Reply #47: It seemed really high [View All]

[BrownOak]

Granted my personal sample size in this (strippers I've known personally) is a total of 2. But neither of them was abused growing up so I questioned that 90% figure as well. That's not to say there aren't some pretty sad stories in that profession, but there are also some really balanced people as well.

The first was a woman I dated for several months and she did grow up without a father. She moved away for school and we fell apart and she eventually ended up dancing. She's probably just heading past the peak of the stripper career span and I hope things work out for her. The retirement plan in that business isn't always the softest landing.

The second is one of my favorite stories because it shows the absurdities of making assumptions about people. Her family life as a young girl was hardcore Southern Baptists... I'm talking tent show kind of religion. She ended up working at a local hospital as a admissions clerk in the ER where she met one of my friends who was a doctor. He had recently divorced his wife,a lawyer whom he had been married to for more than 7 years. They started dating which seemed really odd to most of us who knew the doctor and didn't know the new girlfriend too well. He was a New York/Miami Jew who had been through med school and she was pure Southern country Baptist without any college experience.

It got even more curious to those on the outside when she moved in with him and started working as a waitress at a strip club and then peaked when he got her the ubiquitous boob job and started dancing. The other part of the story is that along the way they married, had two children, and she put herself through college, grad school, and just finished with her PhD in Psychiatry.

So if you're scoring at home using general public perception she went from what looked like a fundamentalist Christian (good to crowd A, questionable to crowd B) to stripper (bad to crowd A, acceptable to crowd B) to PhD (good to almost all). Or maybe she was the same person all along and what changed was the filter through which everyone saw her.