Bad Advice Friday: My new husband went to a strip club

A woman is upset that her husband went to a strip club, so the original advice columnists made fun of her for being a prude.

Bad Advice Friday is a twist on my usual Feminist Advice Friday. In this semi-regular column, I look at the bad advice other columnists have given. The bad advice is often rooted in patriarchal norms, in the idea that women’s emotions really don’t matter, and in the cultural practice of centering men’s desires at the expense of women’s needs. You can find a complete list of previous bad advice columns here.

A brief content note: This is a question about strip clubs. Discussions of sex work and sex work-adjacent work tend to provoke significant consternation in feminist circles. Mostly, feminists in these discussions deride one another as anti-sex and unable to see sex workers as human beings on one side, and unable to see nuance and also unable to see sex workers as human beings on the other side.

I don’t believe in doing that here. If you have an argument to make, make it in good faith. Listen to what others have to say. Be willing to learn and be wrong. I’ve made my views on strip clubs clear elsewhere, but I’ll share them here:

In my twenties, I worked as a paralegal for a First Amendment lawyer who just happened to be the in-house counsel for a chain of strip clubs. I specifically took this job because I was very opposed to strip clubs and had been repeatedly attacked by other feminists for this stance. I wanted to better understand the issue.

What I learned is that all attempts to ban or limit stripping inevitably harm strippers—not club owners, not men patronizing the clubs. Women. I learned, and believe, that strippers can and should be allowed to make their own choices, and universally oppose any attempt to constrain those choices. For many women, stripping was their only and best option—one they were happy with as compared to their other options. I also learned that strip clubs were exponentially worse in their management and practices than I ever could have guessed. And that the men who patronize strip clubs are universally misogynistic losers.

In a capitalist society, there are plenty of bad choices and few good ones. People have the right to make their own choices, including choices that might be bad or harmful to themselves. In a patriarchal society, sex work is inevitably exploitative—but so too are other forms of work.

So we should not be in the business of constraining sex workers’ choices, nor of judging them. My concern with sex work is that the men who patronize strip clubs and sex workers, with rare exceptions, do so because they want to be able to pay to objectify and exploit a woman. They’re seeking a power imbalance, seeking to turn women into objects. And that’s a huge red flag if you’re in a relationship with one of these guys.

So please, keep the conversation civil and the quality of discourse high. Let’s not talk past each other on this issue.

The problem

A reader writes to How to Do It explaining that she’s concerned that her new husband went to a strip club with his friends, without telling or consulting her first. Her question is clear and to the point, and she even identifies the specific reason she’s upset: “I just hate the idea of strip clubs and women being sexual objects.”