A night at a strip club…from the perspective of a nervous, moralistic, horny feminist male in the midst of a three-year stretch of externally-enforced celibacy

 

So...is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

How does a person appreciate the beautiful naked female form when it is writhing about an aluminum pole for the entertainment of hoards of horny men?

How does a person channel his moral guilt for enjoying a strip tease without having discussed it with the strippers themselves to find out the circumstances that led them to strip?

And how does a person hold that moral stand when sexual contact with the fairer sex has eluded him for three years and counting?

All of these conundrums and others are explored in an absorbing essay by Torff at the acclaimed Feminist blog That’s What She Said. Here is an excerpt from that essay, an absolutely fascinating POV account of the writer’s struggles to reconcile his guilt and his dick. Enjoying the exploits of dancing, stripping women is more complicated than you thought…

(For the entire essay at That’s What She Said, click here. And for more work from Torff, click here.)

… look at all these poor girls who are probably just normal people with normal aspirations reduced to parading their bodies in front of a bunch of fucking creepy small town hicks from central Illinois who seem to have no fucking problem treating and thinking about women as nothing more than vehicles to fulfill their sexual desires and half of whom probably have a girlfriend or a wife to go back to in which case what the fuck are they doing here when they could be home in the presence of a woman who probably actually cares about them but who they probably also objectify because how can someone who so unabashedly enjoys paying to see half naked women who they don’t know walk up and down a stage not also objectify to some degree all the women in their life and fuck it’s so fucking sad that these girls can find no other reasonable source of income and are in some sense forced to do this to put themselves through school or support a kid even but then maybe they aren’t forced at all and maybe they actually enjoy this and find some kind of empowerment in this because they have a degree of control over these pathetic guys that maybe is difficult to find elsewhere in life and certainly is hard to find other equivalent type jobs and maybe I should be happy for them and for women that they have this option that they can choose and are not really forced into that pays them so well and kinda sorta even exploits sexism to their financial advantage but is it really worth making a bit of money to sacrifice their dignity to the disgusting perverse things going on in these guys heads right now and I can’t imagine that they would find this to be an empowering activity if they were really aware of what these guys are thinking and how they are seeing them but fuck maybe that is just being totally presumptuous of me and they are probably totally completely aware of the sick disgusting things going on in the heads of all these fucking losers and maybe they even relish it in some fucked up way but isn’t that relishing itself fucked up and perverse and unhealthy but christ who the fuck am I to think that these girls’ dignity is being robbed somehow and doesn’t that just make me as worse as anyone because by seeing things in that way I am completely denying them agency and control and how they see things must play an important part into whether this is really OK or acceptable but I have to think that were it up to women there wouldn’t be such things as strip clubs because there must be something a woman would always rather be doing right? there has to be and so maybe it’s the fault of capitalism and unchecked supply and demand and maybe there are some demands which we shouldn’t allow to be fulfilled in the market place and there are plenty of things we don’t allow but if we stopped it would all these women find other work and perhaps it’s overall better this way because they are able to support themselves with this money and in the end that’s probably better for women and feminism and this is just a short term sacrifice or something but that doesn’t make it fair for these girls standing right here in front of me and oh fuck now STD is getting up on stage and doing that same thing with the lying down and some part of me wishes that were me up there because fuck let’s not fucking kid ourselves those are some nice tits fuck I shouldn’t be thinking things like that and Sally and HIF seem amused but not really bothered by all this and I really need a fucking beer I think I feel a panic attack coming on and why is it that I am clearly way more disturbed and conflicted and deeply uneasy about all this than the two girls I am with? and perhaps I shouldn’t be disturbed at all and maybe this is all just good harmless fun despite nothing about this feeling fun but it should be especially for me I mean shit this is probably the closest I will get to seeing a naked woman for years at the rate I’m going and of all people I should be enjoying this as I’m getting what I have been fantasizing about the last three sexless years: a naked, sweating, gyrating female but I’m not enjoying this fucking at all and I’m starting to shake and I don’t think I can handle this much longer and I have to fucking get out of here right fucking now but god this is so cliché and like something right out of a bad movie where the pathetic, sensitive liberal guy can’t even handle the sight of a naked women and then goes home to his little liberal hybrid and does philosophy and cries when he watches movies and tells his friends how offended he was as the dirty strip club and what the fuck have I become this is so ridiculous and but so fuck it fuck it I don’t care I just have to get out of here right now before I really lose it…