SOME IMAGES NSFW. REPEAT. NSFW.
On the upside, NO KATE HARDING!
So, before the pukefest at Chateau JB, we were marveling over the wisdom of Emily Yoffe, who writes as Dear Prudence over at slate.com.
The first letter in the column was rather interesting, too.
My only daughter recently came out to me as a stripper. For years she had said she worked in a standard office job. I feel as if I’ve been slapped in the face for all the years she lied to her father and me. I love her so much and this revelation has turned my world upside down. I had to tell my husband and he is furious and refuses to talk to her. Not only am I unsure as how to take this, but I don’t know how to handle my husband. I don’t want my family torn apart by this and I do not support her career choice. Help?
I wonder if Mom and Dad have seen this?
http://now.msn.com/stripper-posts-picture-to-reddit-showing-cash-she-says-she-earned-in-tips
THAT’S ONE NIGHT. And perfectly legal, in case Mom and Dad need reminding. Kind of like, oh, working for Enron or Lehman’s, except without devastating the retirement plans and savings of all the employees, and basically destroying the economy.
Bankers? Okie-dokie!
Strippers? Good god almighty NO WAY!!!
Why not? What, exactly is the objection to young ladies displaying their bodies?
Nothing to see here, right? Rapey rape rape protesters. Or whatever. All’s good here.
Mr. Putin, you sir, are an asshole. Here are my tits to prove it!
All y’all are assholes in the Ukraine. Let me paint my breasts to demonstrate how so!
Fur is bad! Here are some more naked ladies to make the point!
Female genital mutilation is bad. Let me soak my crotch in corn syrup and jello powder to prove it! Circumcision? What’s that? Shut up already. We’re only protesting the mutilation of GIRLS. Penis owners will have to take care of themselves. Jello dick, anyone?
Bullfighting is bad. More boobs!
Cellophane packaging is bad? Wait…wha?!?! Oh never mind. Boobies!!!
We need more bicycle lanes. For naked riders with piss poor attitudes, apparently.
Uhm, I have no idea. Something in SanFrancisco is bad. Maybe that bush? Who knows.
So all that shit is fine. Empowering even. Rah! You go grrrrrrrl!
This is good. Oh yeah.
This is even better.
This is nigh unto perfect!
But this!
OH HOLD UP NOW! WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?
What is the difference between all the pictures that precede the one above?
Desire. Specifically, male desire. The “protest” pictures are designed to taunt, to flaunt, to provoke. But not a positive reaction. On the contrary. They are aggressive and designed to enflame, but not in way that admires or invites desire. They are meant to aggravate rather than alleviate.
And you know, fair enough. If yanking your tits out makes you feel powerful, go for it. Bounce those puppies from here to Mars and back if you think it helps whatever cause you are supporting (although a good bra would offer hella more support!).
(That bra is hand’s down the best sports bra ever!!!)
But why should we admire, esteem, even valorize topless fur protesters and then bring down the wrath of pearl-clutching god on young ladies who decide to bare their breasts and bodies for the purpose of gratifying male desire?
Would Mom and Dad freak the fuck out if their daughter said she was a full-time activist for PETA and regularly posed naked? I doubt it.
Instead, she gets on a stage every night and dances to music while removing her clothes to the delight of her customers. Her male customers. Who pay her handsomely for the pleasure of seeing her body.
Being a stripper doesn’t make you a woman of loose morals. It doesn’t make you psychologically damaged. It doesn’t make you a crazy slut in any way, shape, or form. Are there crazy sluts who strip?
Oh hell yeah. Show me any job that doesn’t have a couple crazy sluts tossed in the mix. Whether you stock shelves at Walmart, work at an accounting firm or fold shirts at the Gap, there are gonna be crazy sluts.
Stripping is no different, but if you think every woman peeling off her pasties on a pyrotechnic stage is a crazy slut, you have got another think coming.
Things You Should Know About Strippers
- A third of them are paying tuition with that cash
- Most of them just want to dance
- 10 % of them are married
- 20% have dated customers
http://www.11points.com/Dating-Sex/11_Eye-Opening_Statistics_About_Strippers
In a way, it’s kind of understandable why Daddy isn’t thrilled his baby is stripping, but that kind of falls in line with Daddy not being thrilled that his baby might be getting used by a man and getting her heart broken. The football Captain she stripped for in private could be a douchebag, and maybe that lawyer she was dating, too.
Actually that lawyer for sure. Yech. No lawyers!! Jesus, have some standards.
(kidding)
Daddy needs to take a step back and consider the fact that a woman who is stripping to pay her tuition is, in fact, making a very smart investment. Her sexual appeal is at its peak, paying interest on loans SUCKS, and avoiding debt at all costs is a very smart thing to do, depending on the ROI, of course.
Now, let’s be clear. Debt, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, depending on the RETURN ON INVESTMENT you will get from taking on that debt load. An extended payment plan on a loan of $25 000 will result in a student repaying $52 000. $25 000/ year over the course of a four year degree and you are repaying $208 000!!! And when you used that money to buy yourself a women’s studies degree, which will earn you around $15 000/year as a Starbucks barista, and it will take you a good 14 years just to break even.
Hey! Good investment!
People are afraid of debt (except for all the people who SHOULD be – yes, I’m talking to you, idiot humanities majors), but that is actually a very short-sighted approach to wealth building.
I know, I know. Every head up their ass economic pundit out there disagrees with me. Well, guess what? They’re all wrong.
Here’s a couple of jerkwads you should NOT TRUST ever.
They’re a couple of Harvard economists who are pretty much singlehandedly responsible for the “austerity” measures that have been sweeping across the landscape of modern Western democracies, based on the idea that once you have a debt ratio that is more than 90% of GDP, growth slows dramatically.
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/meet_the_economics_whiz_who_outed_rr_partner/
Apparently, they never heard of the Marshall Plan.
So according to these two, the best way to get economic growth chugging is to restrict the supply of money, fail to invest in public infrastructure and let all the bridges and highways crumble into rubble, and pay down debt rather than get money circulating through job creation.
Kind of like saying the best way to ensure your home increases in value is to never do a lick of maintenance, but pay down the mortgage as fast as you can. Don’t use your money to replace the leaky roof and upgrade the furnace, just pay off that mortgage. There might be some good reasons to do that, but they won’t increase the value of your home. And if that leaky roof ends up as dry rot, you will actually have DECREASED the value of your home, although, hey, it will be paid off!
Harvard economists, like all economists everywhere (except maybe Captain Capitalism) can spit out some fancy-pants language and back that up with some even fancier mathematical models, but their advice comes down to bullshit the average person can see through in ten seconds.
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.ca/2013/04/is-us-cooking-books-on-gdp.html
Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts–as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8973.html
Sharp analysis and comprehensive data?
Oh, oops. They made a tiny mistake in that comprehensive data, and left out Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark. Spreadsheet fuck-up. Forgot to capture a few cells.
That can’t have any real impact, right? I mean Canada and Australia only contribute most of the natural resource commodities. How valuable can that be?
When that tiny little error is accounted for, instead of seeing -.01% growth at a 90% debt to GDP ratio, we get +2.2% growth rate.
Ooops!
Ask any person with a house if they should replace a leaky roof or pay down the mortgage in order to increase the value of their home, and you will be hardpressed to find anyone who doesn’t see the answer. Maybe if Harvard economists live in that house, you’ll see them running to the bank to pay the mortgage instead of hiring a roofing crew, but those people are clearly a special kind of genius.
Aside: ALWAYS HIRE A ROOFING CREW. Mr. JB, JudgyAsshole and my brother decided to replace the roof on our house last summer. Mr. JB ended up “managing”, which basically consisted of wandering around with a cold beer yelling at the guys to put four nails in every shingle, and JudgyAsshole and my brother did all the work. I’m not sure it ended up being any cheaper after they both insisted on being paid in cases of Scotch.
The difference between paying off the mortgage and fixing the roof has to do with time and value. The value of the house has nothing to do with how much is left on the mortgage and everything to do with whether or not the roof leaks. And the roof problem is not going to get better over time, it will get worse.
This brings us back to our stripper. She has something of value that is peaking, and that value is not going to get better over time, it will get worse. So sad, too bad.
Now, the traditional feminist explanation for why stripping is bad and de-valuing is that men always have the upper hand in the power equation between the sexes. That’s called “patriarchy”.
All men, everywhere, at all times, are more powerful than all women, everywhere, at all times. Well, except for all those women who are more powerful than men, but ssssssh. Don’t complicate the argument with facts. You know, women like Angela Merkel, Hilary Clinton, Dilma Rouseff, Melinda Gates, Jill Abramson, Sonia Ghandi, Michelle Obama, Christine Lagarde, Janet Napolitano, Sheryl Sandberg …..
http://www.forbes.com/power-women/
That is WHY the ladies have to pay the men to watch them take off their clothes.
Oh wait. No, it’s the other way around. Men pay women for the pleasure of seeing them dance in very little clothing. Who has the power again?
The reality is that young women, especially young fit women, have an enormous power they can exploit for significant gains, and that power makes an older generation of ladies very, very uncomfortable. Firstly, it does not fit with the powerless victim narrative and secondly, it is a power than wanes as times goes on. Sexual appeal follows an economics, and the value of one’s sexual appeal will depend enormously on the investment one puts in to it.
Which makes it impossible to escape the reality that women have quantifiable, tangible sexual value.
What did Prudence say to our stripper’s concerned mother?
I understand that hearing that your daughter makes her living by taking off her clothes for leering men is a shock, but think of what it took for your daughter to finally reveal the truth. You and her father need to talk out your hurt and pain together, so that you can then go to your daughter and jointly say how hard you know it must have been for her to tell you this and that you appreciate her honesty. Then you can start a conversation about her life. The point you want to make—and which surely she knows—is that her job is not a long-term sustainable one. Say that you two want to support her in helping to figure out how to integrate back into the more traditional workplace so that she can find a more satisfying career. So put aside the judgment and the outrage. Slapping down your daughter will only make her regret coming clean.
Except for the “leering men” bullshit, Prudie doesn’t do a bad job here. She gets one thing absolutely right: the job isn’t a long-term sustainable one. The value of the income-generating asset will depreciate over time, but that doesn’t make this a bad choice at all.
It all depends on how the income is being invested. Paying tuition is an excellent use of the money generated by a young woman’s sexual desirability. Just please.
Not economics.
Or law.
And by the looks of it, you should steer clear of Harvard.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 