Two links today. First, “At Stadium Club, young, professional women party while others strip,” from my hometown daily:
It’s Friday evening in D.C., and three women arrive at the Stadium Club, a converted warehouse in Northeast. It is flanked by rundown brick buildings and a gritty car repair station. Rough gravel replaces sidewalks, and the street is largely deserted. Other than the club, the only sign of life is a gas station a quarter of a mile away. Stadium is like a diamond in the rough, but in the way tarnished silverware shines when placed next to plastic spoons.
The women go inside.
“I wasn’t expecting it to be this nice,” says Rashanda Robertson, 33, an Atlanta native who’s in the city for graduate school.
Tonight is her first visit to a strip club. To her left and right are clusters of women, outnumbering the men. Women in heels. Women who teach. Women who advocate as social workers. Professional women. Heterosexual women. Women just like her.
Unlike many strip clubs — which are narrow, dark and dominated by men — Stadium, with color-changing chandeliers lighting up 14,000 square feet, has become a chic hot spot for young African American women. They host bachelorette and birthday parties here, buy rounds of drinks and chitchat while other women work the pole. The club is a bucket-list item for black yuppies. It falls somewhere between Dupont Circle day parties and concerts at The Park at 14th club. …
“Sixty percent of the club on any night is women,” Redding says.
and here’s the New York Times, “‘The Waltons’ Meets ‘Modern Family’”:
I AM now a statistic. Earlier this summer, the United States Census Bureau reported that the number of adult children living in their parents’ households had increased by 1.2 million between 2007 and 2010. Shared households accounted for 18.7 percent of all American households in 2010, up from 17 percent in 2007. Most of those children were between age 25 and 34, but I had suddenly joined their ranks at a considerably older age.
In August 2010, as my husband, Daniel Rivkin, and I approached our 50th birthdays, we were suddenly forced to move into my parents’ home in Michigan with our three teenage children and dog. Never mind that my older brother, who had lost his job the previous year, was already in residence in one of their basement bedrooms — my parents’ three-story rambling colonial home quickly accommodated us all. …
Without the emotional support of my extended family (I also have more than a dozen cousins who live in town), I don’t know how we would have readjusted. But I also found it extremely awkward initially when new friends learned of our living arrangement.
more (and I found this link at Rod Dreher’s blog, where there are more such stories–and more discontented ones!–in the comments)
September 4th, 2012 | 7:52 am
“It puts women in a situation of being complete objects, being looked at. Why do women want to engage in this without looking at it really carefully and seeing if it fits a woman’s idea of what is sexy?”
I have to confess I don’t fully understand the concept of the “objectification” of women (or men). If a person is dancing with any degree of skill, he or she is a dancer. Many dancers, particularly in such things as chorus lines, are “objects” in a certain sense. I suppose there might be some ultra-feminists who would object to, say, the Rockettes, but I wouldn’t take them seriously. If I were going to be concerned about something, it would be the rappers and the rap music more than the pole dancers.
September 4th, 2012 | 9:42 am
If there is no difference between our common understanding of a “dancer,” one who has achieved a high level of proficiency in the art of dancing, an art that is practiced by both men and women as one part of an integrated life, and that of a “woman,” a person who has integrated her sexuality within the wholeness of her female nature, powers, and proclivities, then the idea of “objectification” does fail as a matter that should elicit our concern.
If, on the other hand, there is a difference, then the subject deserves our most serious attention.
September 4th, 2012 | 10:27 am
With all the talk of various hot-button issues of the day and concern about the “best interests of children,” it has long seemed to me that the best situation for children to grow up in is the extended family, not the nuclear family. Wikipedia says:
My older sister and her husband took care of my grandfather in his old age, and after he had to go into a nursing home for professional care, they had my parents share a big house with them. It was a mutual arrangement, not one of necessity as in the Times article, but the benefits were the same. I think my sister and her husband, my niece and nephew, and my mother and father were all much happier, healthier, and economically secure than it they had lived separately. If we look at history as telling us what God “intended,” then it appears to me he intended for children to grow up not just with their mothers and fathers, but with their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, their cousins, as well as other members of the community.
September 4th, 2012 | 12:16 pm
“If we look at history as telling us what God “intended,” then it appears to me he intended for children to grow up not just with their mothers and fathers, but with their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, their cousins, as well as other members of the community.”
David Nickol,
I could not agree more. Perfectly stated.
September 5th, 2012 | 7:23 am
David Nickols (as usual) makes an excellent point.
The Pécresse Commission, a commission appointed in 2006 by the French National Assembly to report on children and the family, described the “traditional family” in this way: “in this country, the model has long been the peasant family, structured around a patriarch and expanding from hearth to hearth. Children were raised within an expanded group and not by two parents.” They saw the “PME” family – [père, mère, enfant – father, mother, child] as a relatively modern, and not particularly welcome, innovation.
Similarly, where I live, in the rural West of Scotland, more than half the local farms contain three generations and, even in the towns, especially in the poorer areas, many women live in the same street as their mothers. Among the well-to-do, the “granny flat” is becoming a down-sized version of the Dower House.
September 5th, 2012 | 9:02 am
David Nickol,
Is all dancing, whether strip-tease, ballet, or ball room, to be reduced to the same thing, merely a matter of skill? I am not sure whether the concept of objectivization is best in addressing prurience but I don’t think it is used to question whether strip tease is dancing or skillful but rather whether it appeals to a persons prurient desire or not. The desirability of not excessively stoking lust seems to me obvious in male/female relationships. It seems to me that self-control in this is rightly based on an exalted view of human personhood which is desirous to protect human flourishing in fullness. It seems to me those women attending strip joints, as well as the men, are contributing to the undermining of depth and wholeness in the relationships between the sexes.
September 5th, 2012 | 9:48 am
I am not sure whether the concept of objectivization is best in addressing prurience . . . .
David Alexander,
That is the only point I was making. Perhaps someone could explain the concept of “objectification” in such a way that I would understand how it justifies a negative view of erotic dancing. But I don’t get it. Take this (amazing) Busby Berkeley number, for example. The dancers lose their individuality and sometimes even their human form. The same is true for pornography. There may be all kinds of valid arguments against it, but I don’t see how claiming it turns people into objects is a convincing argument.
September 5th, 2012 | 10:34 pm
I think the idea behind the “objectification” terminology is that sexuality ought to be a matter of intimate relations between whole persons, and that therefore it is corrupt to reduce sexuality to an object-level.
Thus, “objectification” isn’t a problem in a Busby Berkeley dance number, but it is a problem with an erotic pole dancer. Because the former isn’t sexual, while the latter is.
That’s the idea, anyhow.
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