Why Strip Clubs Bother Me

A couple of months ago, to celebrate a coworker's last day, a group of us from work went out for drinks. This is not something I do frequently -- the last time I can recall doing this was well over 10 years ago. Anyway, we went to the local El Torito because they were the only place in town that had karaoke on Friday nights, and this was something a couple of us wanted to do.

Because I knew I had to drive a long distance home, I had two quick drinks and stopped so I would be sure to be sober when I left. As I sobered up rapidly, the rest of my party kept drinking. As I got levelheaded, they got reckless. The karaoke D.J. was terrible; he wouldn't play any of the songs that we wanted to sing to, and we got a little restless. One of my female coworkers suggested that we pick up our stakes and go elsewhere. When I inquired as to where she thought we should go, she replied, "City Lights."

City Lights is a strip club in a seedy area over by the airport. I blanched at this suggestion and replied that I had never been to a strip club and would prefer to keep it that way. Around the table the gasps of surprise were audible. No one could believe I had never been to a strip club. It was something that they did quite frequently.

The thing that surprised me about this was the fact that, of the seven people sitting around that table, five of them were women. When did women start hanging out at strip clubs? This fascinated and disgusted me simultaneously. My group began trying to convince me that going to a strip club was a fun experience and something I should try. One of the young ladies at my table, a girl barely twenty-one years of age, tried to convince me to give it a whirl by offering that a lot of her friends from high school worked as dancers at places like City Lights and that "they were all nice girls." For some reason, not only did this not convince me to go, but it depressed me to think of these "nice girls" taking off their clothes for a group of anonymous guys (and, apparently now, gals) so that they can get some weird jollies and hopefully have them stuff a few dollar bills into their g-strings.

Honestly, I have no problem with what people do in their bedrooms, so long as it's legal and consensual. I just find strip clubs to be so incredibly degrading to women, more so than even pornography. I guess my rationale is that if a woman is on the pages of Penthouse or some like-minded publication, she is turned into a fantasy-object for the viewer. Put that same woman on stage, dancing, wrapping herself around a stripper pole, and not only is it a very public exhibition with groups of people getting themselves lathered up at the show, but by the simple act of just being there and hearing the exhortations, the catcalls, the insults -- everything changes. In my opinion, the woman has declined from "fantasy object" to just "object," and all the way to "piece of meat."

I have heard that strippers, even at dives like City Lights, can make a lot of money. Well, all I can say is that I sure hope so. I'm sure that stripping for strangers takes a pretty big psychological toll on you. They'll need that money for therapy later on.

I dunno. Am I being stupid here, or do I have a point? In the meantime, I have an El Torito cocktail napkin signed by my coworkers that I can redeem for a lap dance (at their expense) at City Lights anytime in the future. Whoopee.