at any moment.
But just as I can support troops without supporting actual military action, I can support sex workers without supporting the actual industry they work in. I don’t think I’ve ever met a stripper who wasn’t a perfectly lovely person, and what they do with their time is certainly none of my business. But if I offered a million dollars to any given stripper (or, for that matter, any given fast food worker) on the condition that they leave their industry entirely for a decade…
Well, what do I know. Probably a bunch of strippers might turn me down. I can’t imagine any fast food worker doing so.
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Having talked to some real, actual strippers, I think you’d find a lot of them would argue you this one. A lot of it has to do with how the places are run and whether they lean towards straight clothing removal or burlesque.
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Dancers frequently actually have to pay to dance. It’s called a stage fee or a house fee. And they usually have to share tips with bartenders and other staff.
Edit: Yes I’ve know several strippers, including one heading up some of the movement to unionize specifically in NOLA.
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