I am commenting on this post even though it’s an old one because this statement in particular really bothers me.

It is a MYTH that child sexual abusers are “horrible aberrations” and “nothing like” the rest of us. How do you think they get away with their crimes for so long before they’re finally caught–if they ever are caught?

Trust me on this. There are guys out there getting off on this stuff that you would NEVER guess were guilty of it. Never ever EVER. And that’s part of what makes it so insidious. There are guys who get off on the images but never buy them and never actually molest a child. There are guys who will rape their own daughters but leave other men’s daughters alone. There are many different ways this thing manifests.

Maybe by “aberration” Katz is referring to how these men’s minds work. Fair enough. But there isn’t a special magic tattoo that appears on their foreheads to warn the rest of us away. I wish there were.

Just three words:

I believe you!

Well okay more than that – I support you, I salute you, and I hope you win your fight to be heard. I was subjected to viewing your father’s misogynistic trash growing up amongst other types of sexual abuse, and yes, it does leave its scars, you are right.

I’m so very sorry… sorry you’ve had to also be silent out of fear and sorry that your father exploited you like this. Keep fighting the good fight, such evil cannot be allowed to win.

Since Colbert isn’t a “fat, hairy, lesbian,” and since he’s a million times funnier and tactful than I am about these things, hopefully he can get the message through to more people: stripping isn’t empowerment.

–”Probably, the spins are most empowering.”

–”I think my husband enjoys it probably more than I do…”

*guffaw!!*

As for the youtube flagging advice, that doesn’t work. If you flag a misogynistic video, they just add an age restriction warning before the page loads. Take that, developing minds! Don’t even search for massage techniques. For every one shiatsu instructional vid, there are twenty “Asian breast and buttocks massage” videos. And there is no way to flag abusive comments. If they don’t want the pain of an abusive comment flagging system (even though they have a system for flagging spam), surely adding a feature enabling users to block other users would be in order. I have never watched a video there that didn’t have at least one misogynist comment, no matter how unrelated. They don’t care about alienating women because men created the site, so it’s not their issue. Putting bitches in their place boosts the morale of the male users, so as long as it’s helping business…

Let’s look at the reason they’re not allowed in the class in the first place; men’s presence during sexual moves might make female students uncomfortable, right? So, why would it make women uncomfortable? It’s so empowering to do this for men, after all.

If the only reason men aren’t falling over themselves to learn pole-dancing is because they are banned from the studio, why isn’t the market countering with male-only or gender-inclusive studios then? They would certainly exist if the demand were there; where there’s money to be made, business will crop up. And if the men are too impatient to wait for these mythical male-inclusive pole-dancing classes to be created, then why aren’t they buying those popular stripper workout DVDs? They may not identify with a female teacher, you say? Why isn’t some enterprising, photogenic guy filling the niche and getting himself rich?

The point is that men won’t do it because they know what it means to be a woman in this society, they know what it means to be a woman on a pole, they know what they themselves think about women, and they don’t want for themselves what they think about women. Those pole-dancing girls just don’t have the theory of mind yet to understand sexual-supremacist thinking. It’s so naive.

I can sort of see how it might be an interesting fitness challenge if the cultural context were completely removed: wear fitness clothes instead of pasties, nix the moves that involve being spread-eagle, grinding the pole, etc., and viola! You have a really challenging workout that involves loads of body control getting up and down the pole. But then there’s also emphasis on every remaining non-sleazy move being executed sexily and for male consumption. So should we nix all that too? There is no way to remove the activity from its cultural context (as proponents of stripping attempt to do) without it being a different activity altogether. I think the stripping-as-fitness element is the reasoning Amber, a sex-positive blogger, was using, but it’s a fabricated scenario removing the argument from what this pole-dancing is in reality. Oh yes, this is about gymnastics! And the activity created itself in a cultural vacuum! Right. I hear beating your wife burns calories, too. It must be infallibly good, then–no questions asked!