VIP dances
clubdude
The Greater Detroit Area
I need some input with my question. One of the clubs I go to with separate VIP booths (also have a curtaian in front for privacy), has nude VIP dances. Is this the norm for private VIP dances, or are these dancers just freaks? Mind you I'm not complaining. The club is on the 8 Mile strip of Detroit.
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I believe it's because US courts grant more latitude to regulatory agencies - e.g., Michigan's Liquor Control Commission (LCC) - to restrict First Amendment rights of free expression than they grant to government as a whole. In other words, there are lot of things govt. can't ban citizens from doing legally as long as they're not in a licensed bar. Dancing without any clothes on before an adult audience being one. Perhaps Chitown or somebody could cite the Supreme Court cases that laid down the perameters of all this.
I know that still doesn't answer why even topless dancing isn't banned in bars. Well, in some states it is. They have to wear pasties, etc. Likewise, in some states, nude dancing in bars is allowed. Maybe it does come down to local politics.
Topless bars did not start up in the US until the late sixties around the same time as hippies, rock and roll, the sexual revolution and so on. At the time they all served alcohol. Then after some time they began to evolve into fully nude clubs. Once that happened the government decided that fully nude clubs were a bad thing and tried to close them down. The club owners fought back and took the case to the Supreme Court where it ruled that nude dancing was an expression of free speech and protected behavior under the First Amendment.
Some more time passed into the Eighties and the government was still unhappy with nude clubs so they took a different approach and decided to not allow any place with nude dancing to serve alcohol. Again the owner of the clubs took the matter to court and again it went all the way to the Supreme Court. This time the Supreme Court that under the 21st Amendment, this is the amendment that repealed prohibition, the states have the right to regulate activities where liquor is served. So instead of having one rule for the whole country there could now be thousands of different rules depending on what the individual local governments wanted to do.
At the time most governments went with the rule that with nude dancing no alcohol was allowed. If you wanted to serve alcohol then only topless dancing would be allowed. Keep in mind that this was the Eighties.
Enter the Nineties. Somewhere along the way the lap dance came about. Up until then it was look only and no touch. When lap dancing came about it was pretty much in the topless bars. This gave them a way to compete with the nude bars because just being able to serve alcohol was not getting the job done.
Now we are post 2000 and since the Eighties it has been left up to local governments to decide what is and is not allowed. So you end up with a complete mix of everything depending on the local area you are in.
So now you need to do your research because it literally varies from city to city. That is one of the things that makes this site such a valuable resource.
Some of the signal moments in this development, include (1) the mobilization of whole armies of young men for World War II, and the attendant perception on the part of the military that social policy which reduced the risk of communicable disease would be wise; (2) the puritanical return to "family values" and anti-sexual physical behavior of the 1950s, thanks largely to a national sense of the need to distinguish ourselves from the supposedly "godless" foreign threats of Soviet Russia and then mainland Communist China; (3) the sexual revolution, beginning roughly with Hugh Hefner and moving through the "free love" movement of the late 1960s, and the psychedelic "sex and consciousness raising" of the middle 1970s; (4) mass commercialization of home life behaviors; (5) mass entertainment media, such as the home video player, and eventually DVDs and the internet, which allowed smut to get to the bedroom "where it belonged"; (6) the new threats of AIDS and herpes, which suggested (rightly or wrongly?) to some of the more timid male participants that it was not worth it, to risk an activity which, in most earlier decades of the 20th Century, would have brought disease that caused no more than embarrassment with a private doctor, at worst; (7) the development of the birth control pill and other forms of genuinely effective, reliable contraception, which meant that (for a time at least) sexual experimentation wasn't perceived as a risk of pregnancy for women (though it still did require, and does require, that she be willing to suffer the judgment of sanctimonious public opinion); (8) my personal favorite, the rise of cross-state mostly-male sporting events and major trade shows and conferences, such as the Super Bowl, which until roughly the mid-1960s were events attended as much as 90% only by local inhabitants, who would therefore stick to the expectations of a local region and have familiar local observers on their backs; and, similarly, (9) the interstate highway and the private car, enabling american men to go to new different cities to play.
Just some fun stuff to think about. Sex is now a very common, very public obsession. Compared to 1922, we don't get laid half as much, it costs twice as much, and yet we talk about it four times as often, and see it in magazines and on television literally a thousand times as much. It's an atmosphere bred for frustration!