TonyN here on a sunny Sunday morning and getting my geek on. So the past few months we have seen a constant attack on clubs and some attempts to close them. Also we have seen in the past couple of days some of the crazy that goes with the moralistic minority that want to decide for people how they live their lives. That is not directly related to dancing but I will cover it at the end.
An article recently appeared in a Manchester Matters on line paper, nothing new there apart from it was a piece about striptease and had the views of a dancer and also that "Human Rights" organisation Object. You can read the piece here. To be honest we get the fact that Object has to claim to be Human Rights, the moment they come out and admit that they are a lobby group it turns into an epic fail for them. As you can see from the comments Brute, Edie and myself have all commented. The only thing I would say is that in some ways the call for legislation is correct in as much as there needs to be a standardised approach and if a club is to be closed either a breach in the conditions or a proper consultation. A tiny proportion of the population is not a representative figure for a council to act on, when you read 27 letters sent in for places with populations of over a million it just suggests a we can't be bothered attitude by the council.
So a little while back we were reporting that the Platinum Lounge in Chester had lost it's license. Well it seems that we have another reprieve, as reported here. So the council did not follow it's own constitution in it's attempt to close the venue. Now this is only a temporary breathing space but it does show that the councils just make things up as they go along, which anyone who has worked in local government will tell you is pretty much standard policy unless their is a long term plan to get what one councillor wants. Can see the clubs that are under threat rushing back to the minutes of council meetings and checking them against the procedures that are suppose to be followed. I wonder how many mistakes have been made.
So thinking of comment sections and pages where members of Object post I am getting rather tired of finding one to engage with and then finding that they actually don't want to discuss, debate or look at both sides of the situation. Hearing a lot about the mynameisnot which is dealing as a hashtag on twitter about some of the street harassment that some women face. Not detracting from the hashtag but just to point out to some of the people I have tried to debate with mynameisnot "pornboy", "dirty old man", "ba*****d", "kiddie fiddler" and a bit like my real life mynameisnot "Oh my god what happened to you" nor is it "I hope you don't mind me asking but". I try to treat everyone with respect and hope I never behave boorishly, guess after a lot of the name calling that goes with having this sort of view I am a bit jaded when people get onto the name is issue.
Finally I want to pick up on a horrible hashtag #PGPDVice who are the Prince George Police Department in Maryland who are intending to live tweet an undercover sting of prostitution. Now this blog central focus is/was and always will be striptease in the UK but occasionally you read something and it is wrong on so many levels you feel you have to comment. Now originally the police were saying that they were targetting prostitution and had a picture of a woman being led away in handcuffs. Now the imagery and original discussion sounded like women were going to be the targets and there was a massive backlash on twitter where a lot of people had an opinion (including myself). Then the mission statement crept to say that they were only targeting customers and intend to help the trafficked women out. In fact they claim they have previously helped loads of trafficked women in the past but strangely there seems to be nothing to back up this claim. And this is where I got a bit hot under the collar about it. The fact that women choose to do what they want with their bodies and I would never make a moral judgement on this but it seems that the only reason anyone does "that sort of work" is because they are trafficked or coerced. The problem is if you allow that sort of sloppy belief system to influence decisions it will be applied to other adult work industries and hence we get on to a slippery slope. This is just a personal belief but long term shoddy thinking is our worst enemy. One final thought on this is a sting is supposed to be a surprise not sure how that is going to work now as it is all over social media.
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