I have put together a very simple blog for the Stop The Strip Pub campaign. There is also a really nice quote from me in the Hackney Post article about Saturday's protest.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Stop The Strip Pub Blog
I have put together a very simple blog for the Stop The Strip Pub campaign. There is also a really nice quote from me in the Hackney Post article about Saturday's protest.
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5 comments:
I used to live in Hackney, not far from Stoke Newington.
Good luck with the campaign.
Im a married man... any chance to see a woman naked is a welcome opportunity not to be missed! The last time I saw Nekid was 1982! As long as they keep the front door and curtains closed, whats the harm?
I support your cause, Kate, but I don't understand why you're using the fact that the bar is close to a mosque to support your argument. As a Secularist, is it not somewhat hypocritical to champion the cause of religious sensitivity now that it suits you, when you have argued against it so fluently in the past? It's a genuine question - I'd just like to know if you believe that there are certain occasions when we should be respectful of religous sensitivities or not and, if so, what those occasions are.
Good luck with the campaign.
Further down the same road in Shoreditch there is an area with a few of these places. I won't walk around there late at night. Actually I won't even walk around there during the day. There are always men stood outside smoking and harassing women walking past. Statistics show that in the immediate vicinity of a place like this incidence of rape and sexual assault is three times the level it is elsewhere.
Surveys suggest that in three quarters of strip clubs sex is actually available for sale (i.e. it's basically a brothel). Evidence also suggests that these places offer very poor conditions for the women who work there. Even at a supposedly "classy" place like Spearmint Rhino (the manager at Satchmo's says he's aiming for somewhere "in the middle" between Spearmint Rhino and cheaper joints) the women have to pay to perform so are put in a position where unless they get a certain number of dances a night they can be hundreds of pounds out of pocket. This of course means that they can't exercise the discretion they might like to over who to dance for and are effectively working under duress.
The area has until recently had a problem with prostitutes and drugs being taken in the local park. The police finally seemed to get rid of these problems about a year ago and instead a local community group is now using the park to put on concerts and festivals. All that good work could be undone in one instant.
For me it's the difference between being able to go to the local convenience store/pub/kebab shop late at night and being stuck indoors. Here are the names of some people who visited these kinds of places: Mark Dixie, Levi Bellfield, Stephen Wright. I'd be too scared to walk past at night, I know because I am too scared to walk through Shoreditch.
On a totally personal level - for me paying women to strip is an abuse of women. I'd like to live in a world where that doesn't happen at all. Walking past such a place even if it's closed makes me feel nauseous and worthless. To have that feeling every time I go to my local bus stop is more than I can take.
Paul - there's a difference between being secular and wanting to willfully offend people for no good reason. But yes for me that is not the main thing about the proposals that bothers me. I am not the head of the campaign though - sorry for the confusion. I just built the website for them and I am certainly involved with their work. I would include the names of the whole team on the website but several of them are frightened of the consequences and they are all agreed not to have their names up. You can work out from the website that it's me who wrote it, but that doesn't mean it expresses my opinions.
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