I went to the Hustler strip club last week. What a blast! I forgot how much I enjoy them. Not having a great time in a stripper club is like not having a great time on a Ferris wheel: As long as you don’t do anything stupid and keep your hands inside the car, you will be rewarded with a spectacular view.
For me, the joy of strip bars is broken into two parts:
1. Watching scantily clad sexy mamas dance and undulate and generally be all hot and shit.
2. Watching how men behave in a room full of scantily clad, undulating sexy mamas.
Aside from gay-pride parades and sloshball games, strip clubs are unrivaled when it comes to watching men make jackasses of themselves. The creepy crawlers; the gropers; the old-man golly-jolly seekers; the loser lonelies; the wannabe pimp gangstas; the misogynistas; the inside-the-bar-sunglass-wearing, big-Dan-on-campus, 20-something yuppie twits–all seem to have no idea how to act in a strip club.
Maintaining an exceptional strip-club presence begins with your approach to a strip club: What you think it is. What you think it’s for.
Some guys, the loser lonelies for instance, wrongly believe it’s a place to meet women. The misogynistas think it’s a place where it’s acceptable to be rude and/or act superior to women. The gropers believe personal-space rules of the outside world don’t apply because chicks walk around half naked and pretend to like them.
My approach to the strip club, let’s call it a strip-club thesis, is this: A strip club is a place to engage in a little harmless fantasy; but be cautious because fantasy can be addictive, so, like everything else, strip clubs should be enjoyed in moderation–oh and be cool when you’re in there, cool?
Cool.
My strip-bar modus operandi is as such: Round up friends. Enter venue. Sit at bar. Order drinks. Watch stripper dances from afar. Get drunk. Have fun.
I like to have a stack of about 40 or so singles ready so when the girls come up to my stool with their “Did you see me dance?” rap, I can slip one in the bra and send them packing as quickly as possible. Otherwise, they’ll want to chat that dollar out of me, and, honestly, engaging in stripper small talk can be excruciating–for both of us. It’s why I don’t bother much with lap dances.
To me, there’s nothing more absurd than having a half-naked hot potato writhing over you as she recounts her most recent DMV experience in detail. I’d rather sit at the bar with the boys, laughing and drinking and doling out dollars to the “Did you see me dance” dames, and every now and then, when my fantasy dream girl emerges from behind the purple curtain–the soft-light sheen on her perfect bosom, ass, legs and mouth further fogging my Rumple-sopped brain–I make my way to a seat at the stage and throw money at her heels until she crawls to me like a lion and swallows my entire head with her cleavage.
Afterward, I go back to the bar to do more quality drinking and sassing with the boys, and not talking any stupid shit to the girls, or the bartender, and just being a normal person. I believe this is how one should comport oneself in a gentleman’s club. For those who are new to the stripper experience, or just plain lousy at it, here are five things you should probably not do in a gentleman’s club.
1. Hitting on the Strippers: Oh, yawn. Could you be more obvious? The chances of pulling an on-duty stripper are about the same as your chances of getting hit by lightning while being eaten by a shark, in the same place, twice. The exception is, of course, The Alphaclops male. The Alphaclops is a massive, walking, one-eyed penis-like creature that can lay the females of an entire metropolis at once and induce clitoral orgasm in a woman with only the whisk of wind he creates as he walks by. If you are not an Alphaclops male–and I guarantee you are not–don’t even try it.
2. Rudeness: I despise the strip-club misogynistas. They call the girls bitches and sluts behind their backs and talk down to them as if, by virtue of their chosen vocation, they are inferior, when really, deep inside, it is the misogynista who is inferior and can only feel superior to women in a venue where they’re being objectified en masse.
3. Eye-Contact Abuse: There’s a theory that strippers will like you better if you make a lot of eye contact. But eye contact is good in stripper bars the way eye contact is good in the outside world: In periodic, medium-sized doses only. Don’t be one of these bozos who dreamily gaze into a stripper’s eyes like they’re trying to pry open the window to her soul, crawl inside and creep to where her soul is sleeping so he can climb into bed with it.
4. Dumb Questions: This is difficult for me because I have a hard time keeping my inner journalist at bay. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like stripper small talk–because I always end up asking them all sorts of mood-killing questions like, “What does your father think of your career choice?” and “Which is your favorite brand of stripper-pole grease?”
5. Stripper Gifts: Never bring a stripper a present. It’s too losery, too stalkery. And you should shoot yourself in the ear if you ever compose a poem for a stripper.
O’ Mercedes
How you writhe
On the dance floor of my heart.
I love you.
Now what is your address?
That I may deposit a dead bird
on your porch.
Ed Decker
04.15.09
Had to actually register and respond mainly because this is my territory! First of all dude, you obviously got the huge chip on your shoulder and it comes thru your writing loud and clear.
1st, You forgot one more classification of strip club goers: the know it all who thinks he’s better than all the other guys there.
2nd, you totally are clueless when it comes to stripclubs. You call other guys losers but what douchebag goes to a stripclub…AND DOES NOT GET A LAPDANCE??!!??!
That’s like going to a steakhouse and not ordering the steak!
If you’re too intimidated to get a lapdance from the ladies, stay home and leave the men to do the heavy work.
3rd, always going to stripclub only with your boys is a stone cold lack of confidence move. Go to parties with your boys, go to the local bar with them. Heck go see a baseball game with your boys but serious work at the stripclub requires a focus devoid of distraction.
Also you harp a lot on being with your boys. You’d rather be with them then have a hot potato writhing on your lap. You can’t wait to get back to them instead of remaining at the stage. Sounds to me like you might enjoy the company of your boys a bit more than you’re letting on.
Lastly….who the heck refers to women these days as…sexy mamas?!?
I totally peg you as a gay guy trying hard to write about straight guy stuff.
I’ve logged a decade (and paid off two college degrees) dancing in gentlemen’s clubs. Your review is extremely accurate for Southern California topless bars…which is the ONLY place I’ve walked around after my stage show asking for dollars. The clubs in most other major metropolitan areas have a distinctly different atmosphere and (from an entertainer’s perspective…a different “hustle”)
Strip clubs industry are a multi-BILLION dollar industry…which means it’s not just “losers” buying lapdances. Men go to the stripclub for escapism and attention. The biggest spenders usually just want to sit and talk. Essentially, I’m a shrink in a rhinestone choker.
Hey, It is great you have a code of conduct, but really….you are not one of the strippers favourite customer!
I teach girls how to make a six figure income as a stripper and you would be a customer who they would politly avoid. If there are any girls out ther who want to learn how to become a six figure income earner, please visit http://www.howtostripper.com
Totally brilliant, as usual Ed.
Laughing at all the local strippers getting all defensive.
I definitely do NOT peg you as teh ghey. You are one sexy papa for sure.
I once sent a stripper (who worked at the Crazy Horse Too in Las Vegas) a hand made glass vortex marble and a long letter, written on stationary from the now defunct Barbary Coast.
She made me feel alive and wonderful. I was a gentleman. We did a decent, but not ridiculous amount of cocaine. I walked back to the hotel at 10 am singing loudly in the 100 degree morning heat, lay in bed and twitched for several hours. Then it was Kentucky Derby time! What a night. Strippers, you are scantily clad angels.
Hmm, ok, let me respond to each…
LOGO-
1. I don’t feel superior to all the other strip-club goers, just the douches.
2. I never said I was intimidated by lap dances, it’s just, when I do get them, I feel silly making small talk while getting gyrated upon. I still get them from time to time, but for me, are not the highlight.
3. The fact that few people, if any, use the term “sexy mamas” makes me even happier that I used it.
4. if enjoying hanging out with my friends more than hanging out with women I don’t know and only pay attention to me for my money makes me gay, well then Hell, unzip ‘em boys!
StripAndGoRich – I never said only losers go to strip bars, I was only commenting on those who go who do not know how to comport themselves there.
Hot Mama – will you lap dance for me?
Davard – A few people have emailed me to say they have picked up strippers in the past, so, apparently, it’s not as hard as i thought it was. I just assumed it was difficult cuz they must get hit on a hundred times a night. Guess I was wrong.
Thanks all for your comments, and reading Sordid Tales. Keep it coming!
ed
Going to a strip club today is different than back in the ’80s. Now days there are many women in the audience as well as men!
Way back when, I had a friend who was a dancer. She dated my buddy and one night we went on a double date. She took us to Pacers for a few drinks to start the evening. I felt like a king that night as the four of us sat in the crowd and each dancer stopped by to say hi. Like I was one of those Alpha-whatevers
Just got around to reading your column on strip clubs. I hate to tell you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. You passing yourself off as an expert on strip clubs would be like me calling myself a plumber because I periodically tale a crap. And the overriding problem with your
opinions is obvious. You have way to higfh an opinion of the chicks working in there. While I also despise the pimp-wannabes who act like assholes, you sound like one of those guys who’s got “sucker” written across his forehead, who has no clue how to talk to these chicks, with predictable
results. If you understand what you’re dealing with, it is possible to pull a chick out of one of these places, or at least to have a nasty-good time while you’re there.
you make some good points, but keep in mind, the article was mostly supposed to be funny. If I passed myself off as an expert, it was largely for comedic purposes.
Also, I don’t think I have a high opinion about the girls that work there, but I don’t hold it against them either. I judge each person on their individual merits.
Furthermore, while I agree, I am no expert, I am certainly no sucker either. I have no illusions about what strip bars are, and any money I dole out, I do so not because I’m buying into the façade, but because I’m going with the flow, which is really – as far as I’m concerned – the only way to have a good time in a strip bar.
Lastly, I concur, I have no idea how to talk to these girls (with regards to picking them up) but fortunately for me, I also have no deep seated need to hook up with them either. Incidentally, I’ve dated two strippers, briefly. But I met them at my job (I’m a bartender) and not their job, which is an entirely different thing.
Ed, Brilliant as always. Quite hilarious, I think the comments of people are nearly as funny too, especially cause they don’t understand how you mock everything, and it’s just their turn, so they’ll all pulling hater shit.
Keep up the excellent writing, and please don’t pull anymore april fools jokes that freak me out as if you were quitting your mockery.
Ed,
As usual you have done a world a great service by providing us with an etiquette primer for a previously uncovered subject. Too many of us men are economists who would have had the slightest idea how to act. Well done! Dare I say Pulitzer? Did I spell it correctly?
-PD