But what the hell is wrong with that?

I have no idea if the people who are so adamant that the sex trade is degrading to women have ever worked in the sex industry, but a number of my friends and my significant other of six years has, and one of the very tiresome things they all put up with, be they making queer porn or sleeping with people for money, is the vast swathe of people who meddle in their affairs “for their own good”.

Sex is a thing that people do. They do it in all manner of ways, albeit for mostly the same reasons. Some bits of the sex industry are vile and seedy and exploitative, but then, so are some parts of the magazine industry. We could potentially improve women’s lot in life by banning lapdancing, but we could probably do a lot better by punching Paul Dacre in the face every time his rag published something obscene criticising a woman for having cellulite on her thighs.

There are some parts of the sex industry that have poor working conditions, but then, there are parts of every industry that have poor working conditions. The sex industry, by and large, compensates its workers fairly well for the poor working conditions. This distinguishes it favourably from, say, teaching, or working in a call centre, or standing on the street with a sign advertising pizza hut in the rain, or doing one of those dire “commission only” sales jobs that young people can find themselves broke and worn out from. Anecdote is not the plural of data, of course, but many people of my acquaintance hate their job, and while some of them are in the sex industry, none of the people I know who work all the hours god sends and still end up with no money to do anything but drink themselves into a stupor work in the sex industry. Most of them make pretty reasonable middle class incomes for rather less than your average 37 hours a week.

It is sex work. And the thing about sex work is, it’s work. It’s no more exploitative than any other form of work. It’s perfectly arguable that paying minimum wage to the person who scrubs the faeces from your toilet bowl is exploitative, but I doubt people would pay much attention if you tried to ban cleaning companies.

As with everything, the sex sells the legislation. If the work involved wasn’t women getting their tatas out, nobody would give a flying rat’s ass how they were treated. As it is, I honestly doubt people care how they’re treated anyway. This might seem harsh, but since I pay attention to SWA groups and know working girls who think most of y’all are talking crap, i.e. I listen to what people who are lapdancers say about the working conditions of being a lapdancer, and it’s evident that the people complaining about the poor mistreated women have never had a conversation with a sex worker in their lives, I think it’s pretty fair. People don’t care about the working conditions in strip clubs. They care about their visceral reaction to the proximity of sex, which makes them feel squicky and uncomfortable.

Sorry about that. But that’s liberalism for you. Luckily, you all get to write earnest screeds in the guardian or moralising screeds in the telegraph, whichever your poison should be, telling people they shouldn’t have sex or express their sexuality in ways you find personally distasteful, and the world will continue to spin on its axis.

If this exemption were to be removed then the “Full Monty” would then become illegal!

Lord Norton:
Would you like to be known as the lord who made the “Full Monty” illegal?

You have made 11 postings so far on this blog.

Not one of them refers to any documented evidence or research. Your postings are just anecdotal stories, unsubstantiated claims or personal attacks on other bloggers or others whose life choices don’t coincide with your own. This does nothing to further your cause.

In fact, it just exposes the anti-striptease lobby as based on pure waffle.

Please, can you provide some facts, documented evidence or research?

From “sad little man”.

Thanks in anticipation.

It would be a fine thing if just a hundredth of the concern over health and safety shown to lap dancers was shown to people in, for example, the food processing or fishing industries. But then, I suppose, sex sells, and some people would argue that Westminster specialises in burying entrepreneurship in red tape & one way to kill off lap dancing would therefor be to proceed as normal, and just go softly with the Lord Mandelsons etc.

At one point in the letter, it says that ‘the safety of women performing at infrequent lap dancing events in pubs and clubs will likely be compromised by inadequate facilities. We as local authorities would be powerless to impose licensing conditions to protect against this.’

My response to this is to ask: What about those burlesque/strip-tease artist who WANT to work in venues like pubs but who DONT want to work in lap dancing clubs ?

Under the guise of protecting the safety of these women, these letter writers are trying to either stop them from earning a living (since regular pubs or clubs are likely to stop hosting occasional burlesque or strip-tease events rather than pay for the expensive new license), or are trying to force them to work in the kind of venues that they may not want to work in !

I would say to members of the House Of Lords that this exemption in the legislation should be retained (and preferably widened) in order to protect the right of burleque/strip-tease artist to be able to decide where they practice their chosen profession.

This seems to be a revelation to an awful lot of non-lap dancing female scientists, you sure about this? (Careful, I might just come up half a dozen!)

What to me is sad is a woman these days who complains about what men spend their money on because they aren’t spending it on them.

In this age of supposed female equality, wanting to have a man support you is a bit odd.