Keep clothes on to keep your jobs, strippers told

Dancers can circumvent curbs on adult clubs by being less sexy, city officials in Edinburgh suggest

STRIPPERS who face losing their jobs because of a ban on adult venues will be able to continue working if they keep their clothes on and stop being sexy, a council has suggested.

Edinburgh officials are using new powers to effectively ban strip clubs in the Scottish capital, following claims they objectify and harm women, with the city’s four existing venues told they must shut down by April next year.

The move has prompted a backlash from the venues, who are planning a legal challenge, and some of the women who work as strippers, who say they face being forced out of lucrative and flexible work.

However, Mandy Watt, the deputy leader of the Labour-run council, claimed the venues could remain open as long as women did not dance naked.

Sexual entertainment venues, which the ban applies to, are defined as places with live performances for profit and “for the sole purpose of sexual stimulation of the audience”.

This is likely to mean that having scantily-clad but not naked dancers performing the same routines would not be enough to escape the ban, and suggests they would have to incorporate elements of dances that were not designed to be sexually appealing.

“Dancers are not workers,” Ms Watt said. “It’s not work. They are performers and it is not in the council’s gift to confer workers’ rights on them. Most are self-employed.

“I understand concerns about people losing jobs but the venues could apply to stay open. All they need to do is not insist on women dancing naked. They don’t need to do that to operate.

“I believe the ban was the right decision because these clubs disempower women,” she added.

Edinburgh council voted in March to set the maximum number of sexual entertainment venues at zero. Councillors rejected proposals to set the limit at four, meaning no more would be able to open but those that already existed could continue operating.

If a legal challenge is not successful, it would be the death knell for the city’s infamous “pubic triangle”, where there are three strip clubs within close proximity to each other.

Campaigners who called for the venues to be shut down claimed there was a link between strip clubs and the abuse, rape and murder of women because they promoted the objectification of women. However, Ms Watt’s comments caused a backlash from sex workers, with a union representing strippers also planning a legal challenge to the council ban.

Georgie, a dancer in the city, told the

‘She is doing nothing but pushing women into poverty and taking away their freedom of choice’

Edinburgh Evening News that stripping was “no different” to other jobs, which people did to earn money.

She challenged Ms Watt to suggest another job she could perform with the same “autonomy and freedom” and which she could “live off comfortably with a 12-hour week”.

She added: “Until she ensures that every dancer that will be affected by the loss of Edinburgh’s strip clubs has this same equal and matched opportunity for work, in an industry of their choos- ing, she is doing nothing but pushing women into poverty and taking away freedom of choice. She may believe she is doing the right thing, but she is at best misguided and at worst using personal bias and morality to speak over the lived experience of women.”

The SNP Government handed Scottish councils new powers to set a minimum number of such venues, after officially classifying stripping as a “form of violence against women and girls”.

Nicola Sturgeon has backed councils who want to use the powers to ban venues, claiming the “dignity and treatment of women” must be respected.