Poll: Would anyone here object to or be offended by skimpy outfits on male volleyball team members?

[caseymoz]

42. Fair rebuttal.

Perhaps I can improve the example for you: if a neurosurgeon was a stripper working for her premed degree and then runs for office after years in the operating room, which part of her resume would she be wisest to promote, even if the culture changed and there wasn't any shame in being a sex worker?

Even if we try to equalize the stigma carried by the sex industry (difficult to do in any example), stripper was something she did prior to having any skill and expertise. Perhaps she took dance lessons as a kid, but perhaps not even that. I bet most customers who saw her as a stripper would not be as inclined to think of her as a leader, to defer to her leadership in important matters, or even see her as adept as people who knew her as a neurosurgeon.

Point being: except for the self-contained fantasy or immediate situation, being a sex worker is not something that puts anyone in a leadership position. That's usually true of sex in general. Even if the a person blows the boss to advance their career, they gain something not because the boss thinks they're qualified. Rather, it's a quid pro quo trade, and not because of any added respect from the superior. (The person might be qualified anyway, but that's irrelevant to the boss' final decision.) Moreover, there's not a boss in the universe who would make anyone his or her own superior only for awesome sex.

This a little off-topic: but I'll add that we should have specific criteria considered for the President. The fact that most people have been compelled to throw it aside due to our awful candidate selection process is because of decay of social-political system. Still, even without the stigma that's hard to separate from other psychological factors, there's little about being a sex worker that would gain anybody status. They may gain a lot of confidence and boldness from it, but that's all psychological, and they might not be to apply it to anything outside of sex. Though there's probably more to be gained in it than something like fast-food worker or telephone operator.

I'm not saying its something that would disqualify anybody from higher status, but it's not something that, by any stretch of my imagination, will help.

More off topic: if empowerment refers only to something psychological, that is a liberating feeling, it should go without saying that hetero males and females would have a totally different idea of what this looks like in a woman. Hetero males will judge female empowerment on what they feel in empathy with a woman. Of course this is filtered through their libido, and it comes out as something which, to women, looks like empowerment in a fun house mirror.

Therefore, empowerment shouldn't be judged solely as a subjective psychological effect.