Why do men keep on lapping it up?
THOSE who think the country is in a terminal moral decline should take heart from the government's recently hostile approach to lapdancing.
Under new rules, every lapdancing club will have to apply for a licence as a 'sex encounter' venue, which will give local people more power to get them shut down.
The stricter rules have been welcomed by campaigners in Dewsbury who object to the granting of a license for a new club which, according to the town's MP, could make Dewsbury a 'magnet for the sex industry'.
I've never been to a lapdancing club, and although I can't promise you'll never find me in one, I hope you never do.
I'd feel I'd let myself down if awoke one morning and the memory of being there came rushing back at me through my hangover. (I can't conceive of circumstances in which I end up in a lapdancing club which don't also involve several principle-eroding drinks).
The new rules have responded to a proliferation of clubs in recent years. There are now about 300 of them.
The industry has achieved this by changing the image of lapdancing. By hiking the prices they've filtered out the riff-raff.
So it has become a respectable form of entertainment, to the point that delegates to last year's Tory conference received vouchers for the Rocket Club in Birmingham.
Except it's not respectable, is it?
Feminist groups like the Fawcett Society complain that lapdancing clubs exploit women.
There's even evidence to suggest that the presence of lapdancing venues increases the frequency of sexual assaults.
And the men who go to these places are also exploited.
There's no accounting for taste - especially when it comes to sex - and it could be that some men get a masochistic thrill out of paying women to act like they fancy them.
Maybe such men can delude themselves. And I hesitate to puncture this bubble. Some of us need to fantasise just to get through the day.
But I'm not good enough at self-delusion. I'm all too aware of the fact that women don't, on the whole, offer to strip for me in public.
Handing over money for the privilege would make me feel, not powerful, but pathetic.
And the movies have done their bit to devalue lapdancing. I've seen too many gangster films in which the villain issues sinister threats in the foreground, while in the background, frustratingly out of focus, some babe gyrates around a pole.
And I've seen too many cop shows in which the cynical but decent detective is compelled, by a convenient contrivance of plot, to enter a lapdancing club and question some pouting vixen, glancing about with the weary disdain of a man who's seen it all before.
Lapdancing, then, is pretty uncool.
Maybe what turns me off it is not an objection to exploiting women, or to them exploiting me. Nor is it a reluctance to contribute to the process by which somewhere becomes a 'magnet for the sex industry'. It's fear of turning into a into a pathetic cliche. Life will find a way of doing that to most of us anyway. Why pay good money for the privilege?
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Wednesday 08 February 2012
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