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W Lyrics w Bellydancertopless t Lyrics W Bellydancertopless w Lyrics M Interpreten epregnant%20dancerrsearchh Www A reported 10 million men—age 21 to 61 –- go to strip clubs anywhere from once a year to once a day. About half are married. But the slick new clubs specifically want the businessman crowd, so topless bars are marketing themselves as the in place for deal making. Ads for Stringfellows bill it as the spot “where business and pleasure do mix”; a promotional flyer for the Gold Club in Atlanta calls it “perfect for business entertainment”; and Scores, a New York City topless sports bar, provides its customers with a fax, a laptop computer, and a secretary. (No, there are no laptop secretaries.)
When you factor in cover charges of up to $15, pricey liquor, and tips, an evening at a go-go bar can wind up costing an obscene amount of money. Last year, an engineer at Conoco, a Houston-based oil company, racked up a tab of $22,664 on his corporate credit card for one night with clients at Houston’s Paradise Club. (The executive has since left the company.) Conoco spokesman Tom DeCola says the amount of the charge, not the venue, was in dispute. He insists that a male or female employee can indeed take a client to an exotic dance club “if there is a business reason for it.”
Of course, if a man’s company doesn’t take such a progressive view, strip-club visits can be easily camouflaged. Cabaret Royale in Dallas, for example, uses “Prive” as its corporate moniker. A receipt from The Gold Club in Atlanta will innocently read ESI, and Solid Gold in Minneapolis is discreetly called the SG Restaurant and Club. (These codes can help keep a wife in the dark, too.)
But Wendy Reid Crisp, director of the National Association for Female Executives, says companies that do business in a strip club may be vulnerable to charges of sexual harassment. “There’s an unnecessary risk of a lawsuit and bad publicity for a company to allow any business to take place in these establishments,” Crisp warns. “A woman can make an argument that she missed out from negotiating a contract because these men went into a place where she would feel excluded or offended.”
Indeed, some men admit to preferring the all-male audience. “It’s a bonding thing between men,” explains Allen, a 32-year-old antiques dealer from Atlanta. “I go to the Cheetah or Gold Club about six times a year, when I have someone from out of town to entertain on business or I’m out with a couple of buddies for a beer. It helps break the ice and allows us to have something in common. My wife doesn’t care as long as I come home.”
Not everyone buys that this is all benign boy bonding. “It reminds me of the backlash of the nineteenth century where a lot of bourgeois men were threatened by the development of the first wave of feminism,” says Susan Faludi, author of Backlash. “Women were becoming more independent, so men retreated to these upscale bordellos where women ministered to their need. These new topless clubs come from a desire to make a profit off simmering male anger and fear about women’s demands.”
Michael Kimmel, Ph.D., professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of Men Confront Pornography, agrees. “A lot of men feel defensive around women now. So if you go to a bar where women are bare-breasted, no one there is going to criticize you for being a macho lout.”
Others point out that the boys-will-be-boys camaraderie formed in executive harems doesn’t end at the strip-club door. “These men have influence over the hiring and firing of women in the workplace,” says 30-year-old actor Michael David Gordon, member of The New York Anti-Sexist Men’s Action Network. “I’m not sure you can separate what you do in your private life, under the guise of play, from what you do in your business life. As men, we don’t know what it’s like to be objectified on a day-to-day basis and how that affects our relationships with the women in our lives.”
All Looking and No Touching?
Of course, plenty of women don’t care about the politics of the debate. What they want to know is if strip clubs prime a man for infidelity. “I don’t think so,” says Judith Seifer, R.N., Ph.D., spokeswoman for the American Association of Sex Educators and Therapists. “If a husband wants to fool around, he’s going to do it whether he goes to a strip club or to a singles bar.” Or the office or the supermarket, she might add. “Since it’s a lot riskier to have anonymous sexual encounters today, we’re going to have to rely more heavily on these kinds of fantasy settings to keep monogamy vital.”
Nina Hartley, a 31-year-old porn star who headlines in clubs across the country, puts it more colorfully. “Women have to understand that men need some kind of visual variety. It doesn’t matter where he gets his appetite, as long as he comes home to eat.”
But Brittany, 24, a former dancer at Cheetah in Atlanta, believes many of the men who frequent the club are also cheating on their wives. “Men are such snakes,” she says. “Guys would tell me stuff like, `You’re so beautiful, I wish my wife were like you.’”
Like other forms of erotica, adult clubs should be kept within the confines of a relationship, says Helen Singer Kaplan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the human-sexuality program at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. “If the couple go together and make love afterward, that’s fine. But for men alone, it’s having sexual pleasure away from your spouse. What is he going to do with all that arousal? I’d kill my husband if he went without me.”
Indeed, there is evidence that a small but growing number of women are accompanying their husbands to the more female-friendly strip clubs. Lisa, a 24-year-old graduate student, and her husband, Dan, dropped into Stringfellows on East 21st Street while driving through the ritzy Gramercy Park neighborhood one Saturday night. “We’ve been to a lot of strip clubs,” says Lisa. “We’re always trying to find a place that’s classy.” It is an experience they take to bed with them at night. “I love looking at the women,” Lisa confides. Does it turn them both on? “Yes, definitely,” she says.
Lynn, a 33-year-old mother of two, also went willingly with her husband to Solid Gold in Minneapolis. “It’s like a Las Vegas show,” says Lynn, who helps manage her husband’s contracting business. Does she feel threatened knowing that he’s ogling all these gorgeous women? “I trust him,” Lynn says. “I wouldn’t mind if he came here by himself.”
And in fact, that’s what most do. Although Michael often takes refuge in a topless bar, he says he has no desire to cheat on his wife. “What I have at home is real,” he says earnestly. “I wouldn’t give my wife up for anyone in here.”