How To Be A Woman

Chapter 9




I Go Lap-dancing!




I have no idea what to wear to a strip club. It’s one of the biggest wardrobe crises of my life.

‘What are you wearing?’ I ask Vicky, on the phone.

‘Skirt. Cardigan,’ Vicky says, lighting a fag.

‘What shoes?’

‘Boots. Low heel.’

‘Oh, I was going to wear boots, low heel, too,’ I say. ‘We can both wear boots, low heel. That’s good. We’ll be matchy.’

Then a bad thought occurs to me. ‘Actually, maybe we shouldn’t both wear boots, low heel,’ I say. ‘If we look too matchy, people might think we’re an act. You know. Like a lesbian act. And try and touch us.’

‘No one would believe you’re a lesbian,’ Vicky sighs. ‘You’d make a terrible lesbian.’

‘I wouldn’t!’ I say, indignantly. This offends my ‘can do’ nature. ‘If I wanted, I could be a great lesbian!’

‘No you couldn’t,’ Vicky says. ‘You’re offensively hetero-sexual. You fancy Father Christmas. By no stretch of the imagination could Father Christmas be construed to have Sapphic androgyny. He wears Wellington boots indoors.’

I can’t believe Vicky is doubting my ability to be a lesbian, if I really wanted to be. She’s seen how versatile I can be on a night out. Once, when we went to Bournemouth, we blagged our way backstage of a performance of Run For Your Wife, and convinced Jeffrey Holland – Spike in Hi-de-Hi! – that we were prostitutes, just to see his reaction. He said ‘Blimey!’ in a very edifying manner. My capabilities are endless. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

‘Maybe I’ll wear trainers, instead,’ I say.

Vicky has asked me if I want to join her for a night out at Spearmint Rhino, on Tottenham Court Road. It’s the year 2000, and strip clubs – for so long regarded as the holding pen for the last few sad, sweaty f*cks on earth – have become acceptable again.

Britpop and Loaded have been all about the rediscovery the British working class’s monochrome tropes – pubs, greyhound racing, anoraks, football in the park, bacon sandwiches, ‘birds’ – and strip clubs come under this heading. ‘Ladettes’ now enjoy a night out in the classier strip clubs of the metropolis. Various Spice Girls have been pictured in strip clubs, smoking cigars and cheering the acts on. Zoe Ball and Sara Cox attended strip-club hen nights. Titty-bars are being marketed as an exciting, marginally loucher version of the Groucho Club – just somewhere for anyone who liked to start a night out at 1am.

Partly out of journalistic hunger to cover the phenomenon, and partly because newspaper editors are invariably excited by pictures of female hacks in a strip club, the Evening Standard have asked Vicky to go spend an evening in ‘The Rhino’, in order to see what all the fuss is about.

‘It’s against every single one of my feminist principles. These are arenas of abuse,’ I said, when she called.

‘The manager is giving us complimentary champagne all night,’ Vicky said.

‘I will meet you there at 9pm,’ I said, with all the dignity I could muster.


From the pavement outside, the club has an odd air. Looking through the doors, the place is covered in ornate gold mouldings, red walls and twinkling lights; it’s overdone, ersatz glamour looking like some kind of putative Titty Disneyland. As we hesitate on the wrong side of the rope banner, a couple of punters roll up, and are ushered inside by the bouncers.

I am amazed at how confident and untroubled they seem – not guilty at all. I would have presumed you would make some excuse for visiting a strip club – saying loudly, to the bouncers, ‘I am doing a collection, on behalf of the sick children,’ or, ‘Council. I’ve come to check your electrics,’ or, in a fake Mexican accent, ‘This Pret A Manger, yes?’

Instead, they walk in – slightly sweaty suits, slightly hawkish eyes – as if it’s perfectly normal to leave the office, then relax by paying very young women to reveal their labia. What a lovely social circle I have, I reflect, not for the first time. All of my male friends would be genuinely horrified to go to a strip club. They all wear cardigans, collect vinyl, and fetishise loose-leaf tea. They would never want to pay to see a stranger’s labia. Indeed, my boyfriend still says, ‘Thank you, that was very nice,’ after he’s seen my labia, and we’ve been together for four years.

‘This is like an AGM for Bad Husband Material,’ I say to Vicky, as we go in. ‘Everyone here has left a trail of sad girlfriends and wives.’


Still, the free champagne is very free, and we have a table, right down the front, by the catwalk – or ‘twat walk’, as Vicky renames it. For the first hour, we treat Spearmint Rhino like a pub, albeit one with the occasional distraction of some tits floating over our heads. One particularly enjoyable conversation about the imminent purchase of a new winter coat is interrupted by some buttocks suddenly arriving in our eye line but, to be fair, I’ve had this happen to me in a Wetherspoons before. After two hours, some of the ‘girls’ come over to chat, and, as is the way of all gatherings of women, we all start gossiping: Vicky in her cardi, me in my jacket, the girls in diamante bras and itchy-looking thongs.

By 1am, we’re pretty tipsy, have been given a private dance that has left us both quite discombobulated – this chick has an arse like heaven – and we’ve been regaled with an amazing story about a very famous TV presenter and habitué of the club, which ends with the line, ‘So his wife found out he had herpes – on Christmas Day!’

We are in our booth rofling away, thinking, ‘This is just like the Groucho, but with real twats, instead of metaphorical ones. This is actually OK.’

The PR comes over to us.

‘I’m off home,’ she says, pulling on her coat. ‘You ladies are welcome to stay, if you want.’

I look down the neck of the champagne bottle. There’s still a good two glasses left.

‘We’ll stay!’ I say, brightly. ‘My personal motto is: never walk away from a loaded bottle.’

The PR leaves us to carry on our evening unchaperoned. Cheerfully topping up our glasses, I’m just about to launch into a lengthy anecdote about the one time I offered to strip for a lover – sadly ruining the mood by accidentally treading in a bowl of porridge I’d left by the bed that morning – when two bouncers approach our table.

‘Evening, constables,’ I say, merrily.

‘It’s time for you to go, ladies,’ they say, looking very stern and unyielding.

‘I assure you, I have only had a few weak ales,’ I said, slightly cross-eyed. ‘I’m perferly fine to remain here.’

‘Time to go,’ the bouncer said, pulling my chair back from the table. His buddy does the same to Vicky. We are hustled out in less than a minute, in a flurry of coat-grabbing and indignation.

On the pavement, we are outraged.

‘Why? Why are we being thrown out?’ we screech. ‘We’re simply taking a wry, sideways look at stripping! We’re COLUMNISTS! We’re QUALIFIED for this! We’re BONA FIDE! We’ve BEEN ON RADIO FOUR!’

‘We know your game,’ they said. ‘You’re prostitutes.’

Apparently, we find out – during the next five minutes of increasingly shrill inquiry – ‘rough-looking’ Russian prostitutes often frequent the club, picking up trade from clients whose taste is for disappointingly ‘normal’-looking women rather than the strippers. This is what the bouncer is convinced we are. He knows we aren’t strippers – so we must, then, ergo, be prostitutes. Vicky, in her cardigan, and me, in my trainers.

In his world, woman-type runs on a binary system: stripper, whore. There aren’t any other kind of women. Certainly not 20-something columnists hoping to milk 1,200-words out of the event, whilst caning the free bar for all it was worth.

Once again, I was apt to dwell on what a thunderingly inappropriate and rude relic the strip club is.

‘I TOLD you they were arenas of abuse,’ I said to Vicky, as we sat in a doorway, smoking a fag.

‘But we’ll both be able to get a column out of it,’ she replied, eminently reasonably.

And so, really, we were not losers at all.

But, of course, in a wider sense, we were. For – given the context of the entirety of history up until about yesterday – the idea of clubs where women take off their clothes in front of men is stupendously … impolite.

After all, history is very much ‘99 per cent women being subjugated, disenfranchised and sexually objectified’. Women have – there’s no two ways about this – really been shafted by the simple fact that men fancy them. We can see that men’s desire for women has, throughout history, given rise to unspeakable barbarity. It’s caused terrible, terrible things to happen, because men have been the dominant force, with no rules or checks on their behaviour. It’s no exaggeration to refer to ‘sexual tyranny’, and ‘total bullshit’. Within living memory in this country, men could rape their wives: women were not seen as a separate sexual entity, with a right of refusal. Germany only criminalised the practice in 1997; Haiti, in 2006. It’s still legal in – amongst other places – Pakistan, Kenya and the Bahamas. Even in countries where it has been criminalised, there is an unwillingness to actually prosecute: Japan and Poland have been particularly criticised by human rights organisations for their low conviction rates. There are large parts of the world where women are – with either the explicit or non-explicit sanction of the state – deemed little more than souped-up sex toys for men.

In this context, then, it’s obvious that a lap-dancing club is as incongruous in a modern society as a ‘Minstrel Show!’ or adverts for ‘Jew Beating – Sticks ￡1!’

Of course, the big difference here is that if a white man suggested starting a cleaning agency that only employed black cleaners, dressed up in plantation clothing, and being excessively cowed and deferential to their employers, the entire world would be up in arms.

‘What are you playing at?’ they would shout. ‘We’re not going to bring back a “light entertainment” version of slavery! Not even if it’s for a “social experiment” reality documentary on Channel 4!’

But what are strip clubs, and lap-dancing clubs, if not ‘light entertainment’ versions of the entire history of misogyny?

Any argument in their favour is fallacious. Recently, it has behoved modish magazines to print interviews with young women, who explain that their career as strippers is paying their way through university. This is thought to pretty much end any objections against strip clubs, on the basis that, look!, clever girls are doing it – in order to become middle-class professionals with degrees! Ipso facto Girl Power!

For myself, I can’t believe that girls saying ‘Actually, I’m paying my university fees by stripping’ is seen as some kind of righteous, empowered, end-of-argument statement on the ultimate morality of these places. If women are having to strip to get an education – in a way that male teenage students are really notably not – then that’s a gigantic political issue, not a reason to keep strip clubs going.

Are we really saying that strip clubs are just wonderful charities that allow women – well, the pretty, thin ones, anyway: presumably the fatter, plainer ones have to do whatever it is all the male students are also doing – to get degrees? I can’t believe women supposedly in further education are that stupid.

One doesn’t want to be as blunt as to say, ‘Girls, get the f*ck off the podium – you’re letting us all down,’ but: Girls, get the f*ck off the podium – you’re letting us all down.


But you know what? It’s not just a question of girls letting other girls down. Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here. There’s no self-expression or joy in these joints – no springboard to self-discovery, or adventure, like any decent night out involving men, women, alcohol, and taking your clothes off. Why do so many people have a gut reaction against strip clubs? Because, inside them, no one’s having fun.


Instead, people are expressing needs (to earn money, to see a woman’s skin) in pretty much the most depressing way possible. Sit in one of these places sober – as Vicky and I did initially; it took almost SEVEN MINUTES for the first bottle of complimentary champagne to get to the table – and you see what’s going on here. The women hate the men. The stripper’s internal monologue as she peels off her thong for the twelfth time that day would make Patti Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’ look like ‘Kiss Me’ by Sixpence None The Richer.

And the men – oh, are you any gentler or happier? You cannot put your hand on your heart and say – as the music starts up, and she moves towards you – that you have kind feelings towards these women. No man who ever cared for or wanted to impress a woman made her stand in front of him and take her knickers off to earn her cab fare home. You spend this money on nothing at all – addiction to porn and strip clubs are the third biggest cause of debt in men. Between 60 and 80 per cent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse. This place is a mess, a horrible mess. Every dance, every private booth, is a small unhappiness, an ugly impoliteness: the bastard child of misogyny and commerce.

On the high street, a strip club looks like a tooth knocked out of a face.

In 2010, Iceland – with a lesbian prime minister, and a parliament which is 50 per cent female – became the first country in the world to outlaw strip clubs for feminist, rather than religious, reasons.

‘I guess the men of Iceland will have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale,’ Gudrun Jonsdottir, who campaigned for the law change, said.

I don’t think that’s an idea that will do men, their bank balances or the women they come across anything but good. Men don’t HAVE to see tits and fannies. They won’t DIE if they don’t have access to a local strip joint. Tits aren’t, like, Vitamin D or something. Let’s take our women off the poles.


But pole-dancing classes, on the other hand, are fine. I know! Who would have thought! There seems to be no logic to it! I know a lot of feminists regard them as a sign of The End Days – evidence that the world is now being run by some misogyny Illuminati, intent on weakening our girl-children with strip-ercise classes at the local gym, 11.30am – but that’s clearly not the case.

I mean, on a practical level, they’re totally useless: there aren’t any poles in nightclubs, girls. You’re going to spend hundreds of pounds learning all these ‘sexy’ moves, and then never have anywhere to show them off in public, save the grab-pole on the bus. If you think that’s a fair exchange for all your time and money, then best of British.

But practical considerations to one side, there’s nothing contrary to the rules of strident feminism in gyms and dance classes offering pole-dancing lessons, and women attending them. In a world of infinite possibility, why not learn to hang off a pole by your pelvic floor? It probably will be more useful than learning Latin. For starters, I bet it’s incredibly useful if, when decorating, you need to roller a tricky corner on a landing. And who’s to say that, in the event of an Apocalypse, being able to take off your knickers in syncopation to ‘Womanizer’ by Britney Spears won’t make the difference between the quick and the dead?

Just as pornography isn’t inherently wrong – it’s just some f*cking – so pole-dancing, or lap-dancing, or stripping, aren’t inherently wrong – it’s just some dancing. So long as women are doing it for fun – because they want to, and they are in a place where they won’t be misunderstood, and because it seems ridiculous and amusing, and something that might very well end with you leaning against a wall, crying with laughter as your friends try to mend the crotch-split in your leggings with a safety pin – then it’s a simple open-and-shut case of carry on, girls. Feminism is behind you.

It’s the same deal with any ‘sexy dancing’ in a nightclub – any grinding, any teasing, any of those Jamaican dancehall moves, where the women are – not to put too fine a point on it – f*cking the floor as if they need to be pregnant by some parquet tiles by midnight. Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on.

And, frankly, from a spectator’s point of view, it’s better than watching people line dancing; or doing The Stonk.

*

For exactly the same reason, we shouldn’t have a problem with burlesque – lap-dancing’s older, darker, cleverer sister. Yes, I know: it’s stripping in front of men, for cash. Given the patriarchy and all that, I can see how many would say, ‘But that is like eschewing Daffy Duck and then loving George Costanza from Seinfeld. They are both essentially the same thing.’

But, of course, they are not. The difference between a burlesque artist putting on a single show, in front of hundreds, and a stripper on an eight-hour shift, going one on one, is immense: the polarity between being a minstrel for a bored monarch, playing whatever song the monarch asks for, and U2 playing Wembley Stadium.

With burlesque, not only does the power balance rest with the person taking their clothes off – as it always should do, in polite society – but it also anchors its heart in freaky, late-night, libertine self-expression: it has a campy, tranny, fetish element to it. It’s not – to use the technical term – ‘an easy wank’.

Additionally, despite its intense stylisation of sexuality, it doesn’t have the oddly aggressive, humourless air of the strip club: burlesque artists sing, talk and laugh. They tell jokes – something unthinkable in the inexplicably po-faced atmosphere of a lap-dancing club, which treats male/female interactions with all the gravitas of Cold War-era meetings between Russia and the USA, rather than a potential hoot. Perhaps as a direct consequence, burlesque artists treat their own sexuality as something fabulous and enjoyable – rather than something bordering on a weapon, to be ground, unsmilingly, into the face of the sweaty idiot punter below.

Because, most importantly, burlesque clubs feel like a place for girls. Strip clubs – despite the occasional presence of a Spice Girl, ten years ago – do not. Watching good burlesque in action, you can see female sexuality; a performance constructed with the values system of a woman: beautiful lighting, glossy hair, absurd (giant cocktail glasses; huge feather fans) accessories, velvet corsets, fashionable shoes, Ava Gardner eyeliner, pale skin, classy manicures, humour, and a huge round of applause at the end – instead of an uncomfortable, half-hidden erection, and silence.

Burlesque artists have names – Dita Von Teese, Gypsy Rose Lee, Immodesty Blaize, Tempest Storm, Miss Dirty Martini – that make them sound like sexual super-heroes. They explore sexuality from a position of strength, with ideas, and protection, and a culture that allows them to do, creatively, as they please. They are dames, broads and women – rather than the slightly cold-looking girls you see in strip clubs. Their personas embrace the entire spectrum of sexuality – fun, wit, warmth, inventiveness, innocence, power, darkness – rather than the bloodless aerobics of the podium.

Do you know what the final rule of thumb is with strip clubs? Gay men wouldn’t be seen dead in Spearmint Rhino – but you can’t move for them in a burlesque joint. As a rule of thumb, you can always tell if a place is culturally healthy for women when the gays start rocking up. They are up for glitter, filth and fun – rather than a factory-farm wank-trigger with – and I can say this now – very acidic house champagne.