The New York Times has a great profile of Johnny Diablo, a vegan from Portland, Ore., who owns a stripclub/Mexican restaurant where women wear pleather and serve meatless fare.
(Or, should I say, used to own a stripclub. It’s now up for sale because he “underestimated the appeal of stripping to vegans, or of vegan cuisine to striptease fans.”)
At any rate, this hasn’t gone over so well locally.
But Portland is also home to a lot of young feminists, and some are not happy with Mr. Diablo’s venture. Since he opened the strip club last month, their complaints have been “all over the Internet,” he said. “One of them came in here once. I could tell she had an attitude right when she came in. She was all hostile.”
Mr. Diablo isn’t concerned with the “feminazis,” as he calls them. As a vegan himself, he says he hasn’t worn or eaten animal products in 24 years and is worried about cruelty to animals. “My sole purpose in this universe is to save every possible creature from pain and suffering,” he said
As Jezebel notes, isn’t it a bit contradictory to treat animals better than you treat women? How many strippers start out as kindergarteners who want to take off their clothes for strangers when they grow up?
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Why did the tomato blush?
Because he saw the salad dressing!
Simon, age 7
Vegans probably don’t have the energy to enjoy a strip club. I’m actually laughing thinking about the audience in there. Ignoring the dancers, slumped over in their chairs, all skeletal and stuff. Begging for protein pills. Trying not to break hips, and bones from osteoporosis in the dark club.
For the record it nowhere states he treats women worse then animals, there’s been an inherent implication that a woman showing her nipples equals oppression and victimisation by big bad men who make them feel like meat and that is not only a gross oversimplification it actually further objectifies women to assume such things. Having been a bartender at a strip club for a very long time and knowing a number of dancers very well, then working as a secretary in well respected and well presented IT company, I can tell you where I felt the most meat like and mistreated.
Oh and I’m a woman. and a feminist. and a vegan. Although you don’t wanna see me in a bikini these days:)
There are plenty of animal rights activists who have gotten naked to help animals. PETA routinely has campaigns with attractive naked women in cages to raise awareness around fur, etc.
To suggest that the legal hiring of strippers / dancers, is related in someway to the intentional capture, enslavement, torture and execution of animals is grotesque.
These women have a choice (and right I might add) to do whatever they wish and express themselves however they want. The animals, however, have no such luxury. They are raised from birth in tortuous conditions, drenched in the stink of their dying comrades, with only the comfort of a painful and agonizing death to look forward too.
And how many kindergartners end up doing /anything/ they daydream about when they were kids?
I tend to agree with Rushmore, that protesting a woman’s right to profit off the skewed sexual dynamic that has been created where people will actually pay to see someone without clothes on is oppressive to women.
What is hypocritical is to consider yourself any sort of “activist” for progressive change, and /not/ be a vegan. If you support exploitation in any form, you’re not really getting the point.
“You can’t see tits on the radio.”
Rushmore, let’s assume he pays the strippers really well and doesn’t demand crazy hours and gives them health insurance and a 401(k) and whatever other benefits (all of which I really doubt, but I’ll make the concession for the sake of argument). He’s still making a buck by objectifying them in the most straightforward way possible.
I don’t see how calling a spade a spade “actually further objectifies women.” He is selling their bodies, and you have to grant that while some strippers seem themselves as sexually liberated, a good portion of them would rather do anything else that pays as well.
So you can’t be an activist, and not be a vegan? Let’s say I was an activist that wanted to abolish the IRS. Or maybe thought everyone should be allowed to carry a handgun. Or I wanted to encourage people to waste as much energy as they wanted. Would I have to be a vegan to be taken seriously? Or do you just need to be a vegan for liberal causes?
Incidentally, you’re supposed to turn your lights off for an hour at 8 pm local time on the 29th to save the Earth or something. Just so you know I’m turning ALL of mine on. The garage, closets, I’m getting gas to let my car idle, etc. After that I’ll go vegan.
Holly. On a serious note, my wife was a “dancer”. That’s the word they prefer. It’s true. the girls are not offered 401k’s, health benefits, etc. But thats because in some of the more upscale places a popular girl can literally earn thousands, yes thousands of dollars for a weekend of work. At her peak my then girlfriend, now wife, was easily earning six figures. Is the owner making money too? You bet. Owning a “Gentleman’s Club” is almost like having a license to print money.
I don’t know where you live but there is probably a club like that relatively close to you. Go talk to the girls. Have a drink. I’m betting virtually all of them are there because they want to be there. And I’ll bet they’re happy. Some are creeps, but there are creeps everywhere. And in just a few short years, most, if they’re smart and I knew more than a few who were, will earn as much money as they can over the course of 5 or 6 years and then retire. And I don’t mean from dancing. I mean retire. They will tell you they’re not “exploited”, the exploited ones are the saps that go to those places and get suckered out of their money because they think those girls actually like them.
Are there bad examples, and horrific stories? Sure but what industry doesn’t have some stories? You can love or hate the clubs all you want. But I’ve always believed an adult should be able to do whatever they want, even if some think they’re being exploited.
Pastafarian – Im a girl, dietary vegan, and love strip clubs. Vegans have substitutes for pretty much everything so your comment really has no basis.
P.S Dairy has been proven to hinder calcium intake therefore leading to osteoperosis
P.P.S Have you ever heard of someone dying of protein deficiency? LOL. But you do hear of people dying from high cholesterol.
Have a good day gorgeous ;]
Good for you Laura.
ahhh I just wrote a response and then my computer deleted it..
It was all wrapped up in the ‘is HE selling their bodies or are THEY selling their bodies at that particular establishment?’ line of reasoning and what is the relation between it being a male manager and male patrons as opposed to female run with female customers…does it make a difference to our view of the scenario if the roles are reversed or if the women have a female manager? It’s a pretty interesting issue partly because if the opinion is that it’s ok for women to objectify men and have a good look at their goods but not the other way around then it already implies a disparity between genders. Selling sex in any way shape or form IS by it’s very nature going to be the most straightforward means to generate a buck off objectification, but the question of who is doing the selling affects where we as a society draw the morality line, but is the line fixed?
(and on the subject of jobs, your right most jobs truly suck and most people would rather get paid a lot of money to do something they enjoy rather than whatever it is they do, dancer or no)
Maybe we should instead be opening a chain of clubs where gorgeous halfnaked men in buckskin chaps with silicone testicles serve sausages and spare ribs to female patrons…that’s one thing I’d pay to see
xx
Laura – Starting officially with your post I am going to start asking questions. Here goes.
What study has proven dairy hinders calcium intake therefore leading to osteoporosis?
I’m sure you can point to it on the web somewhere. And you can’t send me to “Filthy Seattle Hippies for Veganism”. That would show bias. Just because someone, somewhere said something doesn’t mean it’s true. And you’re right. I never heard of someone dying of a protein deficiency. You got me there.
And I’ll be right there working it rushmore.
Pasta, thanks for the story. Dancers can make mad bank, I completely believe that. A girlfriend of mine dated a dancer in Key West and while that relationship proved to be a short-lived disaster, it did afford me an inside look at the job. She didn’t work at one of the more upscale places. It was an incredibly depressing scene, the patrons as much as the girls. So whenever I think about stripclubs, that’s just the one that comes to mind.
Rushmore — that image of silicone testicles? Disturbingly hilarious, and hilariously disturbing. I guess I’m just questioning whether this manager was all that much a fan of liberated ladies in the first place. The way he talked about the women who opposed his idea, calling them Nazis, didn’t exactly ingratiate him to me (a self-identified feminist). It’s therefore satisfying to me that his little venture didn’t work out
I have to admit to really just realizing this is a vegan, from Oregon, probably a pretty lefty-liberal guy I’m assuming, (does he have dreadlocks, and wear a lot of cargo pants? does he type stuff on message boards with his Apple computer like Bu$Hitler? Impeach Cheney etc., etc.?) calling feminists Nazis. I’m guessing they weren’t Nazis when they were speaking truth to power, or when whatever they were doing wasn’t directly affecting HIS business ventures.
The point is that the women have decided that dancing at a strip club is the best of their available options. If they had an alternative that they preferred, they’d do that instead. So we can’t blame the club owner for giving them the option to strip, assuming that he’s not enslaving them or something, which there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of.
I was going to comment but instead I’ll just encourage my daughter to become a strip-um-dancer. Screw college, who wants a bachelor’s degree and the student loans you have to pay back?
Really. 100-120 grand and four years of schooling for maybe 45,000 a year, and all the cubical walls you can stare at? Where’s my thong again?
That’s a good point, it’s very easy to fire the fascist/nazi/insert name here rather than opening debate when what you’re faced with is difference of opinion, I’ll bet he thinks they were hairy feminists too, tsk tsk*
I have great respect for pastafarian’s silicone goodness and for the terrific informed discussion too, I’ll be giving him all the best shifts at my sausage house.
Rocko makes the assumption that that this job choice prevents further education as though you must choose one or the other? Or that it prevents simultaneous participation in higher education?
There’s a good few people that dance at night and study by to get a good degrees. If you want to, more power to you. I count a nutritionist with an MSc, a current MSc student in social psychology, an interior designer, a current law student and a woman who has now left dancing to study medicine as people I know that have balanced university with dancing. As it was pointed out to me it pays better then stocking shelves and you can take your midterms off work to revise…full time education without an income is tough and those student debts can stretch into your 30’s.
xx
Pastafarian
You’re pretty funny, unfortunately I’m from Toronto and NOT AT ALL a hippie.
1. It is very simple: where the most milk is consumed, the osteoporosis incidence is highest. Compared to other countries, the most milk is consumed in Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and The Netherlands (300 to 400 kg / cap / year), and osteoporosis incidence in these countries has sky rocketed. (25)
[http://www.4.waisays.com/ExcessiveCalcium.htm]
2. While dairy promotions also include praise for the protein of milk as well, this protein may be more of a problem in osteoporosis than calcium could be a solution. The animal proteins of meat and dairy products cause calcium loss.9 The level of calcium needed in the diet depends greatly on the animal protein intake.10 For many of the high animal protein diets of Americans, it may not be possible to consume enough calcium in the diet to compensate for the amount lost to these high-acid proteins.11 For this reason, Americans have among the highest osteoporosis rates in the world, while their dairy intake is also among the highest. Doubled animal protein causes 50 percent more calcium loss. Yet, when a high protein intake is soy-based, a positive calcium balance can be maintained with only 450 mg of calcium per day.12
[http://www.babyreference.com/MilkingYourBones.htm]
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