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To listen to mainstream media tell it, the lousy economy is driving women who once had "respectable" jobs to go after topless jobs so they can pay the mortgage and put food on the table.
In February,a topless coffee shop opened in a small town in Maine. Maybe you heard about it-- The Grand View Topless Coffee Shop. If you watch any TV news or read the news online it was difficult to miss it. Seemed like everyone was fascinated with this story. Somehow the media decided that having 150 people apply for 10 topless jobs is just one more piece of evidence of how hard it is to find a good paying job.
While both men and women applied for the topless bare-ista jobs,the owner hired twice as many women as men. Go figure.
I guess to the news media, having 150 people apply for the job is their sociological barometer that women are now so desperate that--gasp-- they're willing to work topless to pay the bills.
I find this problematic on so many levels my fingers can't type fast enough. First,the news stories don't say how many of the 150 people applying for those jobs were men willing to bare it all. All we know is the owner hired twice as many women.
Second, we don't know how many women would have applied for the job in a good economy. Topless jobs, rightly or wrongly, have the reputation of paying good money. Bad economy, good economy, women want jobs that pay well. So the fact that 150 people applied for this job does not say to me more women are now willing to work topless,
Third, if this was a great business opportunity it seems to me we'd be seeing a lot more topless coffee shop opening across the country.Unless a topless coffee shop in rural Maine is the only place in America where it's newsworthy to report they are open for business, then I'm not seeing much of a trend towards these types of coffee shops. Without a trend report, how can we possible say more women are willing to work topless?
Off topic, the owner has just applied to open a strip club next to the coffee shop.
In March, The New York Post ran a story about former Wall Street employees and real estate agents who are now pole dancing. Meet Kate Haverton, 27, who used to be a real estate agent and told the New York Post that she had been in real estate for three years but had not sold a house in six months and was down to her last $2 when she applied to be a stripper.
"With real estate, you can work 10 hours a day showing people apartments and you never know when the next sale will be," said Haverton, who lives on the Upper East Side. "But with dancing, the money is instant. Now that I make better money as a stripper than as a real-estate agent, I'm going to buy my own apartment."
Wasn't that a storyline in a movie, girl down to her last $2....? Anyway, I am not the only one who is skeptic about this "topless trend."
In a piece called the "Naked Lie", Jamie Malanowski challenges the assertion by Anka Radakovich - a one time sex columnist for Details magazine--that scores of women are taking it off for $1,500 a night
Scores? Scores?!? You mean, like, forty? Forty women who had six-figure incomes earned on Wall Street, the fashion industry and real estate have become strippers in Manhattan? It is, of course, mathematically possible, but I just don't believe it. By google search, there appears to be no more than a dozen strip clubs in Manhattan. I have no idea how many strippers each club might employ-perhaps some reader could educate me. But 50 would seem like a big number. That would mean there's about 600 strippers in Manhattan. Did one in 15 of them formerly earn $100,000 in business? Really?
Earlier this week there was a Jobless to Topless Job Fair in Austin,Texas. That got a lot of news coverage as well with reporters pulling out all the puns, describing the fair for "North Texans who were stripped of their corporate jobs." If you listen to the interview you will hear the gentlemen being interviewed say that the customer count is the same, but they are spending less.
