We still have strip joints in 2017 because science is real
Hey, all you gentlemen, you executives who lounge, you connoisseurs of the finer pole arts.
More downtown strippers are on the way. If you prefer a place with a less cheeky name than Art’s Performing Center, you’ll soon be able to do your dollar stuffing at the Executive Lounge in the heart of Milwaukee’s occasionally robust convention district.
The Common Council approved the club’s license this week. Aldermen had their minds on potential exposure, not of skin but rather the potential millions of dollars in lawsuits against the city for blocking past efforts to open the club. The ribbon cutting could get weird.
As always, if you don’t like strip clubs, don’t visit or work at them. Executive Lounge, in its application, estimates 100 patrons a day will come through the door at 730 N. Old World 3rd St., and twice that many on weekends.
The calendar says 2017, but guys ogling mostly naked women in, ahem, gentlemen’s clubs is somehow still a thing. That’s because science is real. The men who go to these places are responding to ancient biological and emotional impulses, and the dancers are seeking financial sustenance.
I called R. Danielle Egan, a psychoanalyst and professor of gender and sexuality studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. She wrote a book called “Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships Between Exotic Dancers and their Regular Customers.”
We’re awash now in porn and what Egan calls sexual representation. And in our ambivalence, we both proclaim this stuff wrong and keep seeking it out. So what do these strip joints offer?
“What keeps men coming back, at least men who are regular customers, was the human relationship as much as anything else. It was this access to a safe sexualized space where they could have their egos boosted. It allows them to have the kind of relationship they don’t get elsewhere. It’s the containment of the relationship that’s really important in a strip club,” she said.
“A lot of times these men came to see the same dancer over and over again, sometimes once a week, sometimes more than that. It was like a friendship and a relationship that developed.”
As long as the gentleman kept the tips coming, the illusion of a real human connection continued. Sounds depressing, I know.
In her research, primarily at two clubs in New England, she did not find evidence of actual sex occurring between dancers and customers. “This is not to say it never happens,” she added.
The Executive Lounge will have a VIP area, but I can’t tell from the application if it will allow lap dances. Human trafficking won’t be tolerated, and that assurance is straight from strip club owners to God’s ears.
Got a bachelor party coming up? Go somewhere else, these owners are saying. They’re shooting for an older and more affluent clientele rather than a “rowdy and rambunctious young crowd.” It’s less hubba-hubba and more boutique, a word they use to make the joint sound like less of a neighborhood nightmare.
Visitors to Milwaukee are expected to be faithful club customers, if not husbands.
Egan said strip bars are designed for theatricality, both on stage and in the interplay between dancers and customers. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is being exploited, if either.
“It’s a deeply complicated relationship that involves power that shifts between them,” she said.
Just add alcohol and dollar bills.