Strip clubs and the Current Legal Environment
docsavage
Indiana
Thursday, March 23, 2017 12:00 AM
I've seen many comments at strip club patron websites involving the decline of strip clubs. By this is meant declining numbers of clubs, visitors to clubs, and very attractive girls working in clubs.This is something I've seen myself as a twenty year veteran of Indianapolis strip clubs. Many of the comments I see involve the girls and customers having other options with the rise of the internet and sex related sites. I agree on that but I also think there are underlying societal trends as expressed in the legal environment that is influencing the decline.
I'll use as a concrete example three clubs on the east side of Indy on Pendleton Pike: Babes, PT'S and Harem House. As a comparison I'll take the local medium priced restaurant business. Strip clubs and medium priced restaurants both have a clientele with at least some money. Twenty years ago when these three clubs opened this was a fairly middle class part of town. On a Friday or Saturday night these three clubs were packed with local customers with money to spend. This opportunity to make money drew attractive dancers into the clubs to work. During this same period there were also several medium priced restaurants in the area that also were crowded on a Friday or Saturday night and made good profits.
Like most cities, over the ensuing twenty years middle class people slowly moved further out and were replaced in the area by poorer people. The business in the local restaurants slowly declined and they closed down, one by one. Only the cheap fast food places survived. While this happened, many new restaurants opened up a little further out of town where the customers were now living. The local strip clubs saw a decline in customers with money to spend too. Unlike the restaurants, though, they didn't shut down with new replacements opening up where the customers now were. A lot of their remaining business came from guys driving in from the suburbs. The numbers of these guys have declined over time. I used to live near these clubs. I moved further away but because of previously living near them and them being fairly good quality, I developed a strip club habit. A younger guy in a suburb now will be less likely to develop the strip club habit because there are no suburban clubs by him like there was for me twenty years ago. He'll have to make a longer drive. If he makes that drive to these three clubs, he'll see it's an area that isn't very safe. A lot of the customers in the club will be low class local hoodlum types he doesn't feel safe around. After being open for 20 years, the clubs will be a little run down. With fewer guys with money to spend, the clubs will attract less attractive dancers so the girls there won't look very good.
This doesn't create a very tempting environment that will draw in customers and get them to drive in. Now the question is, why didn't the clubs follow the restaurant example I mentioned above? Unlike restaurants, there have been increasing legal roadblocks set up to thwart new clubs opening. There hasn't been a new club open locally here for twenty years. The local government uses a combination of licensing laws and zoning laws to block new clubs. A new club tried to open in the suburban Castleton area. Zoning laws were used to shut it down. A local Mexican nightclub started having strippers to serve the growing Mexican immigrant population. It was raided by the police and shut down for not having a license. "We don't need no stinkin' license." Yes, you do. Can you get a license? No way Jose! The existing clubs are also being hit with more regulations. The pasties police are more on the prowl, ready to fine girls with exposed nipples. Politicians respond to their constituents and this oppressive legal environment is going along with what the public wants. We've gone through three periods over the last sixty years. Up to the 1960's, women were seen as someone to be protected in a paternalistic way, with their choices restricted to housewife or a conservative traditional female field like nursing or elementary school teacher. They were also encouraged to keep their sexuality subdued. They were to dress and act conservatively. Then, with the first wave of feminism, there was a belief that women should be free to make choices about what careers to follow. This allowed women who wanted to be strippers to go in that field. When conservatives tried to shut down clubs or prevent them from opening, they were met with resistance for the first time by liberals and feminists.
Now, though, I think we've entered a second and much different wave of feminism. The current wave of feminism thinks women should be more like men and go in male career fields. Stripping is mostly a female field so women wanting to do that don't get support. Movies are made about black women becoming NASA mathematicians and being portrayed as heroic but no movie will be made portraying any black woman going into stripping as doing something worthwhile. Just imagine, if all the strippers were men then everyone would be agitating to let women do it too but that's not the case. Some feminists have even gone further and are now actively hostile to strip clubs. They involve women trying to please men and you don't want that. They involve men looking at and treating women as sex objects and that's politically incorrect. So now when the local bible thumping conservatives try to prevent new strip clubs from opening, they find themselves with liberal feminists joining them. These strange bedfellows are combining to shut down the strip club industry and are slowly succeeding.
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