STRIP CLUB TESTIMONY, by Kelly Holsopple - The Freedom and Justice Center for Prostitution Resources

Physical Abuse

Customers spit on women, spray beer, and flick cigarettes at them. Strippers are pelted with ice, coins, trash, condoms, room keys, pornography, and golf balls. Men pitched a live guinea pig and a dead squirrel at two women in the survey. Some women have been hit with cans and bottles thrown from the audience. Customers pull women’s hair, yank them by the arm or ankle, rip their costumes, and try to pull their costumes off. Women are commonly bitten, licked, slapped, punched, and pinched.

Sexual Abuse

Stripclub customers frequently grab women’s breasts, buttocks, and genitals. Customers often attempt and succeed at penetrating strippers vaginally and anally with their fingers, dollar bills, and bottles. Customers expose their penises, rub their penises on women, and masturbate in front of the women. Women in this study consistently connected lap dances to the sexual abuse they suffered in the club. "That’s the first thing men try to do when they get close to you and always in a lap dance." Stripclub owners, managers, and staff also expect women to masturbate them and some have forced intercourse on strippers.

Verbal Abuse

Customers, owners, managers, and staff alike engage in harassing name-calling. Women are continually called "c**t, "whore", "p***y", "slut", and "bitch". Women in this study charge that men in the stripclub called them other demeaning or degrading names like ugly, looser, fat, pregnant, boy, stupid, crack, slash, snatch, beaver, dog, dyke, lezzie, brown eye, hooters, junkie, crackhead, and shit. Forty four percent of the women report that men associated with the stripclub have threatened to hurt them physically. These women report from three to 150 threats during their involvement in stripping. Threats range from verbal threats of slaps, ass whippings, and rapes to physical postures of punching and back hand slapping. "When I wouldn’t let a customer grab on me, he would call me a bitch and threaten to kick my ass or rape me." "When a customer grabs and the woman and the girl takes action, they threaten".

Stalking

Men associated with stripclubs repeatedly attempt to contact the women against their wishes. Strippers are followed home and stalked by stripclub customers. Customers telephone, write letters, send gifts, and follow the women around against their wishes. Women recount stories of catching customers following them to fitness clubs, parks and lakes, day care centers, and even lesbian bars. They describe times when customers have broken into their homes and taken underwear, hairbrushes, and family photographs. Women say that other customers have used their jobs at the telephone company or within the criminal justice system to target the women. The women complain that customers also have followed them home masturbating while driving in the next lane. Women who travel the strip circuit to rural areas report that customers and stripclub owners, managers, and staff alike follow women from city to city and state to state. Furthermore, local men in small towns harass the visiting women by calling and knocking on the doors of the motel rooms and have been caught peeping in the windows of strippers’ motel rooms. Twelve percent of the women who reported being followed to their cars further reported that they were robbed (5.6 %), beaten (11.1%), threatened with a weapon (5.6%), verbally sexually harassed (66.7%), and sexually assaulted (16.7%) by customers. A customer who claimed he was in love with the woman followed her to her car, called her a "fucking c**t" and strangled her hard enough to cause blood to squirt from her neck.

All of the above is from this link where you can see the full study with much more information: http://www.ccv.org/downloads/pdf/Strip_clu...

Note: I had to edit the profanity in order to not have the post deleted by a moderator for being too sexually explicit. (That already happened to my STD post of yesterday.)

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Anti-Porn Activist
http://antipornographyactivist.blogspot.co... /

Veteran porn actor, director, and activist Bill Margold, former director of the “Adult” Industry’s “Free Speech Coalition”, and currently a trustee of the PAW Foundation, (”Protecting Adult Welfare”, at http://www.pawfoundation.org /), decribes below the current extreme level of abusiveness and exploitation that occurs in the porn industry.

“If we continue to force degradation and perversion of any kind, beating the Hell out of fellow performers and doing things to them that the human body isn’t really able to withstand – what I refer to now as the fear factor of X, perpetrating violence and derogatory situations upon them – why do we need to do that anymore when we can simply have sex without making sex derogatory or making sex dirty in the sense of defiling and dehumanizing people and basically physically hurting them? In a recent interview I once said what’s going happen when one of these people breaks? When they take so many penii, interesting term, so many dicks are shoved into them at one time that the body gives up and capitulates. What are they going to do when someone rips apart? When so many dicks are shoved into one hole? I’m being a little graphic but so many of the people making these movies these days have no business even going anywhere near a video camera, many of them have lost site (sic) of what creativity is and because they can’t create they’re frustrated and because they’re frustrated they just do whatever they can to shock. Eventually they’re just going to deal in physical pain, and I will not tolerate that.” …

“They’re doing bad things to people, making them cry, making them feel like pieces of meat, and they’re being brutalized and mistreated. They’re brutalized to the point of a lack of common sense. What we need to practice is ‘common sense-orship.’ These people do not need to be put into a fear factor of X, they don’t need to be penetrated over and over and over again, or the human body and the human mind will break and when you break their spirits and their minds you have nothing left. A lot of the vacancy in this business is readily apparent now, and a lot of the drugs that are in this business now are painkillers so that the girls don’t even know what they’re being put through, they’re just vacant. That, to me, is abhorrent. I’m not censoring, it’s interesting I was accused by one filmmaker of censoring him, but I’m not censoring this business, I’m criticizing this business because I’ve earned the right to criticize it and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem, and theirs as well.”

“I’m mad about that. It’s upsetting me that people will come to see me and cry and I don’t know how to strike back, and I’m suggesting to people that they get out of this business before they become eliminated from this business. A lot of these people, if they don’t want to play ball with the possible rules handed down to them, will find themselves behind bars which is maybe where they belong and there they’ll find themselves rendered into the same pieces of meat that they rendered their performers into.”

“I want to raise the age to twenty one, I want to now bring drug testing into the business and eradicate the escort services, and I want to one day have a porn tax.”

http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/Features/bill_ma...

The good people at NoPornNorthampton http://nopornnorthampton.org / wrote this excellent post below on choice and consent in pornography, which quotes liberally from the extremely informative chapter by Rebecca Whisnant http://www.myspace.com/rebeccawhisnant in NOT FOR SALE, http://www.notforsale-book.org / called "Confronting Pornography: Some Conceptual Basics". Many important points are made that deserve serious consideration if one is addressing porn and sex trade issues.

Freedom of Choice and Harmfulness

The argument that women freely choose to perform in porn films is often presumed to end all debate, but not every free choice is a good choice for one's self or society.

The problem with porn is not that it's offensive, but that it's harmful. Offense is subjective, and can be avoided by refusing to look at the offending material. Harm is objective: to be made less safe, to have one's interests set back. Women can be harmed by porn even if they are not aware of it. Mass consumption of porn creates a climate where women are more likely to be harassed, discriminated against, and treated as sex objects rather than real people. Porn performers also suffer long-term physical and emotional damage. (p.22)

What about women who choose to participate in porn? Whisnant acknowledges that feminists have overemphasized the coercion argument. It's not helpful to blur the difference between actual compulsion and choices that are distorted by a woman's lack of opportunities or sexual abuse history, serious as these problems are. Free choice is certainly better than being forced into the industry, but it is not the only relevant consideration. (p.23) She observes:

Rather than always putting 'choice' and 'consent' in scare-quotes, we need to clarify what does and does not follow from the observation that something is a choice, or is consensual. That something is chosen or consensual is perfectly consistent with its being seriously oppressive, abusive, and harmful--to oneself and or to a broader group of which one is a member (e.g. women). (p.23)

In other words, a free choice can still be a bad choice. Individual choices also don't exist in a vacuum. A woman's decision to be a porn star may feel empowering to her, but if it helps normalize and perpetuate an industry that disempowers many other women, it's not just a private matter. (p.24)

Moreover, our emphasis on the woman's choice conveniently keeps the focus away from porn producers and consumers, and whether they are making harmful choices. The option of becoming a porn performer wouldn't even exist if consumers didn't create the demand for "a sub-class of women (and children, and men, and transgender people--but mostly women) who are available for their unconditional sexual service." (p.25)
http://nopornnorthampton.org/2006/10/10/a-...

http://sexindustrysurvivors.com/main.htm

I am thrilled to see you and other compassionate people here speaking out against the horrific exploitation going on in the almost completely unregulated $10 billion dollar a year U.S. porn industry.

Here are some helpful references for you and anyone else who is interested in further examination of this issue:

From "Pornography Is A Left Issue" by Gail Dines and Robert Jensen:

"No one on the left defends capitalist media -- or any other capitalist enterprise -- by pointing out workers consented to do their jobs. The people who produce media content, or any other product, consent to work in such enterprises, under varying constraints and opportunities. So what? The critique is not of the workers, but of the owners and structure."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cf...

From "KINK.COM in SAN FRANCISCO: Women and Gay Men's Abu Ghraib", by Melissa Farley:

The existence of state-sponsored torture is decried by social critics on the Left, yet the identical treatment of women in prostitution is ignored by those same analysts. Many view torture by the United States of prisoners at Abu Ghraib with shock and horror, yet at the same time consider the identical acts perpetrated (and photographed) against prostituted women to be sexual entertainment. Condemning the Bush administration’s tolerance for torture in the war on terror, one journalist noted the “gleeful sadism” of guards at Abu Ghraib. Yet political pundits maintain silence regarding the same gleeful sadism of men toward women and gay men like that seen at (porn site) kink.com.
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/blog/2...

From "The Porn Debate: Wrapping Profit in the Flag", by Stan Goff:

"Pornography and prostitution 'in the material world' are overwhelmingly not 'choices.' They are vast, exploitative, patriarchal-capitalist industries, largely violent, very lucrative, controlled by women-hating men, and destructive of the women (and children) who are victimized by them. Most of the women who are prostituted (including those who are used to produce pornography) are poor, disproportionately from oppressed groups, frequently drug-addicted, the vast majority showing clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and wanting out. The majority suffered from sexual abuse as children, and many were first 'turned out' as minors. Many new prostitutes are 'broken in' through gang rape, and constantly abused by pimps.

These claims are based on extensive research, not the anecdotal interviews with industry spokespersons suggested to Chyng Sun by Nina Hartley. The anthology, Not For Sale “ Feminist Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant, cites this research extensively, for anyone who is interested in actually studying this predatory industry." http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php...

Stop Porn Culture Group MySpace Site (Formerly National Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement)
Does anti-porn slide show trainings and other activism. Includes videos of 2007 Wheelock anti-porn conference in Boston.
http://www.myspace.com/stoppornculture

Feminist Fred: (Also home of Pornsick Pat. )
http://www.feministfred.com /

My Anti-Porn Blogger MySpace Site:
http://www.myspace.com/antipornblogger

My Anti-Pornography YouTube Channel: with over 200 Anti-Porn and Anti-Sexual Exploitation Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/AntiPornographyBlog

My Anti-Pornography Activist Blog:
http://antipornographyactivist.blogspot.co... /

Enjoy! And to sampsonblk, thecatburglar, and others who are speaking up against the harms of pornography here and elsewhere, please keep up your vitally important work. Thanks!