Former ITT Tech Spokeswoman has an Interesting Job

Well, I suppose when you start a discussion around interesting things you saw in a porn flick you can't be terribly surprised when the discussion takes this sort of a turn.

 

Perhaps more appropriately - "when someone starts...." Don't point your "you"'s at me. I definitely did not start this thread.

 

Ha! That looks like a mighty perturbed bird on the left.

 

I guess we know which one of the birds is female.

 

Yeah, the smart one who knows better than to make sexist jokes? Yeah, I thought so too.:lame:

 

It's not that I have a problem with boobs, really really like boobs, it's just the awkwardness of knowing someone in one situation, a professional, Powerpoint, wear-the-business-suit-when-giving-the-presentation-for-the-final-team-project-as-she's-explaining-market-segmentation situation, and then going to a place where suddenly, shockingly, her boobs are boinging around a couple feet from my face and her buttocks are squeezing out of a thong like a couple balloons. It just seems so awkward, like I'd want to run. Maybe it's because after over 25 years I am MAJORLY married and so used to one woman's bodacious ta tas that the idea of another woman three feet from me with her is terrifying.

 

Oh come on now, that was the "royal you".

 

Firstly, kudos on the sheer number of breast slang terms in that post.

If you walk into a strip club then you, presumably, want to see breasts. So it would be a bit odd to go in and be incredibly embarrassed because the breasts you saw belonged to someone you know. I mean, yes, if you walk in and see your mom/sister/aunt/daughter then I can imagine that being awkward for everyone. I think it is a safe assumption that the majority of people going to a strip club want to see breasts provided they have no familial tie to them.

I get what you're saying, mind you. But I think it is kind of funny. At it's core you seem to be saying that the realization that the dancer is an educated, professional woman would kind of kill the buzz. Anonymous stripper doing what strippers do? Let's party!

I'm not saying this as if to pass judgment. I think a lot of people would agree with your position. But I think it interesting that guys have no problem objectifying a woman they don't know but would be filled with an immediate sense of shame in objectifying someone they did know.

 

The list goes on and on.

Honestly, I've never been to a strip club.

Don't know, if I did go to a strip club and saw someone I knew in the context of the strip club, OK, fine, but if I saw Gladys who I knew from water cooler conversation at the office strut up and give me a lap dance, I'd be incredibly embarrassed.

That would be a dumpster fire of a situation--truly movie sort of material.

Were I into the strip club thing, actually, I'd rather see a lady with an MBA or PhD gyrating. Just not my colleague or cohort member. Just too odd.

Now THAT'S a great point. I think it's the problem with the whole mentality, the woman is just sort of a pure object of pleasure and not prized for anything but the ability to get the man excited. So we're holding hands there. I'd think a strip club would be terribly frustrating: to see all these beautiful women semi-nude or full buck naked moving provocatively but have no means of, say, consummating the act? Wouldn't that drive a man nuts? Like going to a cruise ship steak and lobster buffet but only getting to pile up a big plate and smell it? And being chucked out of the dining hall if you tasted? I just don't get it, why don't people just find a wanton woman willing to lap dance for them and then take things all the way? Why not hire a prostitute? I don't get strip clubs.

 

You can't catch a disease from a lap dance.

I did the whole strip club thing when I was in my 20's, I also don't see the point in them now. All part of getting old, I guess. :loser:

 

Pardon moi, but is there anything that is academically, professionally, spiritually, politically, or even socially relevant to the turn this thread has taken?

Or (to the surprise of some, I would imagine), am I the only one who is offended by the recent slew of posts in this thread?

Reminds me of John Lithgow's line from Sweet Smell of Success: "What's the difference between men and pigs? Pigs don't turn into men when they drink."

 

Absolutely nothing.

I thought this was an adult forum. It's not like we're posting hard core (or even soft core) porn. Just thinking out loud.

 

I don't think there was anything academically, professionally, spiritually or even socially relevant about the original post, so why would we expect it to turn out any differently?

It's certainly your right to be offended. But I think that, slang aside, there was a meaningful conversation taking place here in these last few posts. Even more strangely I think it was actually relevant to the original post.

Lemme 'splain.

Sanantone presented the fodder from a celebrity gossip site to illustrate how desperate an ITT Tech grad was. So desperate was she that she was doing porn. Oh how lamentable! ITT, this is all your doing!

The fact is that porn, stripping, sex work, whatever is a convenient way to slander a person. We, as a society, are perfectly content thinking that these people are on the lower fringes of society somewhere between the people who work at McDonalds and homeless drug addicts.

It's a convenient way to write off the opinion, accomplishments and human value of any individual. We also do it with felons. A single felony conviction for wire fraud, tax evasion or any number of other things that are largely morally neutral gets you labeled for life as a "felon" and lumped in together with murderers, rapists and child molesters. Being a felon is all that needs to be said to discredit a person and write off anything they have to say.

Objectively, however, it doesn't matter if the woman from the ITT Tech commercials (not the same as the company's spokeswoman, for the record) does porn. There are plenty of people who graduated from ITT Tech, starred in their commercials and have good, respectable jobs in the fields they trained for. Even if one among their number is doing porn that doesn't mean that an ITT Tech degree leads to such a profound level of desperation.

It's schadenfreude veiled as genuine concern. People like watching others suffer. And we, as a society, decided that there is no worse way for a woman to suffer than being "reduced" to a sexual object. If she is forced into the trade then she's a victim. If she chooses it willingly then she clearly lacks the ability to make sound decisions for herself.

So you may find the last set of posts distasteful. But the sentiment that was explored highlights why this non-story was a story to begin with.

 

I don’t want to merely seem like a prude here – c’est ne pas moi. My objection is (1) irrelevance to a higher education forum, and (2) the use of phrases like boobs, tits, and bodacious ta-ta’s.. It irks the feminist in me because it objectifies women.

Having said that, I have only been to a strip club twice in my life. Many years ago, a friend dragged me to one in Montréal where the women were more than bodacious, they were artists. I was particular impressed with “Ze Marvelous Stephanie,” who was albe to balance herself on an orchestra chair with the grace of a ballet dancer. A few weeks later, I visited a strip bar in Philadelphia to compare it with what I had seen in Montreal, and was not surprised to find that the women there were, colloquially, skanks. Strip bars have, quite frankly, never been my scene. Nor has objectifying women.

A few years ago, however, I did have the opportunity to avail myself of the services at an “Oriental spa.” The story was so absurd that I posted it over at DD, where the thread was, of course, hijacked, and it turned into a discussion of sex slaves. It’s quite a funny read, and you’ll find it at DegreeDiscussion.com • View topic - A pornographic interlude...

 

You are correct. Those terms do objectify women. However, when the topic at hand is strip clubs then you are talking about something that, even with the most appropriate language possible, objectifies women.

Since we are apparently doing this...

I've been to two strip clubs in my life. Once was during liberty weekend when I graduated from recruit training. I went against the advice of my Recruit Division Commander who assured us all that there were better things to spend our money on. I went, I was uncomfortable with the entire spectacle for a variety of reasons. I left and enjoyed my first non-silent dinner in over two months.

The second time was for a birthday party of a friend. He was engaged to one of the dancers at the time and she decided to throw him a party at her workplace. I found the entire thing bizarre and awkward. I was convinced that the women were all there because they simply had no other options in life. I even urged one woman to call my office and speak to literally any recruiter there for a "way out." Most of them laughed. A few shared how much they were making. All but one had a bachelor's degree (one from Rutgers).

I was just as guilty of judging the women as someone who writes them off as "skanks" merely by virtue of their profession.

In Pennsylvania it was next to impossible to find a legitimate massage therapist for a number of years. It was an unregulated profession. Even seemingly legitimate places appeared to have a menu of services that was less than legitimate. When I moved to Upstate New York I was a bit surprised that even the seediest storefront massage therapists were, in fact, all highly professional and working in a very tightly regulated environment.

I hear that they started regulating them in PA. And, from what I hear, the scene has cleaned up considerably.

Update: Scratch that. I've been to three strip clubs. I tried to block the third one from my mind. I had a manager, when I was a recruiter, who took me and a few others to a strip club (we didn't know that's where we were going) for their all-you-can-eat steak lunch. He called it "steak and smut" and it was where he held his staff meetings which were thankfully only quarterly affairs. Before we made it to our second "steak and smut" he was let go for sexual harassment, however, and our new manager didn't carry on the tradition.

 

Some of those slang terms for breasts have been appropriated by feminist and pro-women organizations, e.g., "Save the Ta-Ta's". I have two teenage daughters, one an upperclassman in accounting, the other an underclassman in the hard sciences, and a wife who did PhD studies in the hard sciences and served on the full time faculty of a Pac12 university, putting me through grad school. It's not like I'm sitting round the spittoon sharin' filthy stories with the ol' boys club. Am something of a feminist myself, but am not understanding how a frank but decidedly non-pornographic discussion of breasts and exotic dance clubs and what men tend to like (and throwing in the fact that I'm very married and have never even set foot in such as establishment and never will--and have never procured a prostitute and never will) would be so terribly offensive. But that said, I'll be glad to opt out if it's offensive to people, because there's no good reason for me to gratuitously do that.

 

Because it is my goal, always, to make my Uncle Steve happy . . .

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/016396290931722

 

Ha! Nice find, Kizmet.

 

This is a "MasterCard - Priceless" kind of moment

Awesome.