Sexy?
Sarah had to answer this question when she signed up at the gym the other day. It’s hard because you don’t really know how to answer, like…do they want you to rank yourself on a scale from 1-10, or is it a yes or no question? Things in China are always that little bit more complicated, and also more fun 🙂
I’m thinking of signing up next week if I can straighten out my budget properly…
Yeah, I managed to lose a pair of pants in the bar yesterday.
Not my pants though, they were Sarah’s. Duh! Dangran!
We were going to Jonas’ birthday celebration at Mao Chong (really good pizzas, I want to go to there again!). Only when Sarah and I were about to jump into a cab did I realise that a pair of her black tights had some how gotten stuck to my jacket. I put them in my pocket, but they must have fallen out when I took my jacket off at Mao Chong. And of course I forgot that I had accidentally brought them along and didn’t think about it until this morning. Ops.
I didn’t realise how bad it sounded, until I called the bar to ask if they had found a pair of pants lying around their establishment.
“Ehh Hiii, I think I lost my pants in your bar last night. I mean, I think I lost my friends pants. Ehm I mean…have you seen a pair of black tights lying around your bar from last night?”
Unfortunately, they said they knew nothing about a pair of missing pants. Sooo where can they be?
Oh the mystery of the missing pants…somewhere in Beijing a pair of pants are lying around all alone and lost.
Damn…
So after reading about the whole “making stripping illegal” thing I decided I wanted to find out what strippers actually think about it.
I went to Studio Veena’s online forum (pole dancing website) and asked strippers to give their opinion on the matter, because even though a lot of pole dancers aren’t strippers, fact is many strippers are pole dancers so I figured I would be able to find some there. So far I have gotten 12 responses.
Pretty interesting stuff, so I have posted below some quotes:
“”in reply to the comment about people working grocery stores or other such things out of desperation – totally true! I’ve worked my fair share of minimum wage jobs at fast food and grocery stores, and I would choose stripping any day over have to do that kind of bullshit for so little money. If a politician told me I now had to work overtime at Walmart just to make ends-meet rather than making twice as much in half the time doing something I enjoy, I’d be like “Excuse me? You think this is for *my* benefit?””
“I retired from the adult biz of 5 years back in September. I loved it. I found it very liberating and I miss it. I never did anything that I wasn’t comfortable doing. I worked with some wonderful, highly educated and respectful people. It was the best times of my life.
Yes, some women get into biz for the wrong reasons and that’s unfortunate… I’ve met a few women in the biz for the wrong reasons (deperate for money, low self esteem, bad-drugs, alcohol, abuse, etc) and that makes their stripping career worse. The truth is if you want to be a happy, healthy, successful stripper, you gotta have your head screwed on straight and stay a head of the game and take care of yourself.”
“I just started stripping this past weekend, but I don’t at all feel like I’m being “objectified” or am there out of “desperation.” Granted, I got pretty damn excited over the amount of money I made, but I was like “omg, omg, look at how much I made! This is awesome!” Not like “god, I can’t believe I have to ‘shame’ myself to make this.”
Sure, there are some assholes at the club that don’t treat the girls very well, but most of the guys I’ve dealt with were very nice. And even the ones that couldn’t have cared about anything but getting a good lap dance didn’t make me feel like an object. It was my job – it was why I was there.”
“People need to actually talk to strippers and get the inside look because it’s really not something you can “just imagine” doing. And most of the girls I worked with didn’t seem depressed or jaded or bitter about how they “had to strip to make money.” They seemed pretty damn happy that they could capitalize well on just owning boobs lol I met maybe two women who seemed to be doing it because they were the “stereotypical single mom strippers who thought they couldn’t make enough money doing anything else.””
“I can make as much money in 6 minutes as I make for 3 hours at my other part-time job where I painstakingly stock a convenience store.” I told one of my guy friends, “All I have to do it shake around a little on a pole and I get guys like you to hand me hard earned money from jobs they hate. Who’s the one being exploited here?””
“Look, i am a HUGE feminist, but I guess im third-wave feminist, in that I believe women have won the right to self-determine their own lives, we’ve got the freedom to own our own bodies. So what we want to do with our bodies is totally our own business…,….It may be in the name of protecting women, but to my mind making it illegal for women to earn money for taking off their clothes or dancing in the nude is taking their rights of freedom of choice back away from them, its disempowering.”
“Stripping is not inherently evil or degrading. Its how the individual woman feels about it, how it makes her feel, the limits and values and principles she has, that determine wether its a good or bad thing for her. I found dancing on stage and getting nude for strangers to be strangely empowering, exhilirating, liberating. I felt like I was no longer being inhibited by social conventions, I felt proud of my own courage and daring, it taught me to be self-confident and appreciative of my body, what it looks like and what it can do. I think the human body is an incredible thing, and should be celebrated and appreciated whenever possible, not hidden away or covered for modesty or the law’s sake. But thas just me. As ******* said, it depends on the individual woman.”
“In my opinion, making stripping illegal won’t solve any problems, unionizing (to protect workers and customers) will. Things will just end up going underground where the real problems start. :(“
I will post more responses as they come in. Of course I expect there to be a underrepresentation of unhappy strippers that feel awful about their job, but the point is that there are loads of strippers who are perfectly happy in their job. It is as such not the work itself that makes people feel bad about themselves, but how they are as people when they enter the business. And as the chick behind the last quote says, making it illegal won’t solve any problems.
Did you know that you are made out of recycled stars?
All the natural elements (that you find in the periodical table) were produced by stars burning and eventually exploding, eventually forming the matter that compose you and I.
My old professor Tony Fairall told us that we were therefore all made out of stars 🙂
I think it is a pretty neat thought to think that the atoms that compose my body once upon a time was part of a star.
A little something to remember on days when you feel a little shitty.
What you are made of!
(Wikipedia)
Grrrr… Why on earth can you only put ONE hometown down in your profile on Facebook???
So stupid!
What century is Facebook living in?!
Sleepless in Beijing tonight…so I think it is time for another episode of Sexy Beijing:
(I never get bored of watching that intro lol)
After having a good laugh with Ryan yesterday about the guy calling me a racist for writing “kalaokey” I started wondering whether or not it is actually right to label linguistic joking as racist.
Is “herro” and “egg flide lice” racist?
If it is racist to make fun of Japanese people’s accents and Chinese accents, then it must be racist to make fun of French people’s accents too, which I do all the time. And when Ryan makes his southern American accent until I cry of laughter, that must then be very racist… ?
Maybe it can be offensive to some if you joke about their language’s “supposed accent”, but is it racism? I mean, it is tied to language, not to ethnicity? Perhaps it could be said that it is lingo-centric or something… but I’m not sure it is right to call it racism. You could be of Asian ethnicity, but born in Norway and have a perfect New Norwegian accent, so your accent is not tied to your biological heritage, but to your cultural upbringing.
When it comes to cultures and languages, I think joking should be allowed, because it is a light form for criticism. Cultures and languages should be critically evaluated, ethnicity should not because there is nothing you can do about ethnicity, you are the way you are (unless of course, you are Michael Jackson that is), whereas languages and cultures are dynamic and evolving.
Also, joking is fun. Most jokes are found offensive by some people, but that doesn’t mean it is racist or that we should not joke about it. If we didn’t joke about anything that could potentially be found offensive by someone we would have no humour left in the world.
I can only begin to imagine how many jokes there must be about foreigners making mistakes with the chinese language. I mean…all those tones! I wonder what I am really saying sometimes. Chinese people must have a great time joking about the foreigner who found a fly in his sugar (pronounced: tang2) instead of a fly in his soup (tang1).
Got a comment on my old blog involving a lot of swearwords and basically saying I am a racist. The fact that I say “Kalaokey” a lot is apparently racist.
At first I was a bit…confused to why kalaokey would be offensive.
Then I realised that the poor little dude calling me a racist probably thinks I’m belittling Chinese people by saying kaLaokey instead of kaRaoke.
It’s just that…. karaoke in Chinese actually is kaLAokey!
卡拉OK, or phonetically: Ka La Okey.
The best thing about this Chinese word (which is one of my favourites) is that it can be said as a suggestion!
Kala-OKEY? 🙂
It’s too bad that some people decide to spend their time pointing fingers, instead of actually enlightening their dumb little ignorant minds. Seriously if all those ignorant people (including sexists and homophobes) spent a little bit more energy learning about the world and a little less being judgemental, they would probably be a lot less angry.
But then again there will always be those of us who like to learn about other cultures and languages, and those who just can’t be bothered.
Now if you will excuse me, I will take my high horse and ride over to see Ryan.
Shanghaied Sigrid 