Last week my husband was researching nearby strip clubs for a friend's bachelor party. He noted that the dress code for one club was "business casual." This struck me as odd. A dress code? For a strip club?
When I asked him about it, he told me that the dress code was to help deter riff-raff; this gave the bouncers the discretion to oust anyone who may potentially cause trouble or compromise the integrity of the establishment.
Um, what?
Setting aside my general disapproval of my husband watching other women take off their clothes, I marvel at the industry in general. Many people—mostly feminists—assert that these institutions degrade women. Really, it is the women who take advantage of the men: they are able to elicit many, many dollars from their customers by appealing to the sex drive of man.
We Americans don't like to talk about sex; we hide it from our children by imposing TV Parental Guidelines and make sex something of a social taboo. Although it seems that television and movies have become smuttier in the past few decades, sex has always been a part of culture. Even the literary canon contains sex: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is wrought with sexual misconduct, and Shakespeare's greatest love story is really just a horny teenager begging for sex ("O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?" a love-starved Romeo pleads).
This is not to say that Chaucer or Shakespeare (or Joyce or Lawrence or...) has any less credibility as a writer. On the contrary, each of these authors—as well as the authors of today's TV shows and movies—portray the sexual drive that exists within man. The sophisticated air of a Shakespearean play or the glamorous sheen of HBO's Entourage is life's normal pairing with sex. It shouldn't surprise me, then, that we attempt to masquerade a "Gentleman's club" as something more than a place that appeals to man's most basic instinct.
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