Strippers

Should dollar bills find their way from g-strings to grade schools? That's what viewers were debating on Headline News this week, as a group of strippers in Long Island proposed a "pole tax" to funnel money toward education.

Though some suspect it was just a publicity stunt, taxing exotic dance clubs isn't unheard of. Texas already has a similar "pole tax," which has reportedly brought in $13 million since 2007.

Considering that states tax other vices, including cigarettes and booze, while funding education through lotteries, taxing strip clubs sounds pretty reasonable. In the words of dancer Carmela Cioffi: "If the men — or anybody who enters a strip club — if they're going to spend money, they might as well help give a few dollars and throw it to the school. The kids are losing all their extracurricular activities, music, art, sports, everything is going."

Plus, stripping could be considered an art or exercise! Would you support a pole tax?

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This post comes from Group Therapy in our TrèsSugar Community. Feel free to add your advice in the comments!

First of all my husband and I have been married for half of a year now. He's in the Navy and just got deployed, but right before the deployment he was sent to Hawaii for one day. I dropped him off at the airport and it was so hard for me to let him go. He called from Hawaii and we talked for five minutes then he said he had to go and he would call back.

As I was checking our bank account to check on the bills I noticed he had paid to go in to some type of club. While crying my eyes out because of how much I already missed him and knowing he wasn't coming home any time soon, I waited for him to call back. When he finally did I got him to tell me the truth and it turned out to be a strip club. This was his first time going into a strip club. The problem is that I feel so offended and disrespected. I know I'm not unattractive, and I'm very open minded in our sex life. So to me it seems as if I'm not enough for him, and that he didn't care about how I feel about strip clubs. The fact that he was lusting over those girls makes me so angry and upset.

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From the stripper pole to the Olympic podium? Proponents of "pole fitness" want more respect, and perhaps a gold medal would help. In an interview with Marie Claire, dance instructor Collette Kakuk, cofounder of the Pole Fitness Association, makes a case for pole dancing as an Olympic sport.

Poles aren't just for strippers anymore. There are stripping-based fitness classes, sport poles, and even national pole-dancing competitions. The moves require no small amount of strength, flexibility, control, and balance. Kakuk argues:

But if you look at rhythmic gymnastics and figure skating, so many of the movements are similar to what we do on the pole. We have to shatter the taboo. The pole is just another fitness apparatus, like a vertical balance beam.

I don't doubt that you have to be incredibly fit to pole dance. But I can't help but think the pole dancers might be a bit overeager for Olympic glory. As Kakuk points out, "we need to unify the sport. We don't even have common names for our moves." Well, at least they have a readymade soundtrack!

A job-seeker stops by the Centerfolds booth during an adult entertainment industry job fair yesterday in San Francisco. Hundreds of people showed up to find out about strip clubs jobs ranging from bartender and cashiers to exotic dancers and waitresses.