Family Forum / Marriage / Marriage / July 2009

Thanks for the LOL you just gave me. You guys are so deep at times, but
fall into the funny zone enough to keep me around :-)

Bob

OMG have you evere gone? The first time I ever bought a lap dance for my
husband, he almost died! But otherwise it is kinda depressing.

This is the crux of the difference.

I am curious as hell since you seem to have an explanation of why. What
possible objection could you have to a pole dancing class in a fitness
center?

In a discussion of a group that complains about pole dancing,
apparently because they believe it promotes unhealthy attitudes about
sex, I objected to referring to those people as being merely "moralizing
busybodies".  Various analogies and arguments have been offered, and
some replies have included tangents, so I'll try to trim this down a
bit and restate my original point.

To be clear: I do not agree that shutting down an exercise class, even
if it includes belly-dancing or pole-dancing or whatever, is a good
idea.  I do not support those who would shut such a class down,
provided it only welcomes adults and its advertising &c are not highly
offensive.

However, if you have daughters, and you have not at times been upset by
some of the messages sent to girls from the wider culture about what
they have to be and do for them to count as worthwhile human beings,
then your experience is much different than mine.

IIRC, a study of TV shows indicated that almost no women on TV, in any
role, were bigger than a size 6, even though most women in the USA with
a healthy body weight are size 12.  Almost no women on TV are over 40,
because once you turn 40 you're useless and ugly and should be hidden
away.  The babble of a Jessica Simpson or a Demi Moore rates front-page
magazine stories in which they give their opinions on topics such as
foriegn policy, because we all know that pretty actresses are experts
on everything they want to discuss.  Madalyn Albright actually *knows*
something about foreign policy, but she's not as interesting for an
interview because she's not as pretty.  The message I see in such
things is that women shouldn't bother learning anything, they should
rather try to be pretty -- and pretty in a conventional way -- in order
to matter.

None of this is new, of course.  An early Supergirl comic book included
her swimming with a young man and letting him win: not to protect her
secret identity, but because she knows that boys prefer girls who don't
outshine them, and it's important for boys to like you.  Important
enough that, if needed, girls should to pretend to be someone they're
not.

It bothers me that such idiocy is, and for many years has been, part and
parcel of our culture's beliefs about women.  We watch almost no network
TV in our house, and the periodicals we buy generally don't include much
coverage of people like Britney Spears (unless I missed her article in
_Communications of the ACM_ 8-).  But my kids go to school with other
kids, and some of those kids definitely take in those lessons and share
them, speaking as if these things were all established truths.

And it's not just the girls: what do boys learn to expect from all this
cultural baggage?  What kind of girls are they taught to prefer, and
taught to ignore?  Yes, it's the parents' job to teach such things, but
does that mean they have no right whatever to gripe about those who make
their job harder?

So, if somebody has started pole-dancing exercise classes, and somebody
else feels this will "normalize" pole-dancing, I may not agree that
this would happen, or that the classes should be stopped, but I
understand having an emotional reaction to what's going on.  No, it's
not logical to go down the slippery slope and wonder if there's going
to be "Pole Dancing With The Stars" on TV in a few years -- but many
people find that their logic is uncertain where their children are
concerned.

So, going back to my original point, which was to object to saying that
these people were merely "moralizing busybodies", I'll include only one
exchange.  I wrote:

and Doug Anderson replied:

I didn't say they weren't moralizing busybodies, I said they weren't
MERELY moralizing busybodies.  I object to looking at anyone you
disagree with, reducing them to a two-word dismissal, and then
discarding them completely.  I object to saying that anyone who is
wrong is completely and totally and uselessly wrong, and has nothing
worth saying and no validity whatsoever in anything they think.

That was my objection.  Reducing someone you disagree with to a
caricature you can discard with yesterday's trash, so confident in your
moral and intellectual superiority that you are untroubled by whatever
concerns other people might have.

It's not like the association of pole dancing with cheap sex is made
only by moralizing busybodies.  Chris Rock is one of those people that
moralzing busybodies complain about, and yet he memorably remarked that
sometimes, he looks at his daughter, "and I realize my only job in life
is to keep her off the pole."  He went on to say "they don't grade
fathers, but if your daughter is a stripper you [messed] up."  Whatever
your feelings about pole dancing and/or strippers, the association of
pole dancing with strippers is so well-established that he could make
those remarks and be comfortably certain that 99% of his audience would
understand the connection.

Darren Provine ! kilroy@elvis.rowan.edu ! http://www.rowan.edu/~kilroy
"Entertainment is the most powerful educational force of any culture."
                                                 -- George Gerbner