Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Christmas 2007

Some highlights from this Christmas:

Genghis Khan brand lamb flavored caramels, supplied by a family member who is visiting from Japan. I didn't sample them. It's enough to know that they exist. Actually tasting them would be carrying broadmindedness too far.

A transsexual sibling explaining that "I was born an asshole, but I transitioned to a bitch." I was intrigued by the ideas expressed in this sentence. First, that being an asshole is a seperate phenomenon from being a bitch. Second, that both are inherent, rather than acquired. And third, that altering gender causes one to become the other.

Another sibling accompanying herself on the piano and singing some rather beautiful Christmas songs by Joaquim Rodrigo.

The young, nubile, female members of the family modeling some clothes from the 1960s that someone found in an attic. Skimpy halter tops, hot pants with one inch inseams, flamboyant exagerated bellbottoms, etc. Some one promptly labeled the garments "skank clothes". On my nieces, the clothes didn't seem so much skanky as adorable, but that could just be me. Nieces have that effect on me. Clothing worn by nieces is never, ever skanky.

Yorkshire pudding.

In my capacity as an ex-mechanic, and accompanied by a current mechanic, leaning over the engine of a 78 Triumph Spitfire and explaining to the teenage girl with the bright pink hair that if the car sits too long without running, the gas oxidizes and gums up the float valves, causing the engine to flood. I commented later that she should have gotten an MGB instead of a Spitfire. That way, she could solve any fuel delivery problems by crawling under the back of the car and banging on the electric fuel pump with a rock. (A rock is the standard tool for this job.)

Someone explaining how her heterosexual son had joined a college fraternity that was one third gay and suddenly started buying clothes that matched.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Strip Clubs & Brothels

Historically, there's a strong connection between music and sex work. The prostitutes of Cadiz, the oldest city in Western Europe, had a reputation for being skilled musicians and dancers. The Romans described their dancing as ad teram tremulo descendant clune puellae, which Ned Sublette translates as "shaking their booties down to the ground". They were also known for their singing and their castanets. Their singing and dancing teachers doubled as procurers or pimps.

After the rise of Islam, the Arab tradition of trained singing slave girls spread through the Muslim world. The best had a repertoire of hundreds of song, and were capable of improvising on a single song for an hour or more. And as slave girls, they were available to their owners for sexual purposes.

Listening to enjoyable music is associated with higher dopamine levels in the brain, particularly in the nucleus accumbens. (Cocaine does the same thing.) Higher dopamine levels in this area are associated with elevated mood. The increase in dopamine levels created by listening to music may increase sexual arousal, or it may make women seem more attractive. (This is speculation. I don't know of any research on this.)

Traditionally, the place where men could find both music and sex was the brothel. The connection between brothels and music is so strong that brothels are associated with the rise of both jazz in New Orleans and tango in Buenos Aires. Brothels offered a private place for men to relax, drink alcohol, enjoy entertainment, including music, and pay for female company.

As Priscilla Alexander has pointed out, an increase in the independence of women in a society is usually accompanied by an increase in the restrictions on prostitutes. Brothels, which were mostly owned by women, were effectively banned in the US by changes in the law early in the twentieth century. Although a some bars hired musicians and served as hangouts for prostitutes, there were no longer businesses that hired musicians in order to attract customers for prostitutes.

In it's current form, the strip club functions as a brothel without prostitutes. Strip clubs give men a place to relax, buy alcohol, listen to recorded music, and watch dancers. Customers can pay for lap dances or conversations with the strippers. Just as brothels had rooms where prostitutes earn money by having sex with customers, strip clubs generally have booths or special rooms where customers and strippers can interact with more privacy, and strippers can charge more money for their dances. And just as brothels earned money from the sale of alcohol and by collecting a percentage of the prostitutes earnings, strip clubs charge more than regular bars for alcohol, and collect house fees and a percentage of dance fees from their strippers.

The similarity between brothels and strip clubs is so strong that club owners have to be careful to avoid hiring strippers who are actually prostitutes. And many male customers view strip clubs as actual brothels; they expect to be able to buy the sexual services that brothels once offered. If club owners are careless about enforcing anti-prostitution rules, they may find that their club has become a de facto brothel. A few owners even encourage this because the prostitution brings in extra customers, although this tends to attract attention from the police.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

5th Annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

I'm almost three days late with this post. I offer the policeman's excuse for arriving late at the scene of the crime; I had to stop for doughnuts on the way.

Rather than write about violence in an immediate way, I'm going to approach it indirectly. Belle de Jour (post labeled Mardi, Décembre 18), tells about informing a man she was in bed with (but not having sex with) that she is Jewish. His response was
Get out of my bed, filthy woman. You killed fucking Jesus.
To which she replied
This from the man who made a stripper cry? Whatever.
After some further conversation, they both fell asleep, still in the same bed.

Compare this with her post five days earlier (Jeudi, Décembre 13). She was responding to a British TV show on sex blogs. Among the many fuck yous in her rant was the following:
Fuck you, heteronormative journocunts judging who is a proper feminist and who is not while contentedly popping sprogs here, there and everywhere in north London.
(I'm not British, but "popping sprogs" appears to mean giving birth.)

Why did she respond to the Jews killed Jesus libel with humor, but get angry at lesser libels on the TV show? It's true the fact that the guy who accused her of killing Jesus was a self-admitted arrogant prick making an arrogant prick joke, and that Belle De Jour tends to find arrogant prick humor charming. (And truthfully, I've engaged in a fair amount of arrogant prick humor myself.) But why didn't she respond to the TV show with the same good humor?

As a Jew, Belle de Jour is well defended against Jews killed Jesus. Anti-Semitism is intellectually unfashionable. The various libels against Jews that have been created in the past two millennia have been thoroughly debunked. Anyone who tries to kill, harm, or commit a criminal act against Jews in the UK can reasonably expect to be punished. Critically, being Jewish does not place a person in a class of people that society is unwilling to protect.

Belle de Jour's anger is directed at feminists who want to deny her the right to call herself a feminist. Because, as she puts it, she does something for money that most people do for free, there is something wrong with her, and this disqualifies her from membership in feminism. What is wrong with her is that she willingly has sex for money, and thereby participates in an act her critics consider violence against women.

Feminism has been the force that brought society to deal with issues of violence against women. Feminists are felt to speak with some authority on the subject. When feminists accuse Belle de Jour of complicity in violence against women, they are taken far more seriously than someone who accuses her or her coreligionists of killing Jesus. And by stigmatizing her with violence against women, they effectively prevent her and other prostitutes from using feminist discourse to deal with their own concerns about violence. They block prostitutes from using what has become the primary means for advancing womens' rights. Not only that, but they make it difficult for prostitutes to advance their own rights outside of feminism by bringing the condemnation of feminism to bear on any such attempt. Any attempt to advance prostitutes' rights is viewed as an attack on women.

Anti-Semitism is not harmless, but it is effectively countered in Western societies. Anti-Sex Worker bias is alive and well in our society, and supported by feminism. That's not going to change as long as sex workers can be excluded from the ranks of feminists, because sex work is thought of in terms of female workers, and feminists who are not sex workers and are biased against sex workers strongly influence society's discussions of women.

Academic research on sex work has tended to focus on trying to find out what's wrong with sex workers. Usually this focuses on drug use and abusive relationships, primarily sexual abuse. Surveys of the literature show little support for drug use as a predictive factor; in plain English, overall the research doesn't show women going into sex work as a result of using drugs. The link with sexual abuse is weak. People who go into sex work as adults tend to have experienced the same level of sexual abuse as the general population. People who enter sex work as minors are more likely to have experienced sexual abuse, but they are also more likely to have run away from home, and the higher likelihood of becoming sex workers may have to do with job opportunities rather than a psychological predisposition caused by sexual abuse.

In spite of this, academics and writers continue to assume that people become sex workers because of mental pathologies. Researchers continue to look for links between mental pathology and sex work, and authors of technical papers sometimes claim that the literature supports a link when this is factually untrue. Many authors and researchers explicitly state that they assume that sex work is violence against women; they accept the feminist viewpoint uncritically. Most researchers continue to look for a link, in spite of the consistent failure to find it in the past.

Prostitutes themselves state that the determining factors in their decision to become prostitutes are money, excitement, independence, and flexibility, in that order. (My source is Priscilla Alexander's essay Prostitution: Still a Difficult Issue for Feminists, in the book Sex Work, edited by Delacoste and Alexander.) Since this is what sex workers say about themselves, it would seem reasonable to research these to determine how strong their influence is and how they interact with personality, economics, moral beliefs, social context, and any number of other factors. To my knowledge, no one has tried to do this. As long sex work is considered to be a result of mental pathology, it's probable that anyone trying another line of investigation would be accused of not taking the problem seriously.

As long as Belle de Jour and other sex workers can be excluded from the ranks of feminists, society can avoid taking them seriously. Their concerns can be ignored, their safety can be subjugated to the whims of abolitionists, and their sexuality can be relegated to the pathological. Academic researchers can continue to futilely search for links between entering sex work and drug use and sexual abuse. And all of this will continue to hinder attempts to change laws and reform law enforcement to deal with violence against sex workers.

As long as sex work is viewed primarily as a female occupation, and as long as feminism can block serious discussion of sex work by excluding sex workers from its own ranks, society will continue to class sex workers as a group of people that it is unwilling to protect.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Body Modification

A slender, tapering neck is a symbol of femininity. There's a tribe in Burma where women wear rings around their necks that lift the head and stretch the neck. This exagerates the length of the neck. More and more rings are added until the vertabrae seperate. At that point, the neck is no longer capable of supporting the head. The women will die if the rings are removed. And this is all for the sake of accentuating the slender, tapered feminine neck.

There are ethnic groups where young women have a hole cut in the lower lip and a wooden plug inserted into the hole. As the lip streches around the plug, it is replaced with a larger plug. Larger and larger plugs are inserted until the lower lip is stretched around a plug the size of a saucer.

In western societies, women commonly shave their legs and armpits. Women wear makeup in public that makes their cheeks and lips red, which mimics sexual arousal. However, removing hair from the pubis, which is normally visible only when a woman removes her clothes in private, is considered unnatural and somewhat slutty.

"Professional" attire for women has come to include high heeled shoes. These tend to cause progressive, irreversable damage to the knees and ankles. Over years, the damage can accumulate to the point that walking becomes painful. However, cosmetic sugery, even if it causes no lasting health problems, is considered unhealthy and a sign that the person having surgery is suffering from a body image problem.

Body modification of one form or another is almost universal. It occurs in all societies, and it is associated with group membership. Members of a group tend to talk, dress, and look the same. Gang members get similar tattoos, young male Salvadorian immigrants in the US cover their closely shaved heads with baseball caps, etc. Taking on the appearance of another group makes people feel awkward. Guys who don't normally wear "business attire" complain when they have to wear suits. Put the average anglo in a salsero's open shirt, and he feels rediculous.

Women who get breast surgery often report that they feel better about their bodies afterwards. Not sexier, or more attractive to men, just better. Having larger breasts means fitting into a group where larger breasts are part of the group image. Not having appropriately sized breasts means feeling like an outcast.
A local cosmetic surgeon advertises that breast augumentation is for "Women who are bothered by the feeling that their breasts are too small."

A person doesn't actually have to have contact with the group they want to belong to. The fans of a rock band may imitate the band's look even though most fans will never speak to a member of the band. High end fashion shoe manufacturers give shoes to movie stars because they know that if the movie star is photographed in the shoes, thousands of women who have never met the star will buy the shoes. Most of the teenagers who buy tennis shoes associated with a basketball star will never play on a basketball team.

A combination of diet, exercise, and genetics gives female movie stars figures that most women will never be able to have. Part of the reason that movie stars earn as much as they do is that people identify with them; they feel like they belong to the same social group. Since the movie star defines the group, people who don't resemble the star become outsiders. Given the stubborness with which our bodies retain their unfashionable shapes, that can only be remedied with surgery.

Women may get cosmetic surgery in order to fit into a professional group. Before silicone was banned in breast augumentation, some people complained that Hollywood parties had so much silicone that guests were in danger of being punctured. Starlets who wanted to get work wanted to look like someone a producer would hire, hence the preponderance of silicone.

When girls start working in porn, they often get work because they don't look like porn chicks: they don't have the heavy makeup or the boob jobs. While they're new and getting lots of attention, this works. Everyone likes the "fresh" or "unspoiled" look. After a few months they stop being new and stop getting the attention. In spite of the fact that they get praised for having the natural look, they start wearing heavier makeup and frequently get boob jobs. When they stop being in demand and their natural look is no longer getting jobs, they start to want to look like porn chicks instead of the girl next door; i.e. they want to look like someone a porn producer would hire. When looking inexperienced no longer gets jobs, porn chicks want to look experienced.

There's no difference between this and professional women wearing high heels because it looks "professional". The intent is to signal that the woman belongs to a group that can do a particular type of job. Women who look the part are hirable.

The Burmese tribeswomen described at the beginning have to stretch their necks in order to be included in the group of adult females. Tribeswomen in other areas have to wear saucer-sized plugs in their lower lips to accomplish the same thing. Western females have to shave their legs and armpits and simulate sexual arousal with makeup in order to be included with adult, socialized women. Movie actresses, porn performers, and strippers signal employability with enhanced breasts. Professional women do the same thing with high heels.

As a large scale phenomenon, body modification can't be explained by referring to unhealthy body image or other mental pathologies. People modify their bodies in order to signal their membership in social groups.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Teachers: Everything Wrong

I've had three different Taiji teachers. After I had studied with the first for a while, he sent me to study with the second. After a year or so, the second turned his classes over to the third. The third, although not the best of the three, is the one I think of as my sifu. When I talk about "my teacher", I'm talking about him.

I studied with him for seven years. He wasn't large, but he was rather intimidating. While I was studying with him, he would walk up to me occasionally, thrust his face into mine, scowl so that his bushy eyebrows were knotted together, and tell me "You're doing everything wrong." He didn't mean that the technique I was practicing at the moment was wrong, he meant that everything I did in Taiji was wrong. In essence, he was telling me that I was a failure as a Taiji student.

He continued doing this even after I became one of his more advanced students. At the end of the time I studied with him, he was relying on me to teach the less advanced students and to run the class when he wasn't there. But he was still telling me that I was doing everything wrong. He didn't do this with anyone else. It was directed solely at me.

After seven years, I stopped studying with him because I had returned to school and didn't have time for lessons. However, I continued practicing every day. And everyday, when I started practicing, I would see his scowling face and bushy eyebrows in my mind's eye and hear his voice telling me that I was doing everything wrong. Sometimes this happened only at the beginning of practice, and sometimes it happened throughout practice. But it always happened at least once each time I practiced.

After three years of practicing on my own, I came to the realization one day that I was doing everything wrong. After ten years of study, I started learning to do everything all over again. I never saw my teacher's face again, or heard his voice.

I still practice every day, and I'm still doing everything wrong. This was what he taught me; how to practice without being right.

Monday, December 10, 2007

My Community

Girls who perform in porn videos often find themselves joining a community. They tend to work with the same fifteen to twenty fellow performers and the same small group of directors through out their careers. They commonly share an apartment with another performer. They borrow money from each other to cover rent and turn to other members of the porn community in other emergencies.

Porn careers tend to last no more than two years. Girls who maintain ties with their families and previous community are able to move back to these communities without too much trouble. However, many girls no longer have ties with family or previous community, either because of ruptures that occurred prior to entering porn or because the move into porn itself caused a rupture. When they decide that they want to leave porn, they have no support group to replace their friends and support group in porn. This makes it difficult to leave, and girls who do leave often come back temporarily. The transition from porn to civilian life often involves moving back and forth more than once.

People in porn have noticed this pattern, and there's a group of people in porn who mock the girls who leave. This mockery can be summarized as "You're a whore. You'll be back." The reasoning behind the mockery is that as whores, the girls are incapable of financial management, or don't have and can't acquire the job skills necessary to support themselves, or they won't be able to earn enough to support their drug habits.

Porn justifies itself through free choice; the idea that individuals are capable of making choices that are in their own best interest, and should be allowed to do so, even when they choose to buy porn. Porn defends itself against accusations of abusing its female performers by recourse to the same concept of free choice; the girls are legal adults capable of making their own decisions.

However, the You're a whore; you'll be back message directly contradicts this. By denying the girls ability to choose to leave porn, they deny that the girls are capable of free choice. And that plays into the hands of porn's attackers, by acknowledging that the girls can't leave porn unless they are rescued. By infantilizing the performers, the people in porn who make fun of them are, in effect, admitting to exploiting the performers' supposed child-like state for their own profit. They're pleading guilty to the accusation that porn exploits its performers.

For performers who want to leave porn but don't have a community to return to, there is a group within porn's attackers who offer a new community; the community of Christian believers. Christian ideology explicitly involves redemption and acceptance of sinners, criminals, and deviants. However, just as the porn community's ideology of free choice is contradicted by some of its members, so the Christian ideology of redemption and forgiveness is contradicted by some of its members. Their attitude could be summed up as "Jesus died for my sins, but not yours", or more succinctly, "You're a whore. Go back."

It's one thing to recognize the hypocrisy in this. It's another thing to think that recognizing it makes me superior. That sense of superiority it the mark of Cain, something we share. Both whores and the people who mock and abuse whores hold up a mirror, and the reflection in the mirror is what I feel superior towards. They are my community. Their mistakes are my mistakes.

Hookers with Responsibilities

The prostitutes who service foreign tourists in countries where sex tourism is common typically come from impoverished, rural areas. Their families are poor and often indebted. The prostitutes send a significant part of their income to their families. It's not uncommon for families to be supported mainly by a prostitute daughter.

In order to ensure a regular income, the girls often have to give in to client demands and work without condoms. This means that they are regularly infected by a range of STDs, and they have a relatively high rate of HIV infection. If they placed the welfare of their clients first, they would never work without condoms, regardless of client demands. But they obviously place the welfare of their families above the welfare of their clients by working without condoms, thus increasing the income they send to their families and increasing the rate at which clients are infected.

It's common for the girls to continue working after they discover that they're HIV positive, and to continue working without condoms. People are shocked when they discover that, but if the girls stop working, or work only with condoms, they won't able to support their families. They still have the same obligations, even if they have an HIV infection.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Missing posts

5150 is deleting posts again. If I recall correctly, the last one she removed involved the relationship between being a whore and dancing. It was a good post, well thought out and written. I suppose it was taken down because it contained an element of condemnation towards her job, and what seemed to be an undercurrent of self-directed anger.

I assume that putting up and taking down the post are the result of her ambivalence about how being a dancer defines her. The post told a story that she either decided she didn't want to tell us, or didn't want to tell herself.

5150 says that she's Manic Depressive I, and she calls herself "5150", a term that seems to be taken from a clause in a California law that allows a person to be forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric unit. Sudden, overwhelming changes in emotions make the world, and particularly relationships, unpredictable and frightening. Our emotions tell us where we stand in a relationship, and unpredictable changes make formerly safe relationships seem menacing or dangerous.

This affects a writer's relationship with her readers. Making the post, admitting the internalized stigma of being a whore, took a certain amount of courage. Taking it down, fighting against the internal self image, also took some courage. There's no need to justify or defend either action. To live with this confusion, to struggle with the inner directed anger of whoredom, without knowing what else you might be or how else to exist, is an uncomfortable, unhappy thing. It's easy to say that you don't have to defend yourself, but in the midst of unhappiness, it's almost impossible not to try to defend yourself. Even so, unhappiness means that you're alive and aware, and can create something beautiful.

Even if it's just a small, momentary spark of courage.

Self Image

I studied Taiji for several years with a couple of black teachers. The other students were almost entirely dark skinned: mostly African-American, with some Africans, Filipinos, and Indians thrown in. I'm Caucasian, and paler than the average Caucasian.

I came home from a Taiji class one night, looked in the mirror, and was struck by how sick I looked. I immediately started checking different parts of my body for signs of illness. Stomach? No nausea. Joints? No aches. Head? No headache or dizziness. After a couple of minutes I realized that I was fine and the image in the mirror was my normal pale self. I had gotten so used to brown faces that my own face seemed ghastly.

It only took two hours of being different for me to start reacting to myself in negative ways.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Primal

The pornographer Mike South is approaching age fifty, and blogs:
I have always had a soft spot in my heart for strippers, hookers and porn chicks, when you get close to them, become an insider there’s a real beauty in their honesty, they see the primal side of us, even themselves, and they embrace it.
Primal means fundamental. What's primal is courtship, penetration and ejaculation, a swelling belly, and a kid being pushed head first out of the womb. Raising kids is primal. So is growing old.

At the primal level, we're all the same. There are no sex workers. The primal happens whether we embrace it or not, which means that sex workers can't make a living off of it.

Paying a stripper for an elaborate sexual display or an escort for expertly performed services isn't primal. There are societies were people live without these things. In our society, these things are assigned to the hidden and shameful. Sex workers make their living by making it possible for us to do the things we don't admit that we do. It's not just sex. We expose them to our contempt, our dishonesty, our mix of insecurity and vanity, and occasionally our violence. When they take off their clothes, we take off our inhibitions.

I'm doing what I do with you because I value it more than the money I'm giving you, more than the purity you contaminate. I pay you to be kind without pretending to be good. As long as your kindness is hidden, I can pretend to be good without having to be kind.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Teachers: The Mugger

When I started studying martial arts, one of the black belts I worked with was a man who had been a mugger some years previously. He had paid rent and bought groceries by mugging people. He explained to me that, as a mugger, he always worked with two other muggers. If he worked alone, there was a risk of being hurt by one of his intended victims. If he worked with one other person, there was a chance that the other mugger would try to keep all the proceeds for himself. But with three muggers, the other two muggers could gang up on the one mugger who tried to keep everything for himself.

At some point, he realized that his way of life was going to kill him, and he got a job at a service station and started working for a mechanics certificate. By the time I got to know him, he was one of the calmer black belts. His techniques weren't as sharp as some of the other students, and some people talked about him in a dismissive way, but I respected him more than anyone except my teachers. He knew, more deeply than the rest of us could hope to know, that self-defense has nothing to do with fighting.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Dating strippers for self-improvement

I got the following link from Avalon's blog. It links to a site advertising an ebook titled "How To Date a Stunning Stripper". In a bold black font with screaming yellow highlighting, the web site states:
Success with a stripper will change the way others view you, and more importantly, it will forever change the way you view yourself.
Seriously, no. If people think you're a dork and you start dating a stunning stripper, they'll think you're a dork dating a stunning stripper.

More importantly, it won't change the way you view yourself. You may get a temporary boost from dating a stripper, but your insecurities will still be there, and eventually you're going to realize that dating a stripper didn't change anything and you're still the same person you were before with the same problems. If you really must go through with this, buy a sports car and go through the process with an inanimate object, rather than making some girl's life miserable by using her in your unsuccessful attempt to compensate for your perceived inadequacies.

If you need to validate yourself by dating strippers, you're not secure enough to date strippers. You're not going to be able to deal with the fact that your stripper girlfriend earns her living by dancing naked in other men's laps while the men get aroused. And if you can't deal with that, how are you going to deal with the fact that she's human and occasionally she's going to find some of her customers attractive and enjoy dancing naked in their laps while they get aroused?

Next up on the web site is
My Most Memorable Moment

I took my first dancer girlfriend to a work-related Christmas party. It was amazing. We walked in and everyone noticed. She was terrific, a perfect dress that showed off her awesome body and long legs without being trashy. Gorgeous hair and makeup - stunning. And if there is one thing a stripper knows how to do, it's work a room. She does it every night. We talked to everyone including the company president, she turned on the charm and they all fell in love. But she made it clear that she was with me. I was king for the night. It's something that every man should experience. It's something that you should experience. I'll remember it as long as I live.

**January Update!**

This New Year's Eve almost beat that first Christmas party. I'm still recovering from the limo ride home!
His life is so lacking in personal accomplishments that his most memorable moment involved reflected glory? He'll spend the rest of his life remembering being with someone who knew how to work a room?

Note that he's not just promising us strippers; he's promising us strippers who have phenomenal looks, phenomenal social skills, and enough education to mix with top corporate officers. And that last sentence seems to be promising phenomenal sex skills.

It's been a long time since I was in a strip club; I remember girls who were attractive but not much out of the ordinary. Dating strippers is more likely to get you a chubby girlfriend with short legs than a girl who looks like a supermodel. I shared a house with a friend and his stripper girlfriend once. She and her friends were reasonably intelligent but not the sort of people who would shine in a room full of corporate executives. Their conversation tended to be about how shitfaced they got the night before, who was running around on her boyfriend, and "Oh my god, let me tell you what this customer did last night!" And while I don't want to perpetuate a stereotype, I have to admit that a certain amount of time was spent discussing where to get the good cocaine. I'm trying to imagine this sort of conversation at a company Christmas party, and I think the ad might be right. That might be a memorable moment that I'd remember for the rest of my life.

The crux of the ad is the fact that strippers almost always say that they don't date customers, but many strippers date guys they met on the job. Most strippers are female, and for reasons I'll never understand, females are attracted to us guys. Since they're strippers, most of the guys they meet are customers. Finding a boyfriend is a somewhat random process, and is most likely to happen in places where girls meet the most guys. So some strippers date guys that were once customers. Since they've got a boyfriend, they're not currently dating customers. And many of the remainder of the strippers are dating someone they met off the job. So, most strippers don't date customers.

Contrary to what the web site says, strippers don't say "I don't date customers" because they're confused, or because they don't know who they want to date, or they're not aware of their subconscious urges. "I don't date customers" is a polite way of saying "You belong to the category of guys I don't date." For the strippers who have boyfriends, you're in that category because you're not their boyfriend. For the remainder, you're in that category because they're tired of fending off date requests and it's easier to say that they don't date customers than to isolate the precise factors that cause them not to date you.

In addition, the ratio of strippers to customers in a strip club works against the customers. And strippers meet many customers who are physically attractive, nice guys, and generally good boyfriend material, so even if you're the guy that every girl is dreaming of, you're not going to stand out.

Of course, you can't have a book on how to date strippers that says that the process is random and the odds are against you. Since this book is written for guys with low self-esteem, which means guys who assume that women don't want to date them, there has to be some way of tricking the stripper into dating. This has all been done before in various how-to-get-dates books, and the author wants to assure us that his book is different. No hypnosis, no neurolinguistic programming, no pretending to be a photographer or a producer. Those involve too much work anyway, and the author has discovered something that requires no effort on your part.
This program is based on an understanding of a powerful subconscious need that most strippers have and are not even aware of.
That's right, a woman's intelligence is just weak disguise for her unacknowledged subconscious needs. Who needs hypnosis when women can be controlled through their own desires?

After looking over the web site, I've decided that this book was written by a stripper. First of all, the book stays
At its core, a strip club is just a well-designed, legal, fantasy designed to separate you from your money as quickly as possible.
At its core, a book on dating strippers is just a well-designed, legal fantasy designed to separate you from your money as quickly as possible. Clearly, the author understands how to sell a sexual fantasy that has little hope of fulfillment.

But more importantly, the author says
I’m sure I don’t have to remind you to follow the rules regarding touching. If in doubt, ask.
And
Get Her to ask You Out!
And
Give her time, space, fun and consistency.
Think about this. If you're a stripper, isn't the ideal customer someone who follows the rules on touching, doesn't pester you for dates, and consistently gives you time, space, and fun? I think the strippers are using guys' subconscious desires to trick them into behaving better. I think they're letting us think that we're using them when they're really using us. And since the target market is guys, and since we all know what happens to guys' intelligence whenever they're dealing with naked boobs, there's a real chance that the strippers will succeed.

So buy the book if you want, boys, but keep those dollar bills coming!

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Smarter But Just As Stupid

Prior to dating an ex-whore, I was pretty clueless about prostitution. The only prostitutes I knew anything about were those ladies out on the street who stared you in the eye as you drove past. I thought escorts were hired solely as arm candy and went home alone after dinner. I figured the transexuals who advertised in the free weekly paper were some sort of model.

Being in love with someone who had been in the business, I decided I needed more information and set myself a course of reading that varied from memoirs of ex-sex workers to scientific research. But it was my ex who tuned me into the the tremendous variety of forms that prostitution takes. The real eye opener was learning about the semi-pro, part-time hooking going on around me: the ladies who advertise in the paper for "generous" boyfriends, the women who supplement their day job by being doms a couple of nights a week, the guys who hang around the makeup counter at the department stores and are always ready to provide financial assistance if a sales girl can't quite make rent at the beginning of the month. For some women, it's a regular part time job. For others, it's a backup in emergencies, and others do it once or twice in their entire lives. Frequently, girls who retire from prostitution aren't so much retired as doing it on a less formal basis.

As a result of this education, I'm now more aware of clues that someone is trading sex for cash. Whereas before I just assumed that it wasn't happening, now I assume that it is. It would be nice to think that I'm more realistic now, but I have no way of confirming that. There's no independent, reliable source of information I can compare my perceptions with. For all I know, the change in perspective could be making my perceptions more accurate, less accurate, or equally accurate.

What I can say is that the type of error I make has changed. Before, I made the mistake of assuming that it was never happening. Now, in individual cases, I may be detecting indications of prostitution when it's not actually occuring.

That's one of the delusions of knowledge. We always assume that greater knowledge means greater understanding, but it may only mean trading one mistake for another.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Bodhidharma & the Courtesan

There's a genre of Japanese Zen painting that always depicts the same scene: Daruma succumbing to charms of a courtesan. Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, the Indian Buddhist who came to China and founded the Chan school of Buddhism, which the Japanese call Zen. In the paintings, Bodhidharma represents Zen liberation, capable of playing with the fire of sexual pleasure represented by the courtesan without getting burned by delusion. That's how everyone reads the symbolism, and of course everyone wants to be the great Bodhidharma. No one wants to be the anonymous whore.

The whore symbolism is two-edged. At the time that the Daruma/Courtesan paintings were being painted, there was a saying among the Japanese lower classes that prostitutes were guaranteed to go to one or another of the Buddhist heavens when they died, because their life on earth was hell. They were typically daughters of poor families sold into prostitution at a young age. They were indentured to the businesses that bought them. They had no control over which clients they saw, or how much time they spent with them. The lucky ones were bought out of servitude by wealthy patrons. I'm not sure what happened to the remainder; possibly they worked until they were no longer attractive, and then eked out a meager living as servants.

So the whore symbol represents both pleasure and suffering, not merely the ordinary suffering of sickness and disappointment in life that everyone experiences, but the suffering of being other people's toy, of being despised and low status, of being worth only what you can earn for someone else. Anyone who has experienced contempt knows that there's nothing ennobling about it. It warps both the people giving it and the people receiving it. Bodhidharma represents, not the enlightenment that guards against the delusions of pleasure and glamour, but the enlightenment that protects from the poison of bitterness and hardship.

But there's a further problem. Bodhidharma is a separate figure from the courtesan; enlightenment is separate from suffering. And that makes Bodhidharma an empty, pointless, religious figure. Unless enlightenment is united with suffering and contempt, it isn't going to help anyone.

Zen teachers are certified. They literally have a piece of paper that says, in effect, "I am a Zen master." The abbots of Japanese Renzai Zen monasteries earn small fortunes performing funeral services for wealthy Japanese. Bodhidharma is the guy who books a whore and then spends the first half hour talking about how important he is and how much money he makes.

The real symbol of enlightenment is the anonymous whore. Abandoned as a child, growing up despised and used, owning nothing except the immediate use of her body, she's hired to give a Zen master a blow job. Undressing her client, facing yet another turkey-neck penis hanging below a monk's pot belly, and asking herself how she's going to bring herself to do this, she suddenly realizes that she has everything she needs. No certification, no important job titles, no worshipful Zen students hanging on her every word, no special Zen philosophy or spiritual abilities, just this mind and this body at this moment.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Mixed Signals

I went into Boobie Bar's archives and read a series of posts. The blog is basically a place to put stories about misbehaving customers for the Customers Suck discussion board. After you've read a few posts, you've got the plot of just about every story:
Customer: sexual desire + booze + naked boobs = jerk
Dancer: applies psychological smackdown
What was interesting to me was the effect the stories had on me. I started viewing everyone in the stories as one dimensional characters. The ill behaved customers were conflated into a single jerk character, and the dancer administering the smackdown was the Bitch Goddess of Stripper Revenge. (Almost every story involved the same dancer.) At some point, after I had made the gradual shift away from viewing the people involved as human beings, I had a sudden shift back; it suddenly occurred to me that the dancer was a girl whose feelings had been hurt. Underneath the anger at having someone stick his hand down her thong or try to grab her tits or stick his finger up her ass, there's the pain of being treated inconsiderately. In her own blog, the dancer Casey writes
...that the feel of someone touching me somewhere I DON'T want to be touched, is the sickest, most bitter, nauseating feeling I know.
However, Casey writes this in the context of telling how she met her current boyfriend. He came into the bar where she was dancing, they went back to a room for a private dance, and he performed cunnilingus on her until she had three orgasms.

Does anyone have trouble seeing how guys might be confused?

Strippers tell customers that they don't date customers, but I've known a couple of guys that dated strippers they met in the strippers' clubs. Strippers tell the customers that they can't touch, but then many strippers allow it, and some actually enjoy it, if it's the right customer touching them. Guys go into a strip club, see naked girls, come into very close contact with them, and know from their own past experience or the experience of someone they know that what they're seeing is available, but for some reason it's not available to them right now. The result is your typical ill behaved customer; drunk, confused, and sexually frustrated.

In fairness to Boobie Bar, there's no hint in her stories that she's ever allowed a customer to cross the line with her. And that may be true for the majority of strippers. But the customers don't know that.

Behavioral psychologists have done research on how people respond to success and failure. If someone tries something, and it never works, the person gives up quickly. If they try something and it always works, but then suddenly stops working, they'll give up quickly. But if something usually doesn't work, but works sometimes, people will keep trying even in the face of repeated failure, because they know that it works sometimes. So ill behaved customers will keep acting badly because every once in a while they get to feel a dancer's crotch or tit, or someone they know got a blow job or a date.

My sympathy is with the dancers. It's a lot worse to have people repeatedly grabbing your body than to have your sexual advances repeatedly rejected. But there's a reason guys act the way we do. We may be drunken idiots, but we're drunken human idiots.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Only do what feels good

Hobo Stripper writes one of my favorite blogs. She's so wholesome and sensible and upbeat, she makes being a lesbian stripper living in her van in the middle of winter in Alaska seem like the most natural thing a girl could do. In Stripping: Eliminating Bad Experiences by Rejecting Bad Customers, she makes the point that
It’s not healthy to do things that make you feel bad. It is healthy to set boundaries and express your anger right away instead of stuffing it or letting it build up.
This is sensible (and wholesome and upbeat). We're social animals and a lot of our self-view comes from other people. If, to use one of her examples, people keep trying to lick your nipple when you've made it clear the nipple is off limits, after a while you start to get the message that your boundaries aren't important, and you don't deserve to be treated better. And when you feel this way about yourself, you start to feel that way about everyone else, along with feeling a boatload of resentment. And if you feel resentful towards the world, and feel that other people's boundaries aren't important, it starts becoming OK to cross your own moral boundaries in dealing with other people. By "moral", I don't mean the sort of conventional morality that would close down all the titty bars. I mean your own morality that you have inside yourself, the things that you know for yourself are right. Things like not lying and not stealing. If the world is populated by assholes, then lying to them and stealing from them doesn't seem like such a bad thing.

One sentence summary: Emotional abuse corrupts morals.

But let's suppose that you're a single mom who's stripping because it's the only way you can support the kids and have time to be a mom for them. It's the end of the month, the kid's medical bills have emptied the bank account, and the rent's due. A customer lets you know that women over thirty are too old. Female value is inversely proportional to age. Do you do what HS did, walk away from the customer, and thereby walk away from the rent money? Or do you let him corrode your mind so you can keep a roof over your kids' heads?

The traditional feminist critique of sex work is that it is inherently corrosive. But in the case of stripping, I think the problem lies in the way strippers are paid. Barring fraud, porn performers and prostitutes will always get paid for working. But in theory, a stripper can dance all night and not get paid. Strippers are essentially sales people. Most sales professionals get some combination of salary plus commissions. As long as they can hold their jobs, they're guaranteed their salary. Strippers get tips instead of salaries. In many cases, they also get commissions on specialized dances with set prices. If they can sell a fixed price lap dance or couch dance, they are guaranteed a large commission for their work. Otherwise, they get tips, which are entirely at the customer's discretion.

A successful stripper with a large bank account can walk away from an abusive customer without regret. A stripper who has minimal living expenses can do the same. But strippers who aren't as skilled in separating customers from their money, strippers who for one reason or another don't have a cash cushion, and strippers who support other people are in a different position. If you need cash immediately, and your earnings are entirely determined by your customers' whims rather than the amount of work you do, then you are at the mercy of your customers.

Grace Undressed describes the effects of a bad night with abusive customers in a post titled Mcdonald's Money.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Giving Thanks

College Callgirl, who claims to have exited the hooking business, has posted a Thanksgiving list of things that she's thankful for. One of the items is "nasty porn". The image accompanying the list item in her post is a Bang Bus graphic. Bang Bus is nasty porn indeed.

I used to date an ex-prostitute who liked nasty porn. She was, truthfully, one of the sweetest girls I've ever known. She was also a firecracker in bed. It was a long distance relationship and we weren't able to get together very often, but when we did, she would keep me erect for hours while she had organsm after orgasm.

So, this Thanksgiving I am giving thanks for all you ex-prostitutes who like nasty porn. In my extremely limited experience, you are sweet, loving, considerate, giving, and very, very nasty in a wonderful way that causes ex-boyfriends to remember you with longing and gratitude.

Happy Thanksgiving.