What Kant Would Say to the Stripper Going Viral After Saying 'It Was Fun' Breaking Men
“I hope I did a little damage.”
I never heard of Whatever pod (a podcast on TikTok) until this week, when I saw a clip going viral on Twitter.
The hosts were interviewing a stripper who works at the Spearmint Rhino, a chain of strip joints that operate throughout the United States. During the clip, the woman talks about a dating experience she had with a man whom she intentionally tried to hurt.
“The whole time I was seeing him I was just kind of using it as a psychology experiment,” the young woman says. “I didn’t really like the guy. I more just wanted to see if I could break his heart.”
Though the hosts of the podcast looked shocked, the young woman pressed on.
“It was fun,” she says. “I hope I did a little damage.”
When she was asked why she hoped she did damage to this person, she didn’t hesitate.
“Because I like humbling men,” she replied. “It’s like my pastime.”
Kant on Treating People as Means
There’s something slightly sadistic in the stripper’s responses, which no doubt helped the clip go viral. (In addition to, of course, an attractive young woman speaking in her top.)
While appalling, there’s also something understandable about the woman’s response.
For starters, modern neo-feminism has a tendency to portray men as the enemy. A neo-feminist might argue that it’s the sexual appetite of men that has led this young woman into this very career.
Secondly, think of what this woman experiences when she goes to work each day. Men ogle her as she prances about in her outfit (or without one, presumably). In a sense, they’re using her.
This brings me to my point. Why were the young woman’s actions wrong? Many people clearly recognized them as so, but what precisely made them wrong? Many would give one obvious answer: it’s wrong to intentionally hurt people.
But there’s a deeper one, and it’s found in the ethics of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who explained that it’s immoral to treat people as ends to our desires.
“Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means,” wrote Kant, arguably the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment.
This might seem like a simple ethic to live, but it’s actually not. And I suspect this is especially true when one is treated day after day not as an end, but as a means of sexual gratification.
It’s easy to cast stones at this woman, who has not just a warped sense of ethics but a sadistic streak. But I think my FEE colleague Maggie Anders is right that she is primarily harming her self by this behavior.
“I hope this woman repents and comes to terms with the damage she's done to other people,” Maggie wrote. “‘Humbling men’ as a pastime will blacken her soul more than it does theirs.”