Lap Dancing

An interesting article from Decca Aitkenhead

The Guardian March 27th 1998

However, I tend to agree with the observation that getting female writers to report on such matters rather obscures the insight that may be forthcoming from an appreciative male viewpoint.

 This is what happens if you go to an average table-dancing club in London. If you are a woman, you will not be allowed in unless you are with a man, and a doorman will ask your companion if the lady knows what kind of club it is. All the doormen will then nudge each other and stare at you when he says yes. You pay around £15 each to a cashier with the caustic efficiency of a one-time sex bomb who has been around a while, and you're required to check your coats in before being shown to a table.

The room will probably look like a suburban piano bar - tasteful black and chrome with thoughtful lighting. The music will be mainstream dance, plus a bit of businessman's soft rock and a few stock favourites like Big Spender. Pretty waitresses will be delivering drinks to tables, at which are seated youngish and not unattractive men, some by themselves, but most in groups of three or four. They have the composure of men who do not earn less than £40,000 a year, and the nonchalance of men who do not mind spending more. Some will be slouched right back in their chairs, hands resting on splayed thighs. And in the space between their knees, beautiful young women will be taking all their clothes off in an elaborate pretence of sexual desire.

Each dancer grinds and pouts to the music, eye contact and nipples as taut as her glossy lips are loose. Once naked, she will turn around, bend over, slap her rear, and press her exfoliated genitalia inches away from the customer's face. She will probably lick her fingers, squeeze her nipples, and stroke her vagina. He will stare impassively, as if he we were watching the share prices on Ceefax; his companions will usually be too polite to claim a free eyeful, and so tend to talk among themselves, or look away at other dancers arranging themselves gymnastically around a chrome pole on the stage.

When the record stops, the dancer will lean over and kiss the customer's cheek, laugh a little, and slide her clothes - such as they are - back on, like a Baywatch extra recomposing her swimsuit. The man hands over £10 with a slightly foolish grin, and the dancer wanders off to a new table. She will introduce herself, sit down, and chat, tossing her hair and falling on the words of her new friends like rare jewels of wit, until one of them asks her to dance. He sits back, she takes her clothes off for him, and so it will go on all night. If you are a female customer, the men will sneak curious glances at you, as if they are normal and you are a pervert. If it is your first time, you may find it too strange and embarrassing to stay long.

This, more or less, is what happens in table-dancing clubs. Four years ago, Britain did not have a single table-dancing club, and three years ago only a tiny handful had opened. But today there are more than 20, scattered from Aberdeen to Bournemouth. In the past three months, three clubs have opened in London alone, and one chain has recently announced it will be opening five new clubs across the country before the autumn. Each club is slightly different, but all share the same basic logic, which goes like this. Stripping used to be sleazy, because it took place in Soho dives where customers ordered champagne, were served fizzy water, charged £200, and then beaten up by gorilla doormen for complaining. If they were lucky enough to glimpse a woman, she would be a vision of cellulite with a drug problem, lactating milk for a baby whose financial requirements had driven her to this career.

At a table dancing club, on the other hand, the doormen are genial and the price list and house rules (no touching, no profanity, no shouting, no propositioning etc) are displayed on table menus. The decor is fashionable, the atmosphere suave, and the location never Soho. The girls are pretty, articulate, drug and cellulite-free, and could clearly find alternative employment if they wished; their clothes are more cocktail hour than Ann Summers, and they are cutely ladettish, draping arms over one another in a mad-for-it lipstick lesbian tease. Customers have to check their coats in, so that no one can say they wear dirty macintoshes, and no one can wank while they watch. Ergo, these clubs are not sleazy. They are sophisticated entertainment for the normal, modern man who likes looking at beautiful women.

This is their account of themselves, and the media have reported it with insouciance. The Daily Mail has featured the Oxbridge undergraduates who prefer to strip with none of their usual censoriousness, the tabloids indulge celebrity customers, and the broadsheets note the phenomenon as evidence of our new sexual maturity. Last month, Arena - the high priest of male sophistication - recommended a new club to its readers as, well, the height of sophistication. The dancers say they find their work empowering, and post-feminists think that's just fantastic. If the women feel good, that's good enough for them.

When one of the first licences was applied for, the only problem the authorities could see was the possibility that men would leave in such a state of arousal that, should they came across a woman before getting home to relieve themselves, they might be unable to resist raping her. But the club, For Your Eyes Only (FYEO), was based on a trading estate in west London where stray women seldom wander, so it was declared harmless and granted a licence. From the outside, it looks like the kind of nightclub normally called Ethos and found between Ikea and a Showcase Cinemas complex near a motorway. On the inside, it looks like a Berni Inn with a few chrome poles added on.

The man at the next table described himself as the world champion of table dancing; he had been to another club earlier that evening, had spent £100 on dances here, and was soon off to another. "The girls have gone downhill," he complained, "but don't tell them I said that." When girls he didn't fancy approached, he shooed them away. He said that girls who had already danced for him now looked like £10 notes he'd spent.

"Is that your boyfriend you're with?" he asked abruptly. "I thought you were chatting me up. You sure know how to bring a man down."

Club managers are thrilled to talk to a journalist, excited by the prospect of broadsheet coverage which will confirm their respectability; but customers are decidedly cagey, and the dancers who "love their job" so much are rarely keen for everyone to find out what they do. However, everyone was always delighted if I pretended I was there for my boyfriend's birthday treat.

Chantelle began dancing at FYEO four months ago. She said it was a brilliant job - the men were lovely, the girls were great, you only live once, you've got to live your life your own way, she thought. She used to be a waitress, but the money was hopeless; now she's saving up for property. The woman in charge of the dancers - the "housemother" - was very kind. Her boyfriend doesn't like her being "oogled" by other men, but then, she beamed, what man does like his girl being oogled? The questions were mine, but she answered without shifting her gaze from the man I was with. When she danced for him, she tried to put him at ease; the first couple of times you'll be embarrassed, she smiled, but then you'll enjoy it. Soon you'll be like this, she said, and she mimed yawning and looking at her watch. "It's a bit hot in here, isn't it?" he joked, loosening his tie. "Not for me," she answered brightly. "I haven't got any clothes on." Ten minutes later, Chantelle was telling a somewhat different story.

"I don't mean to be man-bashing, but men are all wankers. It's okay when it's busy, you just get on with it, but when you hang around you wonder what you're doing with your life. The men can be really abusive - I tell them that's a bit rich coming from you, you fat balding wanker. You're not meant to say that, but fuck it. They think they can say what they like 'cos they're paying." She doesn't like talking to them for too long before she dances. Taking her clothes off after that feels a bit weird.

Male strippers usually dress up as characters - policeman, builder, Red Indian - but table-dancers stick to variations on a Page Three theme. However, in any club the dancers range from the startlingly beautiful to the surprisingly plain. Some can dance like Madonna, and some can barely even dance like your dad; breasts range from Pamela Anderson to pre-pubescent. All the dancers wear high heels and thongs, but some wear spray-on designer dresses, while others manage only cheapish baby doll nighties. Interestingly, the customers exercise almost no discrimination, and appear not to care less what their dancer looks like, still less what she says, as long as she looks as though she finds them irresistible.

This should be a source of some encouragement for Danni, who was only on her second night when we met her at Secrets in Finchley, north London. Danni was very pretty, and generous with her laughter, tossing her curls and widening her eyes with each peal as she hung on every man's word. As a sexual fantasy, however, she was calamitously unconvincing. She'd just finished breastfeeding her second baby, she explained, and thought she "deserved" new breasts. She'd had the implants specially flown in from France, a Christmas present to herself, and paid for them straight off - not in instalments, like other girls. They were her investment. "It's worth it, if it's something really important to your whole life. There are only so many years when you can enjoy your body, aren't there?" After half an hour, she took a deep breath. "Well, after all this, do any of you want a dance?"

When Danni danced, she looked like a farmer trying to swing her legs over a gate. She lurched from side to side, wobbling on her heels, peering anxiously at her reflection in the mirror. She couldn't get out of her dress, and the belt wouldn't come undone. She looked down at her knickers, and back up at us. "Oh well," she grinned. "They've got to come off some time, I suppose." They got tangled up in her shoe, and she lost her balance and flopped on to the table. "Oops!" Afterwards, she couldn't find her knickers, and had to fish around under the table for them.

Danni used to work as a hostess in Soho. She knows the ropes, which might explain why, in spite of her painful incompetence, she seemed perfectly comfortable with her new job. Chantelle was right - it does not take long for a person's embarrassment to dissolve into indifference. Until, that is, Danni was summoned to a table where two young men had ordered every girl in the club to dance for them simultaneously. The pair clicked their fingers - "We're at a party!" - as a dozen women formed a circle around them and took their clothes off.

Table-dancing was invented in America, and the concept is straightforward. In most clubs, the entrance fee is £10 to £20, and drinks are sold at normal nightclub prices. The dancers pay the club a commission of up to £50 for each night they work, and then keep whatever they earn; a dance lasts for one record and usually costs £10, though in some clubs you must also pay £5 per record for a girl to sit and talk to you. The DJ will repeatedly remind customers that, if they are running low on cash, all major credit cards are accepted for the purchase of dance vouchers and drinks. The name of the club does not show up on your credit card statement. Girls at the better clubs expect to earn not less than £200 a night, and up to £1,000 if they are lucky; corporate entertainment is the biggest spender, and most clubs open early on Friday afternoons.

The clubs have profited from something of a licensing loophole. Traditionally, a venue with a standard music and dance licence may host nudity, to accommodate the occasional stripogram and the like. So a club can turn itself into a table dancing outift without requiring a vastly expensive sex establishment licence, and several have - except that Westminster City Council got wise to this, and introduced a clause imposing various restrictions. In brief, these comprise a 3ft rule - the distance a dancer must keep from a customer - and a ban on full nudity save on stage. Some other authorities have followed suit, but the 3ft rule appears to be ignored everywhere, and councils admit that enforcement of their rules is largely hit and miss. Many customers ask the girls if they do "extras", and it is obvious that a significant number do.

But a significant number do not, and the interesting question is why men pay them so much money for what amounts to so little. For £10 you can buy yourself a handjob anywhere, and if you know where to go you can get full intercourse for not much more. Table-dancing is the opposite of a bargain, and yet it has proved popular enough for one chain of clubs to recently float on the stock exchange. The mystery only becomes clear when you understand that the modesty of the service does not represent a disappointment but, on the contrary, is the whole point of its appeal.

"Sure, my wife knows I come here. She's pregnant right now, so she knows that she can't do for me what these girls can do for me," explained a thirtysomething in a suit in Secrets. "We've been married for five years now, so she has to be understanding, doesn't she? She'd rather I was here than in a hotel, getting up to something else. Anyway, for me it's all in the eyes. I just look at their eyes." (How pregnancy had ruined his wife's eyes he didn't explain.) A young City broker at the next table agreed. "You go home and your conscience is clear." He blew a slow, meticulous circle of smoke. "These places are entirely innocent."

Every man in every club would like nothing better than to pay a girl £100, take her out the back and have sex with her - which is why, according to the dancers, most of them suggest it. But if they could, they would be implicated in the lonely, dysfunctional desperation of a brothel, and these are men who see themselves as sophisticated players, men of the world. The beauty of table dancing is the illusion that it has nothing to do with selling sexual services; the girls flatter the men with the pretence that they are dying to undress for them, find their conversation captivating, and have declined some boring executive job in favour of a good time with great guys like them.

"Why do guys come here? This is the question I keep asking myself," says David Simones, who now likes to go by the name of Catman, recently opened a central London club called Sophisticats, "dedicated to bringing glamour back to London". He has his own theory on the club's appeal, albeit preposterous, but the fact that he genuinely believes it is significant. Men, he believes, come to have a relationship without complications, but more than that, "They come to be kind to women. Maybe they are repenting former sins - they spend thousands on girls, and it's a loving thing. They behave with perfect manners, and give money out of pleasure - it's got a lot of meaning. Please don't misquote me when I say it's a kind of charity."

Table-dancing, in other words, has succeeded in constructing a fantasy whereby the exchange has nothing to do with neediness or power - nor even with sex. There is an unwritten rule in most of these clubs which prohibits any hint of sexual arousal in the men, and so they have to act as if girls dance naked for them all the time. "I mean to say," demanded a young man in Secrets. "Look at me. Am I unattractive? No. It's not as if I'm an ugly motherfucker, is it? I don't mean to sound flash, but it's not as if I have a problem getting women to have sex with me." It is is crucial that they all uphold the illusion of sexual immunity. Should one man lose his cool and start to slaver, all would be exposed, and a leisure activity designed to celebrate their sexual prowess would suddenly be casting doubt upon it.

The further you go from central London, however, the less bothered anyone seems to be about maintaining this pretence. At Metropolis in the East End, most customers crowd around a stage and watch ageing peroxides remove denim cut-offs with lace trim, lie on their back and stretch their legs in their air. Table dancing is limited to two booths in a backroom; it costs £5 each, and the dancer was already naked when we went through and took our seats. "You want a dance?" she snapped, before heaving her clothes back on, shouting at the DJ, and launching into a tired routine. The record ended abruptly, she snapped out of her pout, and told us we had to leave the booth.

The Fantasy Bar in Manchester entertains even fewer pretensions. Women are not allowed in ("It's a gentleman's club," explained the doorman without an ounce of irony), and it required bribery to gain entry to what was a bawdy, old-fashioned bear pit full of wildly drunk 21-year-olds dribbling and roaring at the dancers. The dancers had four basic moves, which included pushing her nipple into the customer's mouth, sliding her finger inside her vagina, and blowing hot breath on his crotch, simulating oral sex. When each record ended, there was a two second silence and all the lights went on, presumably to ensure there was no dispute about exactly when you'd had your money's worth.

In Aberdeen, competition between the clubs has grown intense. The Fantasy Club is the oldest, but was empty at 9pm on a Tuesday night, save for a few hard-bitten looking girls, one of whom was eating a pot of instant noodles. At Mr G's, I met a fat man with a squeaky voice and a nervous giggle who said he came here because he was a sad bastard with no mates and no girlfriend, and all the girls thought he was weird because he asked them to keep their knickers on. A tiny blonde dancer said her parents thought she worked in her boyfriend's curry house. He wanted her to give it up and convert to Islam. She thought converting was probably a bit ridiculous, as she was only 18 and didn't even believe in God.

At Private Eyes, the city's latest and most upmarket club, a man tapped my shoulder and asked if he could ask a personal question. "Do you take it up the bum?" His friend offered to buy me a drink, and then asked if we could meet up some time. I thought not. "Well you can fuck off then," he said.

"See what I mean?" laughed a dancer. "The men are all bloody weird. Some of them even ask if they can pay extra to come all over you. I just think of the money."

"But they do it for only £5 a dance up there!" Tara shuddered and pulled a face. "I can't understand why they do it." Tara is a dancer at Secrets, in Hammersmith, west London, one of the capital's first clubs, which features all the usual nods to sophistication - middle-class art on the walls and lobster thermidor on the menu. Tara was slightly startled when I arrived, and so was the man I was with, as it turned out that they had slept together in their home town not so long ago, and nobody back home knew what she did. She agreed to meet me for a drink a day later.

Tara went to an all-girls boarding school, and is now at university. She had friends who were dancers at Secrets, but the first time she went along to see them she was shocked. The next time it didn't seem so bad, and soon she was wondering if she could do it. On her very first night at work she earned £200.

"I just couldn't get over it. You get all dressed up, look glamorous, get bought champagne and everything all night, and get paid. I couldn't get over it." She used to chat to customers a lot, "but now I think, time is money. Time is money. I've got to make money." She has more confidence now, because when she goes out she can buy her own champagne, whereas before she would have chatted up any old guy for a drink. She feels above men now, because they are paying her. Mind you, her friends who've been doing it longer than her have become very hardened, and that worries her. "They are too hard. Guys comment on it, you know?"

Tara is just 20. She is tall, slender, and has a fetching, eager-to-please face which teeters between goofy schoolgirl and flinty-eyed showgirl. She hated being a poor student, and loves earning £500 a week for two nights work, meeting millionaires who buy her champagne and everything. She would never do a dance for less than £10, "on principle". She is scared that her parents might find out about her job, although she doesn't think it's sleazy. She used to, but now she thinks it's glamorous. Does she think she might one day regret it? "Oh yes, I do. It's always going to be there now, isn't it? And I always think, how am I going to be able to stop? I'm too used to the money now."

Like everyone else I spoke to, Tara has located the concept of sleaze in the details - the cost of a dance, the decor of a club. In fact, it is precisely the normality - the smart location, the menu, the credit card, the dancer who looks just like your niece - which makes it, in its way, as damaging as any brothel. Just as Page Three confirms the status of women as bodies with breasts for sale more effectively than hardcore pornography ever could, so the banality of table-dancing is what makes it so pernicious. Genitalia are for sale on your doorstep, as ordinary as pizza.

The industry congratulates itself on its honesty - here we are, here are the prices, this is what you get - yet the whole business is founded on a mountain of lies. The girls perform a sufficiently convincing pretence of finding the men irresistible for the men to kid themselves that they are, and both sides pretend the arrangement has nothing to do with money, when it is the only reason either party is there. David Simones, aka Catman, must have been very sure I would enter into this spirit of wilful delusion when I met him at Sophisticats. Otherwise, why would he tell me that his dancers didn't "go in for all that squeezing of boobies", when one was doing just that on stage right then, or that his showgirls who danced on stage did not do table dancing, when 10 minutes later his lead showgirl was doing just that?

Simones described himself as a "black belt in psychology", who could read anyone - which was odd as he appeared oblivious to my doubts when he told me his club was "an art form", where "performance artistes" entertained "real gentlemen". He served sushi at his club, so how could it be sleazy? It wasn't like those other clubs which go in for gynaecology shows, where the men do not even dress well. I wondered what he would say if someone suggested that, for all the sushi, his dancers were not artistes but women selling their sex as a commodity. "Only a very unintelligent person would make that comment about this type of venue. These women are free to come and go, they control the men. No one has ever said anything like that to me."

The women are indeed free to go, but choose to stay because they can earn more table-dancing than they would elsewhere, and it makes perfect economic sense for someone like Tara to become a table dancer. Even some feminists acknowledge her right to take men for what they've got, as if it were empowering. Others have mistaken sexual commodification for sexual enlightenment, forgetting that a society which was relaxed about nudity would be one where men did not go out and buy it. The sex industry has invented a theory whereby if you do not like table-dancing you must be a prude, and no one wants to be a prude. The theory is evidently working, for since these clubs started opening, the only people to have publicly objected have been local residents, on the grounds of damage to property prices.

For a theory which has enjoyed such widespread acquiesence, it is astonishingly weak. By table-dancing's logic, there would be nothing wrong with prostitution, so long as it took place between well-dressed businessmen and gorgeous graduates in sufficiently plush brothels. But table dancing clubs say nothing of the sort; their principle boast is that their dancers are not "sleazy" prostitutes. What can they mean? If prostitution damages and demeans all women, so does lap dancing. For those three minutes of music, a table dancer controls her customer, insofar as a call girl dominatrix "controls" her client. But when the record ends, she has confirmed to herself that her most profitable commodity is her nudity, and that men are entitled to buy it. Whether it costs £1 or £1 million is not the point; the point is that there was a price. The customer is £10 the poorer, and walks away enriched with the confirmation that women are for sale.

As I dropped Tara home, it turned out that we had another mutual acquaintance in her home town, and she told me that he'd always said she was a slag. She shrugged. "Now he'll find out what I do, I suppose, and then his suspicions will have been confirmed." She opened the car door, shrugged again, and said she thought her job was just a bit of fun. Then she paused. "I probably shouldn't say it, but you know, I always think I'm different. I'm not like the other girls. When I'm dancing, I'm not really there. I'm not really there." She waved, and was gone. As I drove away, I found her words were turning over and over in my mind, faintly familiar and vaguely troubling, but I couldn't place them. Then it came to me that I had once read advice for women if they were being raped. It encouraged them to pretend that they were not there.