things that have my permission to never happen again:

• boss making jokes to someone else about the local strip club
• boss making jokes to someone else AND TO ME  about Girls Gone Wild (two separate occasions)
• boss telling me about an “interesting” (crime-ridden) part of town where he’s seen “nicely painted ladies, shall we say” get picked up by passing cars, telling me this while he’s looking at me like he’s expecting me to laugh

on “Victorian morality”

Given how often I’ve seen the idea that disgust toward sex is haughty and oppressive unless paired with a disclaimer, I’m interested in how that erroneous cultural link formed to begin with.  I can only assume it must have something to do with the upper-class elites of the Victorian age, your classic “prudes,” and this post details the best explanation I’ve come to for what we now know as “Victorian morality,” based on what I can put together from what I can scrounge up on the subject.  If you’re more informed and have corrections or additions to make, please let me know in the comments.

AA: a point of clarification

In response to a message that I was asked not to publish, I’d like to clarify some things about this mess of a post.  My poor phrasing raised some concerns about what I was implying… so allow me to offer this reassurance:

• I do not believe that criticizing the sex industry amounts to classism.
• I do believe that large chunks of the sex industry are predatory and exploitative.
• I believe that part of what allows the sex industry to be so exploitative is the stigma against the women (+ various others) directly involved in it, since that kind of prior work experience can damage their standing with potential employers in other industries.
• I’m not interested in touting full decriminalization as a simple answer to these issues, since I regard these problems as being irrevocably tied to a capitalist economic structure, something that legal decriminalization will not alter.

And while I’m on the subject… I’ll state that my views on all this are in large part shaped by my relationship with the copilot, who’s been working as a stripper since my sophomore year of college.  I’m not going to try and speak for her views on the issue, but through her I’ve had second-hand exposure to the ways that stigma and legal interference have made her life harder, and the treatment she has to deal with at work that makes me wish she could leave and never look back, and how much she needs that fast money in order to keep up with all her debt (+ obligatory reminder that you can donate to her paypal at jute.angel@gmail.com to help!).

So, no, I don’t think of it as “just a job.”  And I don’t want anyone else to think of it that way, either.