Recently Channel 4 broadcast a 3 episode documentary entitled, Strippers. It filmed inside a few strip clubs in the 3 main cities in Scotland. I watched it for educational purposes, just the same as when I watched a video in Biology class where a scientist blew through a hose into a set of cow lungs, inflating them on the wooden bench, because - just as I had never seen a man blow into a set of cow lungs - I have never ever been to strip club.
It's not as if I have not had the chance. In fact I had an excellent chance when Dylan's Bar no more than 600 yards from my wooden door introduced their "lap dance luncheons" weekdays 12:15 to 2pm.
Despite my imagination being in pretty good condition, not even it could imagine this as involving high-class, born and bred on fruit, oats and Vitamin D infused exotic dancers with teeth whiter than fresh alpine snow in July. Not even my imagination can disconnect the obvious fact Dylan's Bar was offering less Lap Dance Fantasy Palace with Pimms Jelly with cucumber sorbet on the menu and more Titty-bar with deep fried scampi and oven chips. This is mainly because Dylan's Bar has no windows - or least it did, once, but they were bricked up, and painted black. Like the rest of the outside of Dylan's Bar. And, from what I will bet, the inside. This and the advertisement of "lap dance luncheons" was daubed on one of the bricked up windows in fluorescent pink marker. And it said: "Topless women and £2.50 toasties - 12:15 to 2pm, weekdays" with a poster stock image of a gold lined silhouetted girl sliding down a pole stuck next to it.
My only point of reference for lap dance bars, go-go bars or strip joints has been CSI.
It is a law of physics that every 3rd episode of CSI has a scene in lap dance club. These cool neon lit venues where the lingerie fitted women spin around poles raised on plinths in slow motion, shot behind giant fish tanks like adult lava lamps, as the owner claims to never have seen "Armando" and knows nothing about why he had the club's business card taped to his penis, has been my sole idea of these places.
So, to have a programme which not only will show real life strip bars, but show them close to where I live, made it an easy choice to get a more accurate and candid take on them.
The show did touch on the darker side of the industry: the occasions where the girls have to dance for undesirable men and abuse they have to endure as well as the issues in maintaining romances - but only briefly. The show didn't discuss the alleged added "extras" which I have somehow heard are supposedly on offer behind closed doors at all. But the show, otherwise provided a very straight laced view of these places, the customers and dancers.
And so this is all what I learnt.
The first thing I learned was there is no putting a paper green-back in a girl's thong as she crawls past on a wet stage. There is very little open pole dancing. There is nothing much of a free sample. The whole process appeared very business like, with money paid upfront for a transaction of service between customer and trader.
The girls are their own business, with the venue taking a cut of their earnings to allow them to trade. This means the girls are not simply passively providing some titillating ambiance to the venue - they are actively touting. They approach men and talk at the tables or in the corner or up at the bars hoping to persuade them to part with £10 for 3 minutes for a personal dance.
The girls' earnings vary hugely. Sometimes when the bar is quiet or the girl chooses to be not too active, the takings are few (£20 a night) whereas other girls appear to be laser attuned in removing £10s from wallets, with one enthusiastic dancer talking about earning £400 a night.
I learned the girls are generally non-careerist dancers. Often the job is a means to put themselves through education, or a stop-gap between jobs or even countries. However, lap dancing is not always conducive to meet ambitions. The attraction of going out clubbing for a living can be too much of a draw to give up and ambitions are always in danger of being discarded quicker than a bra in a corner of a club.
I learned the customers are quite frank about what they want when entering a strip club: soulless interaction. It is perhaps difficult to think of any other reason why someone would, but there were a few who were not just all about getting a girl to writhe at a significant amount of nakedness on them for a few minutes. Some men claimed they went to a particular bar because it was just their pub.
Do you pay for a dance? "Oh, no. I would never degrade the girls like that. I like them too much. I like to look at them in the bar but that's it."
Which, in the scheme of my learning seems, well, wrong. These girls are there just to make money. That's why they are standing in their underwear, in a predominantly male populated bar talking to men they've never met, willing to dance for money.
Going just to look almost seems immoral. A bit like wandering into DFS Furniture every night and sitting on one of their sale chairs because you like waiting on the bus in comfort instead of sitting on the bar at the bus stop outside. Sort of.
I learned also the major lesson from the programme: the science of a dance cycle. There were several examples shown of the dance cycle so there was a chance to take an average, and therefore most normal, result. Like when the scientist blew into the cow lungs for a second time. Just to be... sure? Anyway...
The girl will approach a group of men and ask if any of them are interested in a dance by her. The customer will down the last quarter of his drink, tell his friends he's "going in for a dance" and, handing over a brown-back note to her, follows the girl to a semi-walled private cubicle where she explains he must not move his palms from the red plastic seat fabric: otherwise a bouncer who is kind of watching at the side will throw him out. The girl shimmys, removes the important clothes involved and jiggles well inside the comfort zone, brushing his jeans and sweater. The customer will look awkward - the look of a man who bragged about wanting to drive a sports car but now behind the wheel fears he will crash into the first available tree. Then the time's up the dance stops mid hip revolution and the customer nods a thanks and goes back to his friends, leaving as the girl quickly re-attaches her attire to start again.
This "normalisation" troubles me. Leaving your friends at the bar talking about the big match for a 3 minute cigarette break is one thing, breaking from the conversation because you've paid to be sexually aroused for 3 minutes is another. I am not sure I could do it and look at my friends quite in the same way again.
So! After all this then, with my new found broader horizon - what has been my ultimate lesson learned from this 3 episode series, Strippers? Well it is this:
If I was to go to Dylan's Bar now I would go utterly alone, lying about my whereabouts to friends and family, order two cheese and tomato toasties and pay for a dance from every single stripper there. That's not seedy, it's morally and ethically sound. Like nudie upper-thighed fair trade coffee.
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