Saturday 25 February 2017

Chester Brown: "A Mild-Mannered, Even-Handed & Fair Individual"

CHESTER BROWN:
(from a Patreon Update on 14 February 2017)
...Amanda and S caught a cab home and I walked. Not in a rush now, and after a very enjoyable day, I was in the right mood to fully appreciate the beauty of the city under a fresh blanket of snow.
Earlier in the day I’d read cartoonist Carson Grubaugh’s assessment of Dave Sim's Latter Days. In it, Grubaugh writes that
"If there is [a God], a Creator, conscious of its actions and aware of its creation then it is a despicable, selfish, pathetic, piece of shit. […] I have had a pretty good [life…. But] the day-to-day, moment-to-moment aspects of being alive are pretty much a gigantic pain in the ass and a massive responsibility. Balanced against every awesome thing I have ever experienced the weights fall resoundingly on the side of the ‘meh,’ and that is before you add in all of the ‘this is terrible'."
Several sentences later, Grubaugh approvingly quotes a passage by Sim in which he compares life to a party...
"…which turns out, upon your arrival, to be excruciatingly boring and not worth a fraction of what you had to give up to attend. The fact that you have to stay at the party for as long as eighty or ninety years, it seems to me, only emphasizes the level of stupidity inherent in your choice [to attend the party]."
Many years ago I realized that, if I’m bored at a party, it’s not the fault of any of the people at the party, and it’s certainly not God’s fault. It’s my fault if I can’t figure out what makes my fellow party-attendees interesting.
I was mulling about that while walking home after a delightful day in heaven.

CHESTER BROWN:
(from a Patreon Update on 20 February 2017)
Back on the 14th I mentioned Carson Grubaugh's assessment of Dave Sim's Latter Days. Reading that piece prompted me to pull out my copy of the book:

(What an ugly cover!) I'd forgotten that I make a cameo appearance on pages 224 and 225:
On page 481, in the notes section, he wrote:
"I decided to bring Chester Brown in at this point, since he's a completely mild-mannered, even-handed and fair individual..."
That was written back when Dave considered me to be a friend — I'm guessing that he doesn't still think I'm even-handed and fair.

30 comments:

Unknown said...

I never considered Chester to be a friend. Which is nothing personal against Chester. I learned a while ago that most people consider friendship a form of leverage that they can use against you when it's opportune.

I DID find him even-handed and fair -- or, rather, the closest approximation to that that you're going to find in the DRAWN & QUARTERLY crowd (still a compliment considering how closed-minded Seth is, as an example) -- and I did think it was worth maintaining communication for the sake of Canadian Cartooning Posterity. Which definitely involved my going to Toronto, not Chet coming to Kitchener. But that's more of a "Toronto personality" thing.

I thought it was even-handed and fair of ME to associate with HIM even though he was (Joe Matt's term) a "whoremonger" and discuss the subject in his frames of reference, clip articles out of the NATIONAL POST pro- and anti-legalized prostitution and fax them to him when he was researching PAYING FOR IT considering I was on the opposite side of the argument entirely. "Believe me, Chet, if I thought there was nothing wrong with prostitution, I'd be right there. Go 'shopping' on the Internet for the one that I want, go see her, do the deed, hand her $200 and leave? But, I just can't 'buy into that'. That's just wrong." Like "fornication wrong/adultery wrong" but worse because you've stirred money into the pot.You just don't DO THAT to another human being (in my opinion).

It did come as a complete surprise (and shouldn't have) when he refused to sign the petition. But I try to be philosophical about it. Comics Most Famous Whoremonger Thinks I'm a Misogynist.

I'll live.

Jeff Seiler said...

Um, Dave, you should know by now that there's no such thing as "not paying for it". The only way you don't pay for it is if you don't do it. But, even that is tricky sometimes, as I learned last night.

whc03grady said...

Huhn. Many years ago *I* realized that, one, I didn't have to give up *anything* to attend this party, and two, it wasn't my choice to attend it in any case.

Alright,
mjg.

Carson Grubaugh said...

whc03grady,

Exactly! I don't think one can call someone else a party-pooper if that someone was forced to go to the party. *Kidnapped at gunpoint, brought to an AIDS ridden heroin den, my fault for not finding a way to have fun at the 'party'.* Sorry, Mr. Brown, don't buy the argument.

Anyway, the point I was making, and I think the one Dave was making, is that we find ourselves forced into a situation where the price of admission outweighs the benefits of even the most successful engagement with the event. We all still working to make the best of it. What else is there to do? It isn't like either of us advocated removing one's self from the party.

I find astonishing that Dave can hold the view he expressed in that statement yet still be so devoted to God, the host who created all of the attendees and then forced them to attend such an awful party.

I can see acknowledging that something is bigger and badder than you, shutting up, and doing as it says. Maybe this is Dave's outlook?

I cannot understand a view in which such an entity is regarded as anything other than a purely malevolent sadist. I don't care if the sadist is bigger and badder than me, I am still gonna tell it to get bent, if it is there.

Barry Deutsch said...

I think that Brown's "Paying For It" was... Well,at least one or two of those encounters struck me as genuinely terrible, and not something that I'd want to participate in at any level.

I want prostitution to be legalized because prostitutes can get more legal protections and be abused less if what they do isn't a crime. But that's a "pick the lesser evil" position. I'm pessimistic that prostitution can ever being a job that isn't terrible for many of the people in it, and "Paying For It" sure added to that pessimism.

Unknown said...

Hi Carson and Whc03grady - I don't know where or in what context I wrote that comment, but my best current thinking is that the physically-incarnated world is definitely not a party. I don't think you get yourself physically incarnated this far out in the boonies (relative to the Big Bang) as a promotion or an entertainment. My best current thinking is that we're expected to work: that leisure time is our own idea and a bad one at that. That is, I'm pretty sure that Abraham worked from the moment he got up in the morning until the moment he went to bed and so did Isaac and so did Jacob. If THEY were expected to work sunrise to sundown, I think the best thing anyone can do is work 12 hours a day, (me from 10 am to 10 pm. Work, fast, pray, work, fast, pray, work, fast pray, go to bed. On the 7th day fast 24 hours and rest/sleep. Rinse. Repeat). If you "dig the world" there's no shortage of things to distract yourself with. But you do, I think, end up stuck out here in the boonies when the sun goes nova and basically collapses every soul that ever walked the earth into a very compressed black hole. Choosing to link yourself to God and reinforcing that every waking minute of every waking day is, I suspect, the only "transit papers" available to us.

See, I don't think God forced us to attend the party. Quite the contrary. I think physical incarnation was presented to us (God's chronic wankers and whiners and complainers) -- prior to the Big Bang -- as the closest means to getting away from God. You can't get away from God, He's omnipresent, but physical incarnation allows you to ignore Him (if you think that's a good idea and, I infer, Three Stooges-like, we all thought that was a GREAT idea) and do everything on your oddy-knocky. Some of us, I think, wanted to prove our loyalty to God: that even though we wouldn't be able to see Him our connection to Him is so immutable that we will always be among the Loyalists, no matter how far from the Big Bang we end up and how surrounded by Disloyalists we are. Some of us are right about that. Some of us are in for a very bad surprise on Judgement Day about the extent of our "loyalty" to God.

whc03grady said...

That's a heck of a salad, but I'll say this: the local star isn't massive enough to collapse into a black hole.

Unknown said...

I do want to qualify that I have no idea what God's attitude is toward whores and whore-mongering. I can certainly see Chet's argument and I certainly think that totally legal prostitution is where we're going (in a Feminist Theocracy it's just too convenient to see it as "empowering" for young women: it certainly was in the Temples of Ishtar if by "empowering" you mean a great way to corrupt monotheistic men, which I infer the Feminist Theocracy is interested in in a major way).

It's still in the DUH! category, as far as I'm concerned. Do you want your daughter to be a hooker? Do you want your sister to be hooker? Do you want your mother to be a hooker? If you don't want them to be hookers, then you think being a hooker is a bad idea.

At the same time if Chet is still in a committed relationship with his favourite then his might be an entirely unique circumstance on Judgement Day -- OR a template for how men fit into a Legalized Prostitution Future: find a needy single mother hooker and pay her for sex so she can feed her kids.

Just try not to do it in front of the kids.

Unless, as a Feminist your hooker-mom find that Empowering (I guess...he said, fading to black because personally I don't believe a word of this) :)

whc03grady said...

Another point, and maybe you're being figurative (but given your remarks on the life::party metaphor, I don't think you are), but Earth isn't "in the boonies" relative to the BigBang. On the contrary: the BB happened everywhere. The universe has no center.
You have to be careful you understand the physics before you go trying to reconcile it with the folk tales of Bronze Age shepherds who didn't know where the Sun went at night.

Carson Grubaugh said...

Dave,

If God is the creator of ALL THAT IS, then any entity, physical or not, is because God made it. Whether such an entity chose to instantiate physically, chose to stay with or to leave God, is besides the point, to me. It is a question about the burden of being, of any sort, and the morality of imbuing being without the being's permission. Obviously you can't ask a thing for its permission before it is, so the act of creation itself seems morally suspect to me.

Jeff Seiler said...

Just out of curiosity (and I mean this in the Matt Dow sort of "wow, I can't believe what's going on here, I can't believe I'm watching it, I can't believe I can't stop watching it, I can't believe I haven't walked away yet, it seems like only yesterday when I wasn't watching this" way), are we all going down the rabbit hole here?

Erick said...

Carson, you can not have it both ways. Either you believe in God, and that God created and or set in motion all that is (free will and all that jazz). Or, you do not believe in God, and thus you owe your creation entirely to your Mom and Pop throwing the proverbial procreative dice. And, since you find the act of creation morally suspect, well I guess family dinners at the Grubaugh household are a might tense. 'How dare you create me without asking my permission first!'
Yeah

Sean R said...

The tolerance and critical welcoming of Paying For It was incredibly bizarre to me, a reminder to me that Dave's formulation of "choice above all" is truly active in the world, and a reminder that enforcement of orthodoxy exists in all places of the political spectrum. Such an unintentionally revealing book, utter failure as a polemic, and a portrait of a person revealed as having no regard for the humanity of the people he is involved with in the most intimate of ways. Totally perplexing to me that it would be treated as anything other than an oddity. I think Robert Stanley Martin summed it up pretty well.

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/05/robert-stanley-martin-on-paying-for-it/

I don't have the stomach for such an undertaking, but it would be interesting to do a close reading that compared Paying for It to the Playboy or some of the earlier autobiographical works by Mr. Brown.

Erick said...

Just wanted to add that it should go without saying that I find Chester's rationalizations for dehumanizing behavior to be despicable.

Unknown said...

Erick - I always liked the line Johnny Carson came up with when his kids would say "I didn't ASK to be born!" "If you had, the answer would have been 'No.'" :)

Carson - The problem with finding it suspect is that we aren't God. "WHY did you do create me?" I think it's safe to presuppose that the answer to that would be "You wanted me to." Otherwise it wouldn't have happened.

In a Seminal Creation sense. I think it has more to do with a) externalizing doubt: in multiple senses making it "apart from You"; "getting rid of impurity"; "giving it the possibility of return"; "giving it an opportunity to enact itself".

Look at all the forms of incarnation across the entire spectrum of the sky on a clear night out in the country. If they persist in doubting God and rebelling against God, well, we're way out here. No harm no foul. If we change our minds and want to get back to God ("From God we came out and to God we are returning" as the Muslims put it), there's no shortage of ways to (theoretically) do that. We might even come back to Him with some useful unanticipated philosophy.

grady - Uh, I don't think so. I think the Big Bang LIT UP everywhere -- i.e. "Let there be light" -- but that's very different from saying it happened everywhere. There was only one Big Bang and all of the stars, I think, are attempts to imitate it. To get the exact same [I forget the astronomical percentage: it's in a LATTER DAYS footnote] balance of elements: no way that happened by accident, I don't think. No way. Any less and the whole thing collapses in on itself. Any more and everything disintegrates on the way out. Perfectly balanced. I'm sticking with that, personally.

Unknown said...

grady - If it's not massive enough to collapse into a black hole, it's still going to go nova and consume the earth and everything in it. And then either dissipate or collapse into something.

Unknown said...

Sean R - It's the slippery slope, unfortunately. If we're all just bags of chemicals -- i.e. there's no such thing as the human soul -- then there's nothing wrong with an attractively-shaped bag of chemicals charging me $200 to let me inside her "bag" for an hour or so.

The way I TRIED to explain it to Chet was, "I could not WAIT to be old enough to go and see strippers. What a great idea! Why didn't EVERY guy go and see strippers three or four times a week?" Then I got old enough and went a couple of times and went "This is depressing. They're dead inside. There's no light in their eyes." I didn't know what it was because I was still an atheist. Now that I believe in the human soul I think it's a matter of women being naked in front of a bunch of strange men on an on-going basis eats away at their soul very, very quickly. Even more so with hookers because there's a greater physical intimacy.

Obviously, he didn't agree. How could he? Admit that you -- cheerfully -- go around deadening women's souls?

Erick - I think you still have to make some allowances for the fact that, to Chester, they aren't rationalizations. He's a very deep introspective thinking type and always has been and (I'm sure) always will be. So, at some level you have to accept that he's just come to a different conclusion from ours.

My reaction to his philosophy is my reaction to everyone's philosophy: "For your sake, relative to Judgement Day, I hope you're right."

Unknown said...

What surprised me was that that wasn't reciprocal. I mean, according to Chet he got the idea of using prostitutes from reading CEREBUS No.186. i.e. I don't have to go through this whole convoluted girlfriend thing: I can just pay for it (I think it happened shortly after he broke up with Sook-Yin but was still living in the basement of the house they had shared together in Kensington Market).

Well, that wasn't what I was advocating and it isn't a conclusion that I came to or in any way agree with but -- given that Chester believes that he "saw the light" because of what I wrote -- it seemed logical that he would at least extend me the same intellectual courtesy that I did him: I don't agree with your ideas about women but I don't think that your ideas mean that you hate women.

And I DON'T think Chester hates women. I think he loves women. But he just doesn't love women the way they want to be loved. That's a very different thing from hating women.

Unknown said...

What a can of worms!

And I think Chet slipped -- BADLY -- from his otherwise "even-handed and fair" persona when he claimed that the reason Joe Matt wasn't using prostitutes was because he was too cheap and the reason I wasn't using prostitutes was because I didn't think women should work.

The three of us didn't have very extensive discussions about prostitution, but as I recall Joe's attitude was that using prostitutes was "disgusting" (but great gossip! Joe loved good gossip!) and mine was as I outlined it above. There's really not much you can add when you disagree that vehemently. "Let's talk about something else."

Somehow that mutated in Chet's mind into "Chet uses prostitutes because he's financially generous and Joe isn't" and "Chet uses prostitutes because he's a good feminist and Dave isn't."

Which, I think, just demonstrates how CRITICALLY IMPORTANT prostitution is to Chet. I can't think of a single other instance when he wasn't 100% truthful about whatever he was talking about. That's why mischaracterizing my reactions and Joe's reaction was such a glaring exception to "the Chet I knew".

Anonymous said...

At the risk of revealing too much, I have no problems with women being prostitutes. There's a reason it's noted as the "world's oldest profession" and I think that gets directly back to the differences between men and women. Why would you pay and provide for a woman? So she'll have sex with you regularly. That eventually became the concept of marriage - which Hillary Clinton herself says is the bedrock of Western Civilization - and brings its own headaches to the table.

If the pro-choice free-sexuality movement believed what they were saying, they'd be setting up a "free pussy" sign the way the theater owner in "Another Froggy Evening" set up a "free beer" sign. 'Tell me how much you love abortion, you can totally have this pussy.' I could do the same thing by telling you how much I love murdering unborn children, and the taxpayer would pay for it.

To a large extent, this extends to strippers as well. In my experience, they've been women doing the best they can with what skills they have to offer in the few roles society gives them. Sometimes they're not very intelligent and/or attractive and they're working hard to bring in money. Usually because they're single mothers, but those have their own problems.

I like the ones who know what they're doing and (rightly or wrongly) have plans for their lives. Mostly they're college girls who are working their way through school, or they're just working for extra money. They know they have to stay in shape, they know they have to pay attention to make-up and clothes - maybe I'm naive, but watching a girl go from moderate-sized breasts to 'woah, those things really stick out' just by her shifting her bra was awesome - and they're fun to talk to. I already know they aren't going home with me, but at least I can appreciate female attention, even if it's insincere by definition.

I think prostitution and strip joints are valid because they go such a long way towards stripping off the illusions of gender roles. I support legal enforcement for the girls because the alternative is worse, but then there's that moment where you notice that a girl isn't wearing a shirt, and then you talk to her for five minutes or so, and then notice she isn't wearing a bra either. I was interested in her mind, fer crying out loud! But she's not old enough to want guys interested in her mind, and she works in a job where she's paid for her body. C'est la vie.

ChrisW

Carson Grubaugh said...

Dave,
The omniscience point is well made, and well taken, as an out for not having to ask permission before imbuing an entity with being. However, unless God also decides that some things that would want to exist don't get to, this is just an impersonal concept of God as a top-down predetermination machine playing out mere necessity. If God is making such decisions it is: doing so based on a morality determined by it's own capricious fancy, which reintroduces my skepticism about God's right to make such decisions just because it is the biggest thing; it is appealing to some outside moral code; which undermines the absoluteness of the concept; or it is using omniscience to make the decisions that give the best possible outcome, which both gives it an outside moral code and puts us back in the realm of predetermination. I wish I could understand it otherwise.

An impersonal, yet awe-inspiring, sum total of existence was the view that I held for many years. That still seemed worthy of worship. In the last few years I have become suspicious of any top-down metaphysics and pump in favor of complexity growing bottom up from simplicity. I do think, however, that the best bet we have for constructing a moral system is found in treating reality as if it were a top-down system. A game in which, if we could grasp all of existence as a single bit of understanding, these are the conclusions we would come to about how to behave.

Erick,

Those are the options available to me, yes. The issue has arisen a few times, mostly at big holiday gatherings, when the born-again side of the family tries to bring me back into the church and uses the God-as-caring-parent analogy to try to make the idea palatable to me. Not a fun conversation to have with your own mother, I admit. But, I am also able to say that my parents 100% realize the immense responsibility they took on when committed another person to 70-90 years of life. They have always done everything humanly possible to live up to that task and I am never shy to express my gratitude for how admirably they meet the challenge. It is about as harmonious a set of relationships as possible among biological family members, largely because we are capable of being brutally honest with one another without getting hurt and offended.

Erick said...

Dave,
The Carson quote is hysterical. He was the greatest talk show host and one of the best comedians of his generation.
I disagree that Chet's views are simply "different conclusions" regardless of how much thought he put into it. I am not comparing the two as far as the impact, but I am sure child molesters rationalize as well. In fact, one on the rise conservative homosexual - Milo Jian-something-opolis, just flamed out for advocating sex between 13 year old boys and grown men. There are certain societal norms whose violation draw immediate universal condemnation - murder, rape and child abuse being but a few. They do not require a wait until judgment day before the fate of the perpetrators is known. One other thing Dave, you paint feminists with way to broad of a brush. There is fierce division within their ranks split along conservative and liberal wings concerning prostitution. No surprise that the conservative feminists hate prostitution with a white hot passion. To them it is merely another form of male dominance and violence over women.

Chris,
I am certain that your views are not in the least bit out of the ordinary. That does not make them correct. Slavery was considered an ordinary practice by large portions of society - albeit not a societal norm.

Carson,
You say some of your family wants to bring you into the fold of God, while you rail at them for creating you without your permission. I am reminded of the Devil character in Time Bandits - John Warner(?) telling his minion who dared to say that God had created him (the Devil), that no one created him he created himself. He then proceeded to blast the poor minion off of the face of the earth.

Unknown said...

Chris W - I'd also point out that Chet's team won the debate especially in Canada where pretty much all prostitution laws were struck down by the Supreme Court and the debate shifted to "keeping the female bags of chemicals in our society 100% safe". The answer to that I think is body-cams. You have to register as a John with approved ID and use your ID in the body cam when "visiting" a hooker. The body cam records the entire encounter and if the hooker has a complaint to make, she just e-mails the encounter to the appropriate court and a judgement is made as to whether she was assaulted or not. If the prosecutor sees it as a slam-dunk, the John gets a "Slam Dunk Notice" and reports for jail or pays a fine or restitution as deemed fitting. You can choose not to register as a John and you can choose not to have a body-cam, but then you're on your own. If you want 100% safety you have to give up 100% privacy. Otherwise you're "tasking" the police with playing "he said, she said" on the public nickel.

Unknown said...

ChrisW - the stripper context does have the advantage that there are bouncers there who will "mess you up" if you get out of line.

Unknown said...

Carson & Erick - The TIME BANDITS thing is pretty close to it, I think.

I'm pretty sure that God -- as the only omniscient Being -- is very, VERY strict on the subject of free will. Particularly when it came to the procreative act that generated Creation (and that I tried to document in the prologue to THE LAST DAY). The part of His Consciousness that was curious as to what the net result of Creation would be and which was separate from his God Consciousness...

[I see Creation as God's metaphysical incarnation of the old saw: "Is God powerful enough to create a rock big enough that He can't lift it?" That's, I think, pretty much what He did. Created a large enough structure with so many moving parts across so much time and space that it taxed the outer boundaries of omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence]

...the ur-YHWH (in my frames of reference) was curious enough that when God said, "What if I showed you a way that you could create This Big A Context where you can try out every theory that you have and discover trillions that you barely even suspect...?"

Well, with the ur-YHWH that was a slam-dunk. The chance to BE God instead of doing what God said.

And God knew that was a slam-dunk. And God knew that the ur-YHWH and pretty much all YHWH's great and small (who all THINK they created themselves and who all THINK they're God all the way down to our little dinky chunk of rock ("The stars! They all revolve around ME!!") would regret it, but that that was the only way to successfully end the discussion: "here, prove yourself wrong OR submit to My Will. My best advice is the latter."

Which is where I think "Lead us not into temptation" in "The YHWH/LORD's Prayer comes from.

No, no, no. God didn't lead you into temptation. God told you what the result would be, you didn't believe Him and now there are quintillions of you going "Oh, this was SUCH a bad idea."

Anonymous said...

Uh, I don't think so. I think the Big Bang LIT UP everywhere -- i.e. "Let there be light" -- but that's very different from saying it happened everywhere.

You misunderstand. The BB happened everywhere because it was everywhere. There was no space into which the BB expanded; it was--and the universe is--the sum total of all space.

Similarly, sometimes people think they're pretty deep by asking, "Well what happened before the Big Bang? Tell me that." Yeah, nothing happened before the Big Bang. The Big Bang was the beginning of time. Asking what happened before it is like asking how many square feet of my living room lie in my front lawn. Mutatis mutandis for the Big Bang lighting up everywhere...there is no "where" outside of the Big Bang.

You can "think" that the BB LIT UP everywhere, but now you're cherry picking the science to fit your theology. (As someone interested in thought and reasoning, you might want to familiarize yourself with the concept of Special Pleading, to which cherry picking is related.)


To get the exact same [I forget the astronomical percentage: it's in a LATTER DAYS footnote] balance of elements: no way that happened by accident, I don't think. No way. Any less and the whole thing collapses in on itself. Any more and everything disintegrates on the way out. Perfectly balanced. I'm sticking with that, personally.
"This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'"--Douglas Adams

Alright,
Grady.

Unknown said...

Hi Grady! - One Big Bang. That was the point. All the elements were there and exist anywhere that a star forms. All you have to do is to do what God did in causing the Big Bang to happen -- cause your own Big Bang -- and God will be happy to admit that He's not the only God. There hasn't been a Big Bang since the Big Bang. And an almost unimaginable number of attempts to duplicate it. So, QED, as far as I can see.

It seems a really, really intelligent way to a) prove that You're God and b) prove that "you"'re not God and c) get rid of "you" for a good long while. i.e. BUH-bye! (as Paris Hilton used to say).

Anonymous said...

Erik, slavery is still considered a normal practice by large numbers of society. We call those people "Muslims" and tried to elect multiple presidents who would import as many as possible. I think paying individual adult women for their voluntarily-given time is a very small crime considering the wide-scale kidnapping, slavery and sex-trafficking practiced across the world in 2017.

As opposed to the western method of driving Cassie to the movies for the price of 1 ticket, 1 medium popcorn and 1 large Coke and 1 blowjob. And buying Tina 1 Big Mac and 1 large Coke for the price of 1 blowjob. And giving Stacia 1 ride across town for the price of 1 blowjob. Cassie won't see the movie, Tina won't get fed and Stacia won't get across town, but that's not remotely slavery, especially when they're the ones making the offer.

Dave, I'm not sure how prostitution could legitimately work. My point is that it's going to exist in some form no matter what, always, until the Last Day, and strippers are probably a more legitimate effort to make that happen. The last stripper I conversed with admitted that the customer would get away with whatever the girl would let him get away with or else turn him over to the bouncers, so handsome, charismatic males will continue to have the advantage. C'est la guerre.

Then we continued talking, and she went on about the stupid laws that strippers have to abide by. Their shoes *MUST* be 4-inches. I'm not a leg man, so to me, the heels are pointless. [pun?] Their ass is fine, their tits, face and hair are fine, I'm good. Some strippers have made a point of describing how heels are actually helpful on the pole, and I'll take their word for it, as subject matter experts.

Then we started talking about other laws. I forget the stupidest law, but the second-stupidest is that they must keep one foot on the floor at all times or else it might mean prostitution. I laughed and pointed out that if I gave her money and we went out back, she'd probably figure out some way to keep one foot on the floor. She saw my point and also laughed, but said that was the law as written. And some of the other laws she described, I could see a point in those. This is how you write laws to protect strippers, customers, bouncers and club owners. You can't make everyone happy, but you can make everybody equally unhappy.

ChrisW

Erick said...

ChrisW,
Setting aside for the moment that grown women and men who are not under duress are free to make decisions regarding their bodies. Would you - ChrisW want your female loved ones (Mother, daughter, aunts, grandmother, cousins, wife ) to be a prostitute? And if not, why not? I am not forgetting about the male prostitutes, simply not part of this question.

Anonymous said...

Erick, how would I know if they already have been? It would seem to me that it falls under the 'not my business' category. A case can certainly be made that it's wrong, but they're the ones committing the wrong.

And again, women will trade their sexual favors for many reasons. Astoria cited alcohol as a reason in "Kevillist Origins" when she said pubs should be open for women. To this day, I don't think I've ever heard a guy use the term "road head," much less suggest it as a method of payment not intrinsically different from paying a taxi driver for a ride. Never mind if it's moral or not, is this prostitution? Why or why not?

ChrisW