"One in four lap-dancers has a degree"

Peter Stringfellow: Let's go back to this: These are young women, in their 20s - not teenagers - who make a choice and decide that this is what they want to do in a safe club such as mine. There are some that are not so good but the majority, quite good places to work.

Anchor: But it does objectify women - there is a question about that. A lot of people think it's degrading. ... Would you want your daughter to do it?

Peter Stringfellow: If my daughter wished to do that, she would. There's a lot of things I wouldn't want my son to do. ...

Anchor 2: But this is about your daughter.

Peter Stringfellow: I'm making the point that, why are we all about daughters?

Dr. Belinda Brooks-Gordon: As a mother, I would want my daughter to do whatever she had chosen to do in good working conditions, in a safe environment doing the job she has chosen to do. ... Instead of taking the immediate assumption that it is degrading or that it is empowering - one or the other - [the study] is just looking at what the women think about why they've chosen it and why they do the job they do.

Peter Stringfellow, a lapdance club owner and Dr. Belinda Brooks-Gordon, a university researcher discuss on BBC the findings of a recent study which showed that one in four women working as lapdancers have a degree and "some 6%" of them are pursuing post-graduate degrees. The conversation quickly turns into whether this profession is degrading to women and what it means to be a woman making these choices for oneself.

Both Peter and Dr. Brooks-Gordon do a good job of articulating how I feel when it comes to "feminism" - that it's never really about whether the topic in question objectifies or empowers women. Instead, we should consider whether or not the woman in question was given the opportunity to make her own, well-thought decision; that in essence, she is thought of as smart enough to make her own decisions.

You can watch the video here: One in four lap-dancers has a degree