Empowering or Degrading?
 

I want to see what members here think of stripping and prostitution being considered both degrading to women as a gender or being empowering to a womans sexuality? Is prostitution a form of power woman have over men? The ability to seduce?

Would any female members here do any of the above? It can be in extraordinary circumstances also such as being in poverty.

Ok I know everyones cringing right now because Vege is going to write a novel, but to be honest I don't mind because I'm not 100% sure how she would take this situation as isn't be a feminist giving women the ability to do what every they want?

****ing degrading imo, but I think feminism is about choice, so if they want to do it and feel empowered by it, I guess more power to them

Degrading yes but it should be legal. Why illegalize paying for something that you can get for free legally? Isn't that capitalism?

It's simply providing consumer service, something that is in high demand and not effecting any non consenting party, to people who are willing to pay for it and can't get sex elsewhere. And everybody can use some sex, you can't expect every f*cking person to be able to have it any other way.

We use sex to sell all kinds of stuff so lets get off the high horse. There's no harm in the idea of prostituion, yes there are issues like STDs, abusive pimps and being forced to take addictive drugs but these are problems that have been enabled by prostituion being illegal. If it was legal and heavily regulated it wouldn't be as much of an issue.

I dont find it particularly empowering, as its you performing sexual acts for men because they've payed you for it, - you wouldnt have money otherwise - but in all fairness, it is a woman getting payed to do something she could easily do for free. Its a two-way thing really. I dont support it much, but thats because I dont really care. If I was more interrested in the case maybe I'd have a stronger view, but since its the actual prostitute's choice on the matter, then its her decision. My opinion doesnt matter :/

If a woman is choosing to strip or to sell her body for sex because she wants to and not for the money, then I feel it is a free choice and I have no problem with it. Sexuality and being attracted to people is a lovely thing; feeling adored and admired feels nice, too.

I've seen documentaries of women who strip where they seem quite strong, have a sense of humor about it, and take a serious and professional interest in a good performance of their show: learning physical techniques to appear seductive is an artform, like any other dance form.

However, I think most prostitutes are selling access to their body because they are pressured through circumstances or desperation. I suspect they are often lacking many other options that allow them to earn money easily. Plus, prostitutes may be under control in some fashion (though physical control or drug addiction). I feel it is very degrading to a human being to feel pressured to offer up something so personal about yourself to someone who uses you just as a body.

I do not see prostitution as a form of power that women have over men...although it does show how desperate some men are. I wish they'd just masturbate and not feel they need to have a woman to be "men." I think if there were more higher paying (non-sexual) jobs available, far fewer women would strip or prostitute themselves. So, prostitution at least is usually a sign of a poor economy and a lower status for women in the society.
I would not strip or prostitute myself unless I were starving and found absolutely no other method to survive...which may be the case for many prostitutes in the developing world. Having sex with someone you don't want to have sex with feels horrible...and is often a death sentence for a woman due to HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases in the developing world. I do not wish that for myself or any other woman.

The fact that men *take* from women who are needy intsead of simply helping them (offering financial help without requiring sex in return) is one of the worst things a person can do to another, I feel. It is using someone in the worst way. I could never imagine paying someone else for sex, and the men who do that frankly sicken me.

Well I take back what I said, there is harm that comes from prostitution pyschologically both for the prostitute and for those close to her. But it's still a career choice both men and women should be allowed to have. I mean stripping is legal. So why the inconsistancy? Why is tiltilation ok but actual sex is bad?

Agreed, I think applying this stereotype that all strippers are ashamed of their job and have esteem problems is ethically wrong. People whore themselves in just about everything they do just in different ways. If a woman doesn't mind the job or even enjoys it, why feel sorry for her?

Prostitution is a little different. The way so many women put up with all kinds of abuse to make their living is really sad. I think if it were legal, prostitution wouldn't have quite as many hardships. And illegalizing it hasn't stopped many women from doing it so why not make it where the government can actually regulate it to produce a safer environment for both worker and customer?

I believe men should have the option of recieving sex if that's what they want and they can't get it without paying for it. And lets not forget that that there are also male prostitutes who make a living off of serving female clients. It goes both ways.

But I'm so glad that you give props to the underrated art of wanking. I get mocked a lot for being a virgin and talking about masturbation more openly than others because it's really all I have to talk about as far as sexual activity.

Generations of teaching children to be ashamed of their bodies and masturbation has had more negative effects in society than positive. Masturbation is great, and I'd imagine it's less complicated than intercourse. People undervalue the importance and power of imagination.

Yeah, people joke all the time about how I need a hooker but really that annoys me when people say that, I'm not THAT desperate. As cliche as it is to say I want my first time to be special, or at least not totally miserable. I think when I finally do pop my cherry the most satisfying part will be the communion involved, being able to satisfy another person, and someone who actually enjoys satisfying me in return, instead of doing it because it's their job and how they earn their living.

And less risk of STDs is also a plus.

so many reasons to abandon this archaic thing called capitalism people!

the only way capitalism can survive is with planned obsolescence and a civic caste system wherein those at the bottom are all prostitutes in one form or another. either suck it up, or come up with a new way of thinking and start spreading those thoughts around.

prostitution exists because we vote with money instead of thoughts.

Oh, I don't know about that. Prostitution is a lot older than capitalism and I'd be will to bet it has existed under every single economic system.

that's ma' story an' i'm stickin' to it!

besides, how would it exist without either monetary exchange or essentially some form of slavery?

*Yawnnnnnn*

Or maybe she just likes sex as much as the guys who pay her to have it, but isn't considered attractive enough to become a porn star.

Cracks me up too how you think guys are just going to give girls money without any motive or reason just because they're needy too.

I agree that people, men and women, should be allowed to do with their bodies what they will, including have sex for money. It isn't very different, really, from other reasons people sometimes have sex. My concern with people letting others use them sexually for money is that there is greater chance of the person being physically harmed, compared to when a person takes off her clothes while dancing...which shouldn't physically harm her at all.

Plus, I feel sexuality is something personal enough that I don't want people to be stripped of what *can* be precious and caring by having physical sexual actions turned into a commodity. If no money is being exchanged, then people are free to decide to do what they really want to do sexually without their decision-making affected by other needs or issues.

Masturbation IS great, boo boo! :) I feel that masturbation is often much better than sex with someone else because when you masturbate you can do exactly what feels good, and you don't have to worry about people's motivations (because you know you care about yourself)...or diseases...or pregnancy!

Also, I feel that what you said about sex and the communion of it (when there is that element to it) is very true: being able to satisfy someone else, who enjoys satisfying you in turn, is a very nice feeling. It feels lovely when someone wants to make you happy, and vice versa, as its own goal, because they care about you and especially when they love you and you love that person. Mind you...you can have all this, and orgasm, too, with someone, without actual sexual intercourse!

I feel nice men would help out a woman in desperation (say, extreme poverty with children to feed) rather than have sex with her and pay her a little bit of money for access to her body.

There are lots of nice men in the world who don't use others for their own selfish ends.

this doesn't make sense.

you don't get a random girl dancing her clothes off for you for free legally whenever you want, even when you're in a relationship. your significant other isn't just a collection of reactions to your actions. just because you can have sex with your partner doesn't mean you can **** them like a pornstar every time you feel like. it just doesn't work that way (it might, but then you'd be dealing with a wicked pile of crazy just waiting to explode on you).

as for the whole angle about documentaries showing 'strong', 'independent' women, how reflective of the industry do you people honestly think that is? really now. a documentary will focus on what, 2-3 women, ignoring the dozens of others in the background... i wonder, are they all up and coming med students just trying to pay their tuition? or are most of them broken little girls trying to come to terms with the abandonment issues from their youths?

i've actually worked for a company that started doing online porn hosting as a side job halfway through my time there. if that sample of 20 some odd girls was any indication of what kind of personalities end up in that situation i'd say you're lucky to find 1 out of 20 who can actually accomplish much of anything on their own. it's not that they're worthless people, not in the least, they deserve help, BUT they need to want it first, and most, are still waiting for the world to say it's sorry.

also, i've never EVER seen the kind of psychological control the queen bee exerted on her girls before or since, even on tv.

i honestly think the people trying to paint this behavior as somehow empowering or healthy are lying to themselves so they can feel better about wanting to participate in something they're able to recognize as destructive and counter productive without having to admit it to themselves. for all the 'empowerment' stripping might provide, it is completely and thoroughly overshadowed by the objectification it creates. to try arguing a social benefit to prostitution aside from a 'potential' decrease in STDs is even laughable.

also male prostitutes don't service female clients. they service other dudes. seriously, how clueless are you?

The point is, as usual you want to blame the man for the women's problems. The women offers the service and yet you're angry at the man for taking her up on the offer?

Nice men don't exist in the sense you're describing and neither do nice women. I don't know of any nice people who actively seek out prostitutes, and then freely give them money to help them get by. Nice fantasy world you're deluding in, though.

When does she ever blame the man?

Actively nice people who give money to the poor and destitute don't exist, yeah? because there aren't charities devoted to this, and churches definitely don't do this kind of thing?

Your cynicism is very tacky, especially coupled with condescension

This is true, and yet prostitution still exists.

I thought Vegan made it very clear that prostitution was man's fault:
If that's not blame, then what is it?

Being that men are the main consumers of prostitutes (male and female) who else would there be to blame? Surely not the victim of their own unfortunate situation? It's their fault that they have to **** to earn anything? If you want to appropriate blame, you really think it should go to the prostitute?

People should take responsibility for their own lives. I don't see a need to cast blame, it's just the way things are.

I don't know any prostitutes personally, so I can't say if they really made an effort to get a legitimate job or not, they could really be that desperate or they could do it because they're too lazy to find a job or they prefer it to a job at McDonalds.

Now, if they truly can't find a job and have resorted to prostitution to be able to survive, aren't their clients helping them along? How else would they afford food? Yes, I'd love too if they had another way to make a living, but that's simply not always the reality of life. In an ideal world maybe, everybody would have a legitimate job.

I don't particularly find it empowering nor degrading.

Everybody has to earn a living somehow and in the real world not everybody will be able to do it in a way that they would like to.

If you can earn as much in one night for lying on your back that would take you a week to earn by serving in McDonalds or cleaning toilets or collecting rubbish then who am I to judge. I'm not the one that has to live with the consequences or the danger.

Any job can make you feel degraded or empowered... Welcome to the real world.

Do they have strippers in England? For some reason the Benny Hill theme music lodges in my head whenever I try to conceive of it.

In this scenario -- prostitution for survival -- no, the clients aren't helping them along. The clients are exploiting them. I agree with Vegangelica's and Paloma's points here that there are men who would choose to help rather take advantage of a woman in such a desperate situation.

Well, they say that people already do that with charities and church fundraisers, etc. Yet prostitution still exists so either it's not having the desired effect of feeding all the people on the streets, or prostitutes aren't as desperate for money as Vegan describes them to be.

My guess, most of them are not trying to survive. They're trying to get enough money to feed their drug addictions. And for that, I don't have much sympathy.

Well, I had an ex about a year ago who was a very, very strong believer that prostitution and stripping were fantastic professions to work in. He was also under the delusion that most of the women involved were otherwise well-adjusted, substance-free and just doing it to get through college. It led to more than a few arguments.

In fact, when I was hard up and living in my car (completely different story), he actually encouraged me to do prostitution. His reasoning was that because he thought I enjoyed sex, I would enjoy sex with complete strangers and I would be able to "choose" my customers, so it wouldn't be "that bad". Never mind the fact that I was underage then.

/coolstorysis

Anyways, it was a ****ed up relationship and he's not an example of most men out there at all, but it obviously stuck with me. It made me wonder just how many people out there actually think the sex industry is just something "nice" girls resort to so they can graduate and leave completely unscarred with their ****-tons of money.

Also, I really don't believe it's that empowering... since most of the arguments I've heard about how empowering it is have come from men only.

Men are, for the most part, idiots when it comes to such things.

There are situations, I'm sure where a woman appears to be empowered by stripping/prostitution/pornography, but I think that in those cases it's a reaction to having been disempowered or victimized through abuse in the past.

Men will use the personal empowerment of women argument as their justification of their patronage of these "industries", but I think it's a safe bet that these are the same men who show little to no respect for women outside of that context.

I'm inclined to agree with Urban... and I think that the problem here is that the question is a little confusing as 'empowering' isn't necessarily the polar opposite of 'degrading'.

For example, if we take a man and a woman of similar abilities/background/etc. who are in the same economical situation and have rougly similar career prospects, if Person A (pick one of the two) is able to prostitute themselves out and Person B isn't (due to factors such as their appearance and demand for prostitutes of their gender etc.), then A effectively has an extra option (one more than B) for making a living and therefore, has more power than B... I think that is objectively true.

The fact that A's extra 'career option' could be considered to be of a degrading nature (subjective) doesn't invalidate that. So if A does prostitute himself/herself, A is exercising their power to perform acts which are considered by a portion of people to be self-degrading. Regardless of whether you consider Person A offering services as a prostitute to be degrading, it is (or it should be) entirely their choice.

Indeed. Prostitution under one form or another is the oldest profession in the world, despite any personal views I have.

It has been a while since I saw the documentary, mr dave, but I agree with you that it didn't necessarily show the typical experience of women who work in strip clubs. I felt the women were pretty gutsy. I don't know much about stripping beyond what I saw in that one documentary.

I wonder if a culture that allowed women and men to be shirtless in public and lacked societal prohibitions against premarital sex would tend to have fewer women working as strippers or prostitutes. I suspect female stripping and prostitution are more common in societies where women are of less value and are burdened with more social constraints on their sexuality.

By the way, for a good look at what prostitution is like in countries such as in India, the movie Salaam Bombay is excellent: Salaam Bombay! - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It's fictional but very realistic, I think.

True, some jobs can make you feel degraded...and maybe sometimes having sex feels like cleaning someone's toilet! Still, hopefully there is a slight difference between janitorial work and opening one's legs for some stinking, horrifying beast...although perhaps prostitution is preferable to working at McDonalds.:p:

I hope janitors and trash collectors don't feel degraded. Ideally, no one would feel degraded doing any job, and the difficult jobs to do (mundane, stinky ones) would get extra pay. You are right, though, that the world isn't perfect and often people are just lucky to get any work at all. I wish such desperation didn't exist.

And these are good reasons why prostitution should be illegal because..............

I'm not saying strippers are predominately one thing or another, like you do with your mind blowingly gross generalizations.

I wasn't even talking about porn stars but it's interesting how these stereotypes of being "broken down, self loathing" are only applied to the female porn stars while the male ones like Ron Jeremy are pop culture icons because they're just doing what every guy wants right?

You're probably right in that most porn star chicks are like that but you're only talking from subjective experience and not real statistics or anything. I'm saying it's wrong to apply the stereotype to EVERY woman with such an occupation. Not saying that many or even most of the women don't fit the stereotype.

I'm not painting it as empowering or healthy either but I'm not gonna say it can't be ever regardless of the type of person. Which is retarded to believe I think. It can be empowering to those that have no shame or guilt about it or don't find it degrading. I'm not denying that most women probably do find it degrading, because they have been conditioned to belief that sex is totally shameful and repulsive.

Oh f*cking please. You don't think ANY women seek out prostitutes? EVER?

YOU'RE ****ING DELUSIONAL!!! GET HELP NOW!!!

Compared to men seeking men, no. A girl could walk into a bar with legs open without paying for sex. No matter how butt ugly.

haven't you seen documentaries on prostitution? they're ALWAYS nice, well adjusted girls getting themselves through school / hard knocks.... :banghead:


@Vegangelica - it's really hard to say how things would go in a society like you described. i remember a few years ago legislation was being passed in Ontario (and possibly a few other provinces) allowing women to go topless in public. hasn't really resulted in a change in attitudes towards genders yet, nor did i ever see fresh boobs getting sun when i lived in the province either. personally, being a pessimist, i think that making it more socially acceptable and tolerated would have an increase in the behavior, though it might be easier to get treatment for those who become destructive (not unlike the way alcohol is handled).

@ BooBoo - STFU and read what Vanilla said, you really are clueless in this discussion.

I know it's much more common for men but to deny that some male prostitutes do service women is goddamn f*cking insane.

Mr. Dave clearly has a mental problem, he makes these crazy generalizations all the time and thinks the whole planet functions exactly how he experiences things personally. He's really f*cking crazy and a danger to other people, he should be locked away.

You're right that there are some male prostitutes that service women, I've read before that it's especially common in places like the Caribbean where older, wealthy women on vacation often visit for the express purpose of hiring a young male "companion". That said, I don't think Vanilla is denying that exists, she's just saying that more often than not male prostitutes service men.

Ironic post of the year. :laughing:

Mr. Dave is denying that it exists.

You sure about that?

Well lets see.....

Yeah I'm sure.

I think you're taking that way more literally than it was intended.

I never said male prostitutes primarly served women over men. I said that they do have female clients and he says they don't, EVER.

How in the f*ck he knows for goddamn sure is something I want to know. But I'm just gonna chalk it up to the fact that he's a loon.

Where did he say they don't ever?

JUST THEN ASSH*LE.

Stop being the f*cking contrarian all the time.

Again, I think you're taking his post more literally than it was intended.

And knock off the name-calling. Not only is it against the rules here, but I don't call you names so please show me the same respect.