Strip Clubs

Since the 20^th century, increasingly from the mid 1980’s, strip clubs have become a profitable and growing form of entertainment for heterosexual American men. Acknowledging that there are male strip clubs designed for a different audience in mind, my focus will be on the trend rather than the exception. The industry for strip clubs, an industry ran primarily by males, presents male costumers with an apparent and seemingly real product in front of their face. A product so real, so human, so intimate that the pornographic industry (magazines, television, internet) cannot compete with their virtual, pixilated snapshots. The seemingly real and limitless leisure of strip clubs is in fact identical to pornography with its spectacle and special limitation.

            Every strip club has a stage. The main stage is meant for performances, though not on an intimate level because the performance is meant for everyone and no one specific. The stage itself sits higher than the audience’s sitting position. This elevation might make it easier on the eyes, but it also creates the strange sensation of looking up to find something. Audience members tend to look down when they go to sporting events or the movies. Why must we look up to watch the strip performance?

            The space of the club is not just the stage, but also the room itself. Katherine Frank, a professional sexologist, notes how “the behavioral structure of everyday life are inverted for many costumers inside the club.” An example of inverted behavioral structure is when a woman approaches a man, thus eliminating the possibility of rejection. Another example can be seen when women ask to be looked at naked, a natural sense of human privacy now irrelevant. Frank could also be referring to the behavior of the men who can drink, smoke, and be rude/vulgar/aggressive to women with no consequence. What people do and how they behave stays in the strip club.

            Overall, the leisure activity of going to a strip club is a huge critique on the costumers and their gender identity: men who go to strip clubs for the desire to feel desirable, or to display some sort of masculinity, or to get some sort of more real pleasure, or to feel some sort of freedom. Whatever the motive may be, it is not be satisfied in their home/work life.