Sansa Stark

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

Sansa Stark

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?

midnight rain

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.

ribbons

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.

midnight rain

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.

Urban Hat€monger ?

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.

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VEGANGELICA

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.

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.

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SATCHMO

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.

bannister

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.

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You're not punk, and I'm telling everyone.

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last.fm

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"Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day.

But, set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

- Terry Pratchett

SATCHMO

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.