I don’t want my children shaking their tits for tips. I want my children to pursue careers that are intellectually stimulating. I want their careers to be ones that require education, knowledge and a certain degree of skill. I don’t want my kids working in fast food restaurants, convenience stores or strip joints. There is nothing wrong with those jobs, I just want better for my kids. Morals don’t even factor into my reasons, as you can see.
And good for you and your parents. What I was referring to is the “double-standard” I have observed in many guys I know who enjoy going to strip clubs, but would not want their girlfriends or daughters to do it. One of my colleagues stopped going to strip clubs for work when he had a daughter. It was a bit of an epiphany for him.
I respect your family’s moral perspective on this and your consistent application, i.e. you were not being hypocritical about it.
I think that the other moral perspective, that there are some philosophical / moral / ethical concerns with this career choice, also deserves respect, so long as it is also applied consistently, i.e. so long as the guy who gets up on his moral high-horse doesn’t sneak away to strip clubs on the side, and that he remains loving and open to his kids.
I think there is a danger there, in the argument that since the kids are of age and I can’t tell them what to do / force them anymore, of abdicating one’s responsibility as a parent. Yes, the adult-child is of age, and can legally make decisions on their own. As a parent, I feel that I still have a responsability to be involved in the child’s life, to be interested in what they do, their motivations, fears, hopes, dreams and plans, to offer advice, share concerns, and most importantly, to be ready to step up to the plate in helping and supporting my kid if they have to make a sacrifice to follow my advice.
I hope that if it were my child, I would be able to share concerns about either of these options, either of becoming a stripper, or drifting with the current in college without purpose, to a life of sub-urban banality and disposable relationships.
I expect that my son will make some decisions I don’t approve of. Hopefully, if I play my cards right, they will be relatively minor. But there will be some. I will not stop loving him, being available to him, and being proud of all his good qualities and acheivements, because he makes some choices I don’t agree with.
I’m sorry if this got in a little too deep. Your post promted some important reflections for me, for which I’m grateful. It’s not my intention to pass judgement or try to influence your opinion of stripping as a career choice.
That’s a great point - hey, if you live in vegas, have your daughter screw people for a living - nothing wrong - it’s legal! Whether you believe there are right or wrong career choices, all jobs carry some economic rent - and being a stripper carries negative connotations. Mostly because they hang out with drunk dirtbags all day, but still. I don’t want to be a garbageman - not because I think I’m hot stuff, and I’m certain they get better benefits than me, but because I want my mother/family/guardian spirits to be proud of me.
Now a little story about the glamorous world of stripping: My friend Steve dates Fawn - Fawn slips on some ice and fractures her pelvis*, Fawn is on crutches with a cast on her ass, and her boss at the strip club tells her he doesn’t care - strip or you are fired - so she had to get up on stage and take off her clothes with a cast on her pelvis and on crutches- me, while being an evil bastard, just can’t bring myself to go watch.
*I’m not a doctor - I’m not certain what was wrong with her pelvis - I just assumed it was a fracture. I don’t remember if she told me or not.
It would be worth it just to see the doctor’s face when he takes the cast off and there’s money stuffed inside it.
Another downside is what’s happening in Canada, where for lack of willing local “talent”, dancers are recruited in poor rural areas in Quebec and even more so overseas by the biker gangs and organised crime, and then shipped around from place to place in a country far from home where they don’t speak the language, kept in virtual servitude, often in fear of their boss and greater fear of the authorities, and earning not very much money at all.
A system where the dancers work for themselves, make good money, are free to accept what they won’t do, don’t have to put up with terror tactics from management, and can leave when they want, is infinitely preferable, even if they do recruit in high schools.
And if you tell me the same also applies to prostitution, well, I wouldn’t disagree. Even if you believe that patronising either strip clubs or protitutes is wrong, you should even more so feel that victimizing, enslaving, and brutalising these women is also, indeed even more so, wrong.
I agree (as long as your children want the same things you want). I took issue with what burundi said because I don’t really see what is wrong about the stripping industry. The speaker made it known that it can be lucrative. What is wrong with that? And, what is wrong with your children knowing this? Is it the possibility that they may go after this lifestyle? Or that they may go against your wishes of an intellectually stimulating career, only do find out that they’re getting laid off in 2 weeks, without severance, and with kids of their own to feed? The socially acceptable “careers” of which you speak can have ugly sides too.
I understand that morals may not factor into your reasons. But I don’t think you can fairly group fast food and convenience stores with stripping.
Trupa, this is happening all over the world, and it’s a well known human-slave trade. Especially in Southeast Asia.
Tripler
I was making a joke about the lack of future boobies. Am I being whooshed here?
Hopefully, one of these days what your children want will rate a line or two in diatribes of this type.
I’d be happy if my girls pulled down half that a year! If you’ve got it, make some money with it. Then after a few years, you can go back to school in your new, paid-for car, without student loans, and study in our paid-for condo, and go on to a career.
Several of my students have been strippers right out of high school. They have so far been intelligent, hard-working girls who made practical choices.
Remember the one about the little boys discussing what they wanted to be when they grew up? One says he wants to be a doctor so he can have a fancy car like that one, pointing to a Jaguar across the street. Another says he wants to be a lawyer so he can have a fancy car, too, pointing to a Mercedes parked behind the Jaguar. The third boy says he wants to be covered with curly hair. The first two ask why. He explains that his sister has a little patch of curly hair and owns both of those cars. 
When my daughter is of age if she wants to shake her booty, that’s her business. I’ll advise her to save her earnings and so forth as other posters have indicated. I’d rather see her working an honest job giving enjoyment to others rather than some annoying profession like telemarketing.
I did a thought experiment once about how people become strippers, it’s definitely apropos to this discussion, here’s my post:
It makes you wonder, do women with bodies like that get sucked into sex industry work more readily than other women do? I’m serious. There are several things that determine what you’ll do for a living (if you aren’t born rich or connected, in which case that is THE determining factor in most cases).
Most people have dreams of doing something for a living that’s exciting, fun and easy and makes lots of money, but the harsh reality is that there are only so many niches out there for rock stars, actresses and supermodels. Considering how many people covet those jobs, you might as well plan on making a career out of winning million dollar lotteries. The odds are about the same.
Instead, most people pay careful attention to what others tell them they are good at, if they tell them they are any good at anything at all, and try doing that. If you get praised for your skills in math, you head in the direction of programming, accounting, finance, physics, etc. If you get praised for your language skills, you get a liberal arts degree and bus tables for a living while threatening to write that novel one day. If you have no talent whatsoever but you can talk people into things, you head into management or sales.
Now, what if you have a pornbody like (porn actresses) Stacy Valentine, Alexis Taylor and Jenna Jameson? It’s doubtful your parents, your teachers or your guidance counselor pushes you toward the sex industry. (Note: I guess I’m a little behind the curve here.) But you can’t help notice that guys REALLY want to have sex with you, and that women hate for you to pay too much, i.e., any, attention to their boyfriends. Your friends tell you that you are beautiful and sexy. Boys tell you that you are beautiful and sexy and anything else they can think of that might gain your favor. And your parents tell you that you are beautiful and sexy, too, only their words are a little different: “Don’t trust boys, ever, they will tell you anything at all to get you to have sex with them. You’re beautiful and cute and that’s the way some boys are with beautiful girls.”
So you watch TV and the movies and read magazines and you learn that women who are beautiful and sexy have some career options. They can model and act and dance naked in strip clubs and have sex with men for money and have sex in dirty movies for money. Of course, these aren’t the FIRST option for such women, which is to be the aforementioned actresses, singers, and models, but they’re always there, in the background as it were.
But of course all this is very remote, until you graduate from high school, when you suddenly find yourself flipping burgers, working retail or waiting table for minimum wage, and you don’t have enough money to move out of your parent’s house, and the work is horribly dull and dead-end, and you wonder how long your beauty will last and you’re not having any fun at all out of all this morality and goodness you’ve been participating in.
What’s more, instead of everybody praising you a lot for being moral and all despite your fabulous potential for immorality, your parents are showing definite signs of getting tired of you living at home, and that dull boy you’ve been stringing along until someone better comes along is starting to act like you’re already wearing his ring, and your less attractive friends who are holding down the same dull jobs you are have taken to pretty much calling you an idiot for not capitalizing on your looks and getting out of Burger Doodle/Mall World. Because they hate their jobs as much as you do, and they want to escape from them vicariously through you.
And so that’s how you get the 'nads to show up at amateur night at a strip club in a nearby town to see if you have what it takes to dance naked before men. Or that’s how you wind up answering that ad for models that everyone knows is for nude models, or that’s how you end up calling the girl who was in your school a few years ago whom everybody thought was beautiful and sexy like you, who wound up doing porn films, and asking her a few questions about the porn film business, such as how do you get into it?
So that’s how you get into it, not because of some fabulous degree of immorality on your part, but simply because, from puberty onwards, this had been presented to you as something you could do well, an opportunity you could take and thrive on. And presented with Burger Doodle/Mall World or porn, you chose porn, as another might choose accounting or engineering or medicine. You were born with a body made for porn, and so that’s what you do.
My point here is that we all bring something different to the table when it comes to how we make a living. Some of us are good at writing, some at sales, some at management, some at organizing, some at keeping records. So why are the women who are born with pornbodies and who use what they’re born with to further themselves in the world any different from the rest of us, really?
To tell you the truth, I don’t think they are.
Wow. This thread is making me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t give stripping a try. I’m pretty thin and I have big boobs. I could really use the money - paying off my college loans would be awesome! $250,000/yr? I’m in my mid-20s, though, I’m prolly too old now.
I think EC pretty much captures why people get into it, but I don’t think the exotic dancer / stripper lifesytle is all that rosy even if it does pay well. It’s an environment that’s full of dangerous and predatory people, drugs, and lots of tempting bad choices. The stripper turned drug user, turned hard luck whore, is almost a cliche.
I did what the schools tell us to (just graduated from college last month). I’m currently unemployed with little to no prospects. If there were a corresponding career for guys (and there’s not; at least, not in this town), I’d be all over it. 
I’m trying to imagine what kind of patron is going to find this sexy. Some guys, obviously, would feel too bad for her injuries to get turned on, and I would imagine that even the less-sympathetic customers would just be irritated or bored watching a stripper who can hardly move and turn their attention to one of the other strippers.
Yes, I know that most ANYTHING can be sexy to someone. But how many people are going to want to watch this?
In the SDMB I distrust everything! So, I need a cite.
The high standards of this illustrious board require that the cite has to be of a photographic nature.
I think the speaker shouldn’t be invited back simply because he’s full of it. There’s no way the average stripper is making that much money. According to [Salary.com](http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layoutscripts/swzl_compresult.asp?
origin=secheader&zipcode=&statecode=&state=&metro=&city=&geo=U.S.+National
+Averages&jobcode=HC07000313&jobtitle=Surgeon±+Neurology&search=
&narrowdesc=Non-Profit+and+Social+Services&narrowcode=CS02&r=
salswz_swzttsbtn_psr&p=&s=salary&geocode=&metrocode=#
bottom), the US median salary for brain surgeons is only $309,716. They list the 25th percentile as $235,014.
If there are any strippers out there making more money than brain surgeons, they must be the superstars of the world of exotic dancing. Telling kids they could make $250,000 or more a year as strippers sounds like telling them they could make millions of dollars as a Hollywood star. It may not be impossible, but it’s not a realistic career goal.
I am laughing so loud, the neighbors are banging on the wall…I am sooo glad I’m not at work right now.
So why does a career goal need to be realistic?
I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. I had the talent. I had the skill. The years between then and now have shown me that I’m a pretty darn good performer. But my goal wasn’t realistic, and so my parents did everything they could to discourage my ambition in that direction, going so far as to actively place obstacles in my path. They were successful, unfortunately. In all honesty, I agree that I probably would never have become a famous rock star. But you know what? With a little encouragement, I might have looked into other possibilities in the music business. I might have found my niche as a studio musician. Perhaps I would have established a lifetime side job to supplement my “legitimate” income. Maybe I would have, at the very least, become the guy that other musicians in my city call when they need a bass player.
Instead, I was the good son who went off to college, where I discovered that, despite an IQ in the 130s, I am an absolutely wretched student. My University career lasted a whole semester, and I came back home and went back to the fast food restaurant that had been my very first job. Twenty-one years later, I’m still a cook. Granted, I’m one of the best and most reliable cooks in my town, but I’m still a damn $9.00 and hour cook. My music is nothing more than a beloved hobby these days. I didn’t even get into my first band until I was 36 years old! By the time I was old enough to truly realize that I could have ignored my parents advice and taken a shot at being a rock star anyway, I was also old enough for becoming a rock star to be truly unrealistic.
Geddy Lee sang, on the 1975 Rush song, Best I Can, “Got my sights on the stars / Won’t get that far, but I’ll try anyway!”
Thanks to all the parental discouragement, I can’t even say that I tried.
And that makes me sick.
No to hijack my own thread, but you’re a grown man of considerable intelligence, and have been making your own life decisions for over 20 years, if you have an IQ in the 130s and you’ve been working as an hourly cook for over 20 years, you’re quite deliberately and selectively choosing to do what you do. Blaming your mother and father because you’re not a noted studio musician is pretty pointless at this stage in the game.