I've known two women that have stripped. They were both fiercely intelligent human beings. During the time that they stripped they used a lot of drugs. From what they related to me, many strippers are using drugs and/or alcohol while they are working. Speaking personally, I don't think I could dance naked in front of strangers or on their laps for money without some self-medication. That makes it difficult for me to think that it isn't often a bad thing for the person practicing it. I doubt there is a universal truth to be found here, but there maybe be some patterns that are difficult to dismiss.
Although I am in the 'stripping is shameful camp', I cannot say with confidence that everyone would feel that way. There are so many behaviors that were once widely considered shameful that no longer are. Although I cannot personally fathom it, I am willing to accept that for some individuals, they could practice it without shame.
what is it about stripping that is shameful to you? why do you think that societies views have changed on this for the better?
It's not the stripping, so much as the stripping for money. I believe it's the differential in incentive between the payer and the performer that bothers me the most. There is a money-based power structure behind it that is difficult to discount. I'm not sure if society's views have changed for the better.
It's just a job that is basically pretty crappy. Maybe there are some better forms of stripping jobs and the pay may be good, but generally not a job to boast about. Like a trash collector. I don't know many folks that would aspire to trash collecting. For some though, that crappy job fits their situation. I worked at Mickey D's in high school. I wasn't taking pride in emptying the fryer. It was a job I was not proud of. Plain and simple. It paid terribly too.
This reminds me a lot of the concept of 'job ghettos' that my mother introduced to me a few days ago. There are a lot of jobs usually considered either crappy or low-status by the population at large where the people in it are not a representative sample in some way or another - the administrative assistants in the College of Science, where I'm a student (and graduating in two weeks), are almost entirely female; construction is almost entirely male; the surgical techs at the hospital where my mother had her surgery were almost entirely non-white; and so on. Stripping is a crappy, low-status job (as much as the 'sex workers citizen brigade' would like to deny it, they are always going to be a low-status, crappy job viewed with disdain, in part because you need no qualifications other than anywhere from good looks to a functioning set of genitals), and it's almost entirely female.