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.
Here's an idea, why not ask in the club? Bartenders can often be a good source of information, especially if you visit often enough that they know you.
If the place serves alcohol then it is topless. Full nude bars can not serve alcohol. So if the girls are getting naked in the VIP room consider yourself lucky and enjoy. I wouldn't tell anyone else who works there what is going on you could get the dancer in trouble.
i agree that robofan has nailed it. I know that rules may vary from state to state but I think that, that is pretty much the standard rule. I know that the now closed Memphis Platinum Plus had a choice. Total nudity or alcohol.But not both. They chose to go with beer/wine and total nudity. Their sister club in Columbia SC went the other way. Full bar but topless only. Don't let that fool you. I have gotten more pussy in the SC club than I ever did in Memphis.
In Detroit the rule is topless. In reality some dancers will go nude in the VIP, often for tips or as an intro to other things. Everyone keeps this quiet because cops will track conduct and raid.
I have been going to my favorite SC club for 8 years. I have never seen a cop in there. My favorite dancers have told me that of the only few raids it has only been when they have been looking for drug violations. I know of course that this is totally dependent on local policy.
Going off topic a little can someone please explain to me the reason(s) why alcohol is usually served in topless clubs but not nude? As a Limey I can't understand it?
londonguy, it is just local politics. Like no whore houses in Las Vegas.(legal in most NV counties) The casino owners do not want the competition for your money. Why do Limey's like beer at room temps? UGH!
Londonguy, I've always heard that the linking of alcohol and nudity goes back to regulatory attitudes upon the repeal of Prohibition in the mid-1930s. The states were very determined to keep organized crime from regaining the stranglehold they had during Prohibition on liquor sales and distribution. So, they used their licensing authority to clamp down on any activity that could conceivably be associated with vice rackets controlled by the mob - gambling, drugs, prostitution. It wasn't intended to moralistically protect patrons from sin as much as it was a heavy-handed tactic in a govt. vs. mob turf war. Originally, at least.
chandler, I can believe what you said but it still does not answer the question. Topless only clubs are still sexually oriented. So why can they serve alcohol but totally nude clubs cannot?
Let me further add. It has been many years since I was in a Vegas or CA club but if my memory is still clear, totally nude clubs could still serve alcohol.
(Re your next to last post) You're right, Shadowcat. I explained how alcohol licensing authorities got into the business of regulating what kind of adult entertainment is allowed, but not why they draw the line at showing tits but not pussies.
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.
Thanks for that Shadowcat and Chandler, I understand what you are saying and can see the thinking behind it to a point. I would have thought though that in the 21st century things might have moved along a little. Shadowcat, about the beer, you are talking about what we call 'real ale', we also have lager served chilled.
Depends on where in CA. In San Diego, topless is a full bar, but fully nude is juice bar only. And all dances are air dances or very strict 1-way contact for the most part. This is why San Diego sucks for SCs, and most people go to Vegas or TJ to get their fix.
Here in LA, topless (21yo+) is full bar and nude (18yo+) is non-alcohol. Same in Vegas, with one exception - The Palomino. It is the only nude club in the greater Vegas area that is allowed to serve alcohol. I'm not sure why...I suspect it is due to an old grandfathering rule of some sort.
Londonguy here is a little strip club history for you. This is pretty general and apples to most places but there is always exceptions.
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.
It can get confusing keeping it all straight, but I've been to places in Illinois, Kansas, South Dakota, and Wisconsin which have both nude dancing and serve alcohol. Then there is Iowa, which has nude dancing, but no alcohol served, but since places where nude dancing takes place are, by the legal definition, theaters, alcohol is permitted so everyone brings their own. Like they said above, it all depends on the local jurisdiction.
I like Robofan's intelligent discussion of the history and development of the problem. I'd further suggest, that there's another social dynamic going on, above and beyond the ones he mentions. That is, that the sex industry has become more and more "public" since roughly the mid-1950s in the USA. Prior to that time, there were tolerated (though technically illegal) brothels in most medium-sized or larger cities; and many of those establishments perfectly reasonably also sold (or served free!) drinks, offered titillating floor-shows for the customers who were waiting (to help them choose a girl!), or provided literally no amenities (depending on price and quality of establishment). Slowly, due to a set of rather unrelated developments, sexual services became more and more heavily distrusted by mainstream society, and the brothel was driven entirely underground, or out of business all together, while the "above ground" adult businesses began to get more of the public's entertainment dollar.
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!
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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!