Letters to the Editor
-
Hiring Committee Member, here.
What you need to know is that I am an academic, identify as *liberal* and don't see alot of difference between a lap dance & a hand job.
Sister, there has to be a better way for you to fund your education!
-
Get a wig and hit the pole!
The writer's stripper job sounds great -- she enjoys it, gets healthful benefits for her posture, and makes a good wage. The hours fit her schedule. She doesn't mention feeling demeaned or unsafe. She likes being scantily clad. This sounds like a perfectly respectable job for her, and would be even if she weren't particularly hurting for money during this PhD-studies time in her life.
I just read a book called Candy Girl by Diablo Cody (who also wrote Juno). Candy Girl details Diablo's year of stripping in the Minneapolis area. She, too, holds a traditional day job and is uncomfortable being recognized at her stripper job. So she wears wigs while she strips and plays up the makeup. Perhaps the letter writer could do the same to avoid being recognized by students or school associates.
-
disguise yourself
Please, ignore all these professional prudes who think your career could be ruined. I mean, the thing is, if your students are IN the strip club, is that any better than you DANCING in the strip club? No.
Anyway, there is another possibility... why not get yourself a really, really nice wig? Something that might help disguise yourself a little? And learn to do some makeup magic and maybe you can go incognito... Afterall, the lights are usually pretty low in those places.
-
networked
1. Either do it out of the boundaries of the immediate college town, and 2. This is dangerous professionally because of our highly networked world.
I think the conversation has changed; our conversation has to include Facebook and professorial ratings systems, the immediate and ready exchange of information. Printed photographs aren't nearly as available and -- dare I say -- compelling as a streaming YouTube video.
Has society's judgment evolved? Probably not. But stripping near the school you'd ideally be working for (is it?) seems unwise in our highly networked era.
-
Socially Conservative Religious Background ill prepares women to navigate the mainstream
I, too, came from a socially conservative religious subculture. I knew many other young women from this background who, like myself, eventually emancipated themselves (or ran screaming) from the confines of the socially conservative religious background thinking the larger world was a more accepting, more fair, and less judgmental place than it really is. Some became strippers, maybe some of them thrilled by the emanciptation from their backgrounds. I went through a time when it did seem empowering to defy the conventions of my background and got social acceptance (among other humanities graduate student types) for doing so. I did think the larger world had a healthy attitude toward bodies and sex and only my religious conservative background was judgmental about those things.
What I didn't know was just how judgmental the larger world, including the upper middle class, is about those things too. There is much lip service in the larger, secular world, about not judging women based on their sexual histories, but there's a lot more judgment in the upper middle class than I ever realized. The first time I bumped up against the upper middle class was when I moved from the South to the Midwest and got a job in a large corporation. I was shocked at how conservative the people (including from the East Coast) were. No one talked about parties they had been to on the weekend, and almost no one was living together. To my shock, the religious Deep South had been a lot more party hearty than the people I ran into in the Midwest in a corporation.
I think some young women from a socially conservative religious background, once they escape that background, have no rudder and no sense of where the boundaries of judgmentalness are in the larger world. People out there in mainstream society may not attend church or they may attend a liberal denomination or they may attend sporadically or they may make fun of religion but the sexual guidelines they go by and judge by are deeply intertwined with their ideas about social class. They aren't as liberated in how they judge women's sexual pasts as a person newly emancipated from fundamentalism might think.
Also, the upper middle class is closing ranks and academia is not the stepping stone it used to be for smart young people of lower socioeconomic backgrounds to enter the ranks of the upper middle class. If I had to guess at what goes on in the minds of those from upper middle class backgrounds these days, it's not "How can our society better help the smart people born into families without resources to rise and benefit society even better" but "ha ha ha, that nobody from nowhere doesn't know they are a nobody from nowhere. This will be amusing to watch them fail. Ha Ha Ha."
I think the corporation is a better route into the middle and upper middle classes than academia, because at least you are judged more on what you produce than what background you came from. Profs expect your parents to pay for grad school and if not, ha ha ha. No more room for people not from a privileged background to move up into the upper middle class. The upper middle class is getting too nervous these days. Cary said something about that the other day.
Forget the Ph.D. or when you get it, use its prestige to get a foot in the door of a corporation, which probably will be more forgiving and offer more chance for advancement. But don't forget the upper middle class movers, shakers, and decision makers are much more conservative than one from a sheltered background may realize.
-
You will get caught out
Cary's advice today is very foolish. His sharecroppers analogy is ridiculous. You will not be homeless if you do not continue to "dance". Heed the words of the other posters warning of the basic conservatism of those in academe.
Also, keep in mind the danger of "easy" money. It is a trap.