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Book Guy

I write it like I mean it, but mostly they just want my money.

Lap Dance Prices, Alfred North Whitehead, and Market Irrationality
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Lapper prices. Are they going up? AGAIN? Fucking what the fucking FUCK?

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So, are lap-dance prices rising? It looks like $40 for one song is becoming appropriate in some settings for some contexts. An interim measure of $35 is not unreasonable, so the market seems to suggest. The $20 lapper's days may be numer.

But. Do you remember every single goddamned time that lap-dance prices started going up, every single occasion that it happened, and JUST HOW GODDAMNED PISSED OFF you were about it?

I remember mainly the one big tectonic plate-shift of lapper pricing some time in around 1997 or so ... some cities earlier, some cities later; some clubs were exploitative or at least opportunistic early adopters of the new regime, and other clubs responded by being recalcitrant opportunistic exploiters of their competition's price hikes! Eventually, though, everybody made the change, and they've made it more or less permanent. Upwards.

By 1997 or so, I think, things had finally changed to the more expensive.

Up to the late 80s and early 90s, a lap-dance was an oddity and not the norm, to be had at a smaller number of certain "special" clubs which made up 50% or less of the total "burlesque" market out there, which consisted of variously named joints buildings centers clubs establishments venues etc. all of which provided women in stages of undress. Hence, up the the late 80s or early 90s, a lap-dance would cost about $10, though it might come in a pricing-packet bundle or it might require other outlay of funds for other amenities.

But then, by the late 90s, things had changed. Burlesque as a performance was long since dead, while sexual services and most "adult" establishments were growing more and more mainstream. Jazz bands and feather boas were no longer necessary. It started to look like every strip-club would soon offer SOME form of dancer-to-customer contact: a lap-dance or bed-dance or sweetheart-dance or just plain old "back room". Small city council jurisdictions across the country began ongoing battles with First Amendment Rights activists over how to curtail this lewd anti-social menace. By the end of the change-over, an official lap-dance would come to be established as lasting the length of ONE rock-song, at roughly 3.5 to 4.5 minutes; and it would cost $20, though it still might be assorted into pricing-packet bundles of one sort or another as of yore. And there really hadn't been much middle ground. Rather, BOOM! suddenly prices DOUBLED and they did so everywhere for everything lapper.

I think my recollection is roughly accurate at least for the cities which I frequented at that time -- mostly, Tampa and Toronto, and a little bit of Memphis and New Orleans and Detroit or points nearby. In 1988, it would have been $10 for maybe a five-minute "cuddle dance" on a couch at the side of a club. By 2000, it was pretty much guaranteed to be $20 for a one-rock-song lap-dance at the patron's chosen location, higher entry price for more privacy.

To me, the change from $10 to $20 was a radical game-changer. Before the change, I would just head on out to sample the party, like grabbing a few chicken wings at the buffet. It was easy to take what I wanted and to experience up to satiety. I got ENOUGH. Nobody could possibly have danced me into the ground, neither wallet-wise nor duration-wise, because the experience was generic and simple. Then after the change, I had to plan, to think, to goddamned care about what I did with my time, and therefore I had to choose how much. How much of EVERYTHING. I had to choose how much to drink of alcohol, or whether to drink at all; I had to pick which club to visit; I had to decide what to wear; I had to remember when I had last shaved my face (and my balls); I had to consider whether or not I lived in the same city as people who might recognize me at an "illicit adult establishment" and whether that would be bad for my workplace image. Worse, I had to select among the dancers. I had to "examine" each one for lap-dance viability, run them through an audition in the expensive "trial" pricing structures before heading to any potential longer session of bundled dances in a more private room, and so forth. It went from off-the-cuff to make-an-appointment-in-the-datebook, from whatever-floats-your-boat to there's-a-right-way-to-get-this-thing-organized-properly.

Yet I personally hadn't really gotten any poorer or richer during the change. The new price totally changed my ATTITUDE. By the way, it's no surprise to me to note, that the change happened just as the internet started to become mainstream. Girls and managers started to find out what other clubs and other cities were like and they started to be able to compare experiences, the pricing climbed to what the market would probably have tolerated for quite a long preceding time, and they could have raised the prices earlier except they just didn't have information, didn't know how to exploit the demand.

The change changed my MIND. My disposable income would easily keep up with the change, and the overall impact on my personal bottom line was perhaps still negligible. I invested the same amount of my total income, I spent the same amount of time on going out to strip clubs as compared to working out or seeing movies or attending church, I drank the same amount of alcohol (or non-alcohol). The cost of lappers didn't really impact those balances. Well, of course, I'm sure I would like to have all that spent money BACK, wouldn't we all? I would want it sitting in some Mutual Fund growing interest ever since that day that I had instead spent it, naturally. But I'd say exactly the same thing about any money I spent on vacations or expensive dinners at nice restaurants -- gee, if I could have it back, if I could go back in time. But we can't. Duh. So the expenses, for me, from before or after, at $10 or $20, neither made nor broke me, neither represented "good" or "bad" pricing in true neo-Liberal Free Market terms. I had little intrinsic sense of the value of a lapper, other than that price-point at which the market had evaluated it and therefore charged me for it. True Economics 101. But somehow, despite my agnosticism regarding any intrinsic worth that a lapper might have to me, I just could not mentally "justify" spending the larger amount of money. At $20, I suddenly felt like a lapper "had to be worth it" to be bought; I felt like I would keep in mind my expenditures; I felt like girls had really better KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING.

And yet, damnit, they DON'T. Lappers haven't gotten any better. Dancers haven't gotten any more skilled at them. The likelihood that, in my first lap-dance with a dancer who is otherwise a new acquaintance to me, her dancing will turn out to give me an excellent experience, or a miserable one, is still about the same likelihood. If I had to put numbers on it, I'd say it's roughly 60% likely, that I'll enjoy the lapper enough to say I don't regret it; another 15% or 20% likely that it will be so extremely wonderful that I'll want more more more from the same girl (i.e., that's a chance of about 1 in 4, ranging to 1 in 3, per individual dancer); and the remaining 20% to 25% likely (1 in 4 overall) that this will be the one only and last dance I ever have from her because she's lame. Before, at $10, those were the likelihoods; and now, after, at $20, those are still the likelihoods. This fact bothers me. More money for no more service. Drat. Fuckin' free market sux man.

Income has not necessarily increased for mongers appreciably over that time-period; I suppose for DANCERS it has, at least in terms of potential income per hour or per song? An average working dude has an income which reflects his status, education, skill, duration of tenure, value, negotiation, ethics, whatever, just the same. Salaries for PLs haven't gone up disproportionately, have they? The cost of doing lap-dance business has not significantly increased. In fact, I think it has partly decreased, given that the legality of the situation is more clear-cut and the mainstream social pressure to avoid it has been reduced. It costs the same, or less, to give lap dances. And the clients are not any richer than we were. But the prices have gone up.

So why is our higher expense not yielding higher levels of service? The pervasive nature of lappers, I suppose, is the explanation among the neo-Liberals. The damn spin-on-my-crotch things are taking place all over the map, every club, every county, all the patrons have heard about them and want them, it's become almost impossible to legislate against them and everyone knows it; therefore, it's become clear that there's a higher demand than was understood in the $10 era, right? That's what they'd say. And with more demand can be higher prices right? Demand up, all other things equal, prices up.

Well, but there's also more supply, in my opinion. More girls are willing to do lapper dances, partly because it's more self-evident that the action isn't an illegal activity; partly because, hey, everyone's doing it, there's less social censure against it. Many many more clubs offer the lap-dance experience. In fact, I think more clubs EXIST, are IN BUSINESS at all, than before. And by the way, it's an unlimited resource, this thing called pussy; they keep making more 18 year old girls, and last time I looked, every single one of them had an 18-year-old body, not a year older! How on earth can a perpetual, unlimited resource be in SHORT supply? Young girls are reckless, and are busy one-upping one another in the looks department, and they always will be. There's never going to be a dearth of dancers, only a dearth of clubs or a dearth of jurisdictions that allow clubs with lap-dances. So far, the First Amendment Activists have driven the market's supply side well toward favoring the mongers by eliminating that threat. Infinitely more dancers, more clubs, more opportunity, less restriction, this all means much more supply. Prices should go down, right?

So, we must engender competition to lower prices. We can cause them to drop, I suppose, would be our natural and necessary reply. I guess. TUSCL would be a good place to start. Rise up, brothers in chairs! Brothers on sofas, in back rooms, behind thinly-veiled curtains of VIP! Join in solidarity, to demand what is our God-given right, to a full-service fair accord in which lap-dances are not exorbitantly priced! I don't exactly see that this will ever come to fruition. In fact, if anything, prices seem to be on the verge of going UPWARDS again. What the fuck? Now $35 at some of the higher-end clubs, and $40 is pretty much the norm on weekends in the big cities.

Too much, I sometimes think. They haven't priced me out of the market due to my lack of funds. They're priced me out of the market due to their lack of respect. It's not that I can't afford it, or that I make different choices with my money. Often I withdraw the same old amount, absent-mindedly, and then just don't happen to go to a club to spend it. I'm not "thinking with my feet." I'm just wondering why anyone would WANT that. I really don't feel it's sensible (I suppose this means, I AM thinking with my feet, I admit it) to spend more on a single rock-song's worth of lap dancing than I would on an ENTIRE DAY of out-of-the-house dining. I think of three to four minutes of a girl gyrating on my willy with her butt and coochie as ... well, as not a big deal; it's an untrained, non-trade, non-unionized, off-the-cuff, can-do-it-at-any-time-of-day-or-night, requires no infrastructure, is not a liability concern, has no HIPPAA compliance mandate, toss-off purchase. Like getting that Snickers bar at the gas station while paying for my gasoline: nothing I need, something I probably cannot be said even to WANT, merely something I happened to open my wallet for, something I would just as well do without as do with. An impulse purchase, no value added to my life, neither necessary nor durable nor staple nor idiosyncratically exotic.

Exotic? Is a lap-dance actually a LUXURY service? I don't think so. It fits that sector, according to the classical economist, I suppose. But then he quotes Maslow on the hierarchy of needs and puts the drive for reproduction at the top of the list, which of course is inherently one major cause of any hetero male's interest in a lapper, right? He's contradicting himself, this economist.

No, lappers are "fun money" income. My impression is, that just as McDonald's jobs were never DESIGNED to be longer-term income for longer-term employees, for the permanent American under-class of dope-stupid brain-deads who won't finish High School, similarly, lapper services are not DESIGNED to be the full means of support for single mothers. McDonald's employees are SUPPOSED to be high-school kids who stil live at home, use mom and dad's car on the weekends, and are learning the meaning of an honest day's work for an honest dollar, right? The market for pricing, of the burger or of their wages, is not entirely a free market neo-liberal phenomenon. We giving them money because it incentivizes their education, see what I mean? As the economist would whine, there should be no minimum wage for a bunch of high school kids who don't need or want the job. To the contrary, if we let Democrats and other Socialists unionize them and drive up the minimum wage for burger-flippers, what we're doing is crediting the entire fast-food industry with the capacity to operate as though it were the same as the Life Insurance sector, replete with product managers and investment oversight boards and a right to tax-break consideration when they provide meaningful infrastructure investment, right?

Similarly, we should not give the lap-dance industry that type of credit. A hot chick is hot because of no thing she ever did. Her ability at a lapper could motivate me to pay her more, because of value added, but the industry doesn't guarantee me that she will have the requisite level of skill (see above, dance quality is not improving, in the aggregate, despite increased prices and even in the face of grossly inflated supply). Her level of education, like the McDonald's burger flipper, is really the central question here. To me, as a patron, if she wants $35 a dance, I'm going to have to decide whether her Big Mac is worth it or not. In a truly free market, in which the consumer (demand) works as hard as the producer (supply), there would be give-and-take. Groups of mongers would refuse to pay; enclaves of low pricing would pop up, with opportunistic dancers and club managers taking advantage of their competition's hiked prices by lowering their own. The market would fluctuate, and reach fair equilibrium. But we don't have that situation, mongers are unlikely to balk at higher prices (see above, I don't exactly see that this will ever come to fruition), consequently we're supporting an inflated price structure. To put it in neo-Liberal terms, we're paying the price of our own stupidity. So, the purchase just looks stupider and stupider, and the consumer grows more and more alienated from the interaction.

It can't really be said that the dancers are an intelligent market participant, in the aggregate. They go out, they take what they can get, they dance the night away, grinding on crotches if they get $100 profit at the end of the night or $500. In fact, the indeterminacy of their night's worth of income is one factor that argues strongly in favor of their failure to be a truly "rational" economic actor. They don't make a decision on the basis of the cost (in their case, the negative cost; the income). They can't, because they can't KNOW it. Rather, they are ADDICTED to it. They're hooked on the adrenalin and the ease of having money for "nothing but partying" and the sales-pitch nature of the situation. Every dancer who needs more money, promptly reads off of single girl who made more money than her, the clear message of, "You must just not be hot enough." The absence of rational economic decision-making on their part, and perhaps on our part too, makes this a woffly weeply market that makes little sense. Drama, prices, coolness, adolescent kissing games on the basement sofa, can we really say that the "market will bear" a price increase? I don't think so. Because I don't think there IS a market for lap-dances.

I mean, sure, viewed from a long distance away, of course there is. Neo-Liberal and classical economists will show you that the mere fact of it taking place is enough to say that something is working like a market, and I do agree. But I think the thing that is being bought and sold is absolutely not lap-dances. It makes much more sense to consider it as a market of self-esteem, or of cojones, mojo, some sort of "intrinsic" value that we humans place upon ourselves and place upon other humans. If you flip-flip all the above analysis, and stop thinking about price-per-service, dollar outlay for a lap-dance, maybe it makes a little bit more sense.

At least, it does to me. When I think, "Hey, why is it exactly that I don't want to pay $35, I probably don't want to pay $20, but I'm OK with paying $10," and the thing I'm buying is something that is essentially useless to me, I wonder what kind of brain I have. A luxury or unnecessary good, yet I have an emotional need to evaluate it at a certain "reasonable" level? You can't buy a luxury goods or services with "reason." The market for luxury has no reason. Nobody ever owned a Lamborghini "reasonably." It doesn't admit of rational economic actors. A Lamborghini doesn't travel any faster than the latest BMW or look any better than a classic Cadillac or, if you get drunk and puke in the Lamborghini, it doesn't smell any better than a mini-van after your kid has puked in it. (Worse, in fact, probably.) Lap-dances the same -- there is very little "rational" economic activity going on there. That's because we aren't buying lap-dances.

So, when I look at my emotional investment, what I see is, a need to evaluate myself highly. At $35 a song, a dancer is saying to me, "You're a PL and all I see is a dollar sign. I'm a Hoover, I will vacuum your wallet, have a nice day, this is an impersonal interaction. Pay. Oh wait, forgot, have to dance. Here (gyrate gyrate) tah dah, ten-second dance, now pay." Insulting. At $20 a song, I'm feeling like, "Well, take it or leave it mister, I'm sure someone else here will pay that much." And I like to be able to prove I'm not a PL, just for the novelty of it, you know. Once in a while, take my own life by the balls, be in charge, decide what I want and reject some things that I don't want. At $10, a dancer is saying to me, "I hope you like me. Please approve of me?" I like this, but it does smack of a little bit of desperation. She needs to make the sale, and therefore she engages in actions which will bring it about. Improving her skills; becoming personable; losing weight; appearing properly attractive. At $35 a song, she is no longer motivated to do so, because she knows that the likelihood of income is not seriously improved by her instigation of any improvement regiment. At $35, her being a bitchy cunt to ten men will still run nine of them off, but it will also net enough money from the tenth to make up for the lost nine. Whereas, at $10, she has her destiny in her own hands. Well, most of it; her tits are in my hands; and I suppose her tits are part of her destiny, aren't they? She needs OUR approval as much as we need hers. At $10, it feels to me like she asks us to approve of the transaction.

Problem is, of course, we go to strip clubs because we don't otherwise get females to do that. The reason this market is skewed, and the commodity waffles among self-esteem, lap services, the sex industry, and just plain old sales, is that one of the items that's being bought and sold is, in fact, the CAPACITY for market participation. It's like sales forces buying and selling salespeople from one another. Because the average PL lacks the capacity to woo (in other words, to NEGOTIATE) for himself the fact that (adequately hot, adequately apealing, adequately young) woman into lying in his bed and approving of him, he goes about finding other ways to get his hands on her tits. I do this, you do this, we all do this, PL or not. That much is free market. But then, the FACT of being good or bad at negotiation is, in itself, an indicator of market status. So, there's a self-referential circle going on. The PL lacks what he seeks; sure, we know that. But also, the lack of it causes him to be poor at seeking at. A double-whammy. Thus, the dancer is free to double-exploit.

If you know your Whitehead, here's a theory, a propounded but perhaps profound metaphor: we are the set of all sets. The sex industry, and in particular the mainstream-most part of it, that is, the pictures of semi-naked girls who advertise underwear in the newspapers and magazines, and who grind on our laps at strip clubs, is self-referential. When you buy a car, you need some degree of negotiation skills, but you are not BUYING the very act of negotiating between yourself and a salesperson. When you buy even the nicest Lamborghini, you may get a high price or a low price depending to some extent on your own negotiation skills, but you will absolutely not be able to say, after the interaction, that you have become a better negotiator by merit of owning a Lamborghini. Aside from the small lesson of experience that you get from that one interaction, you gain no salesman points. Study enough of them, sure, you can learn. But mostly, it's an engine, tires, and an expensive chassis which you have bought.

To the contrary, when you buy a lapper, you buy negotiation. You not only get the service that you have purchased. You also get the sense that you are now better at buying that service. Why is this? Well, because otherwise there would be a much more rational market for lap-dance services. Unlimited supply would dictate a rather low price; flagging demand would lower that price; any sensible competition among dancers would further lower it. The market doesn't seem to act that way. Therefore, I conclude, the thing which we are selling is not lap-dance services, but rather, self-esteem, of the subtle form that I would call self-reference. Getting a lap-dance causes the provider (the dancer) or manufacturer (her mother?) to think that a negative has taken place -- she has gyrated, offered a service, reduced her value by performing actions which otherwise she would not do. She brings almost no expertise, but she raises demand by being remarkably visually appealing. The desire for her is there, so the demand for her is there. But it is evanescent. Hotter girl walks by, and monger watches her instead. Super-hottie walks by, and I've been known to break off halfway through a song with a half-hearted ugg and chase down her much more desirable competition! And guess what? The ugg seldom complains. She knows she should not get the money. Intrinsically, inherently, sub-consciously, she is already aware that it would HURT her more to chase after her former customer to demand that he pay for what he partially received, in the face of her knowledge that he desires someone else more than he desires her.

Hence, she is not selling the service. Else she would naturally demand money for it. (Some still do, of course. Maybe most. The market is still fairly powerful in her mind. But my example of how it HURTS her, merely makes the point that there's a sub-conscious twinge of regret, a tie to something other than price of service paid for that service.) Instead, to her, she is BUYING OUR APPROVAL, and we, too, are buying her ability to give us her approval.

That's why the prices need to be within a reasonable range, and that's why most of us can probably invest "emotional" value in lap-dance pricing. Some high prices are "too" high, even though the service is supposedly just a luxury. Some low prices may be "too" low as well, demeaning to seller and to buyer, reducing the transaction to something unpleasant. I don't want just any old ass to grind on my crotch. I want That One Special Girl to do so, and I want to make sure I know she's special, and I want her to know that I know, and she wants me to know that I know that she knows, and so on and on and so forth, self-referentially impossible to escape the cycle.

Whitehead explained all of this in his Principia Mathematica. In this book, his grand scheme was to come up with a mathematics of everything. He (and his student Bertrand Russel) did come up with a mathematics of a lot of things. But of everything? No, they ultimately decided that would be impossible. Why? Because there could never be a complete mathematics OF mathematics. Any system which has to reference itself, also has to contradict itself. They proved this assertion through the now-famous example of the "set of all sets." (I won't go into the reasoning. This paragraph has enough proper nouns related to it, for you to easily find the reasoning by means of Google and Wikipedia.) Strip-clubbing, like much of pornography and the adult-services industry, is inextricably self-referential. We don't buy in order to have the product. We buy, or sell, in order to approve of ourselves, and in turn to gain the knowledge of another person offering us their approval, and in turn to know that she knows that we know, and so on. Thus, it CANNOT act like a rational market commodity. It MUST have some degree of extremely irrational behavior.

Such as, at present, the fact that prices go up even though demand is rather small, costs are already prohibitively high, and world-wide supply is demonstrably unlimited.

Next question, then, how do we stop this nefarious cycle? Just some thoughts. Yours also welcome.