Is the lap dance an endangered species?

"can they and the dancers survive on that?"

Of course they can. A rather brilliant poster here recently did a simple analysis that showed that a dancer can make 3 times what she'd make at MacDonalds merely by spending 15 minutes of each hour doing lap dances. Three times the minimum wage by working only 15 minutes per hour.

I don't feel bad for strippers. If they put in just a tiny effort they're doing far better than most or all of their peers.

To me it is.

There will always be customers who want to spend and those that dont. Mostly customers that want to spend under $100?? Maybe and maybe not. There will always be a want for lapdances from someone somewhere though.

As long as prostitution is illegal strip clubs will survive. Even if it was legal, they'd probably still be around, perhaps just less of them.

Stripclubs will never go away. Other adult- oriented options may become more readily available in the future, but stripclubs seem here to stay, thank goodness.

Survive or live expensive?

jerickson, why the comparison to McDonalds? I don't know anyone that could survive working at McDonalds and I would bet their peers aren't working there either. The last I looked, no Americans want to work there so making more than serving Big Macs cannot be the goal of a stripper

NO ONE can live on a minimum wage that a Mickey Ds pays!

Strip clubs and lap dances will be around for a long time, and hopefully our entire lives. They may even become better in the future especially if prostitution gets legalized.

No one can live on minimum wage alone. If you lack skills and have past employment issues there are worse options than McD's. As I understand it, advancement is a reasonable possibility there.

But I think Jerkison's point was simply that a woman who has qualifications that would normally relegate them to a minimum wage job (or slightly above) can make significantly more than that at a stripclub. Not to mention they should be able to do that and work less.

"Do they even have this kinda club in Europe or Asia where sex laws are a lot more lax?"

Not that I know of. Obviously Mexico sort of has this and other places in Central and South America.

For some reason I feel like Australia has clubs that are also legit brothels, but I may have that wrong.

As a veteran PL I have gotten to know several dancers over the years. By "know" I mean I have come to understand their lives well enough that they need not BS me. None of these girls is wealthy nor making a net income of $1,000 per week, many making much less. Why do strippers make less today than 8-10 years ago (a fact that even the Pinkies acknowledge)? I agree with the OP that the rise of internet escort sites has provided a level of competition absent in prior years. Today I use the clubs to screen for OTC companions. Yes, I use escort sites as well but eschew Backpage and Craigslist as I am still paranoid about LE until P4P is legal.

Steve sez: "jerickson, why the comparison to McDonalds? I don't know anyone that could survive working at McDonalds and I would bet their peers aren't working there either"

If you read what I said, actually it was that a stripper who works for only 15 minutes every hour doing lapdances can make 3 TIMES what she could make at MacDonalds. Which translates to about $25 per hour. For only 15 minutes of work every hour.

And if you do the math, you'll see that if they work only 50% of the time, they can make $50 per hour. So they can screw off for 1/2 hour, then work for the next 1/2 hour.

That's a lot of money, no? How many people make $50 an hour? Especially if it's only working half a shift?

Well prostitution is legal in Australia, so quite possible some there try to merge the strip club and brothel models.

Smart People down under.

Public Sex is fun! I always enjoyed the public Sex in Bogart's old VIP area. Like being in a live porn video. Was also a fabulous way to scout out other Talent! LMFAO

Agreed, $50 hour is pretty good considering it is really two songs. Here, girls keep all dance money, just have to cover their fixed costs, and keep half of their VIP.
I didn't get the peers working at McDonald's. NY strippers I know have friends that don't strip. They are working in bars and restaurants for decent money,

"I didn't get the peers working at McDonald's"

It's called an "analogy". You use analogies, which are examples using things that most people are familiar with, to illustrate a point. Everyone knows MacDonalds, and everyone knows they're all over, in every city on the planet, which means there are tons and tons of people who work at a MacDonalds. Probably for minimum wage. And we all know that many/most people work at or near minimum wage, wherever they work. In California, minimum wage is around $8 per hour.

That's why I used MacDonalds as an example. To illustrate a point and to provide an easily understood comparison. Though in your case apparently it wasn't so easily understood.

from what I have read, over in Germany, the have what's called "FKK" clubs (please don't ask for the translation of the abbreviation). they're a lot like the description of the "ideal" marriage of a SC and brothel. pay a door fee, go in, and there are women there (most of them either naked or nearly so) to choose from. you can approach any of them, talk, usually get some initial pussy play in, and if you think she might be worth the cost, you can go to a room and do whatever deed is available on the menu. costs are fixed and up-front, so haggling over price, and the women are usually a minimum of 6-7, with some truly hot 8-9+ available. now do I expect anything like that in the US? HELL NO! we've got too many people here who get their jollies by telling everyone else how to act, how to think, and what is (or isn't) "moral".

Isn't a swingers club kinda what your talking about? Pay a membership fee then fuck anyone in site. Now yes I know you don't have the good looking women like strippers but same concept pretty much.

I understand analogies, but my experience here is that minimum wage is not an option in NY. Girls travel half way across the world, college educated and they didn't come here to serve Big Macs. If they aren't stripping, they get connected in their local community and work as a bartender or waitress for cash. It would be like moving to Italy to work in a pizzeria (analogy)

"...but my experience here is that minimum wage is not an option in NY"

Which is why, twice, I explained that she can make 3 TIMES minimum wage for only 15 minutes of work per hour. That's not minimum wage, it's three times minimum wage, which comes out to about $25 per hour. Which is a lot more than minimum wage. It's a lot more money than many or most people make at their place of employment.

Is that right? Isn't $25 per hour for only 15 minutes of work every hour something a lot of people would like? That's a lot of money, right? It's a lot more than minimum wage, right?

VH_Kicks I understand what you mean. We do live in a conservative country and I do wish the United States was more liberal like Europe, Canada, and Australia. In parts of Europe prostitution is already legal while here it is a prison sentence. Whether or not our country becomes more liberal is to be seen, but I hope it does.
We seem to have very similar beliefs.

First of all, it only takes them 3 minutes, maybe 4 to make $25 or three times minimum wage. Which at a $25/4 minute pace, they are making $375/hr. If we go with the 8pm to 4am shift, we are looking at $3000 a shift. So yes, at 3K a night, the average dancer can pick up all of her friends when their shift ends at McDonald's and get some steaks.

I like VH-Kicks view of the future, but my experience is running in the opposite direction. I don't disagree with the majority of the thread, here, that it would be great if our Puritanical hypocrisy about sexuality would just get evaporated somehow here in North America (mostly in the USA, but the rest of N.Am. is kinda bad sometimes too). But that isn't happening.

Oddly, however, I see the trending direction as different. I don't see that sex-clubs are becoming more and more the norm. It would be great if the brothel, the "private sex club", the "strip club," were all to become more available here, and I do understand how the trend could be perceived as merging those types of institutions in the future. I guess what I see is a different set of details.

The details that I see, include the fact that getting a blowjob, full-service, or even a quickie-handjob-under-the-belt, are all becoming extremely expensive services. I recall in about, oh, 1993, when you could get a full-on private room fuck at many strip clubs for less than $100. And I compare that to the prices reported today, and it just seems to me that the cost of sex-services has increased MUCH more than inflation or wages or real buying power or anything else. I had believed, with most, that the advent of internet escort sites, TER, the Red Pages, Craig's List, etc., would lead to the possibility of there being such a sex market that the prices got driven down. For a little while, say, 2000 to 2005, maybe that did happen. But now sex prices are up up up, everywhere.

Examples. From 1992 to 2012, a span of 20 years, in my experience, the following prices have changed:

-- lap dance, one rock song (3 minutes?), from $5 to $30
-- blowjob from stripper in back room of club, from $20 to $100
-- full service inclub, from $40 to $350
-- "VIP" hour in a club "special" room, from $30 entry to $500 per half-hour

Additionally, the AVAILABILITY of services at all has gone down, regardless of cost. Here's what I've seen, from 1992 to 2012, the same 20 years:

-- likelihood of any given dancer in a club being willing to try to get your willie out, and to try to make it pop, during a standard-cost lap-dance, down from 95% likely to 5% likely
-- likelihood of any given club having dancers that are essentially trying to make your willie pop during every single song, who also offer higher-cost and higher-privacy services either in the club or out, down from about 75% to about 5% likely
-- likelihood of finding someone who will be a sex-services provider, without actually having to contact a sex-services provider's website on the internet, down from about 50% to about 10%

To me, the thing is, if she does NOT have an internet-escort website, then she is NOT an escort, now'days. Previously, before those things existed, the escorts had to run under the radar and go out to where they could find a customer. I was a customer and I wanted to be found. That was good for me. Now, I'm a customer and I want to be found but the providers aren't DOING the finding, they sitting back and expecting ME to do the finding of them. That's bad for me.

I don't see why they wouldn't be an endangered species. There are always new customers to strip clubs and as long as strip clubs exist, there will be dancers who need to sell lap dances and customers who want to buy them. Like they say that marijuana is a gateway to other harder illegal drugs, lapdances are a gateway to escort services and whatever else there is.

Don't forget us married PLs. When me and the boyz head out for a night on the town we ain't hitten regular bars. It's straight to the SC for some titties in face and lap grindin. We are generally not looking for ITC or OTC. There is no way I'm am going to do that and then drive home to the fam. Just hanging at the tittie bars, drinkin beers, listening to some good tunes, and laps is enough to make it a good time for us Hubbies. I never call escorts, not that I disapprove, just not my style. I bet married men who just want a little playtime are a strippers best custy, right ladies?

Escorts are normally not prostitutes in a strict legal sense. They don't promise you sex, just their time. Legally, it's similar to a woman who likes to go to expensive restaurants, shows, and clubs for free, and will fuck most any guy who will pay her way. In practice, you can pretty much count on covered vaginal sex. Anything else you'll have to see her once to know if she's down with it, just like regular dating. I've been with a few who told me not to touch them with my hands.

Escorts are afraid of the vice squad, since it's generally corrupt cops who don't give a shit about fine points of legality. Vice cops typically will perjure themselves if necessary and say an escort promised them specific sex acts for money. For that reason, escorts want you to fully undress before they do, since cops are reluctant to do it. As long as an escort did not get paranoid that you were a cop or a dangerous weirdo, I think most of them would be fine with just lap dancing.

Since strippers generally pay house fees, they can LOSE money by working, which can't happen working at McDonalds. If you work at McDonalds, and an asshole grabs at you or says nasty shit to you, the manager will ask the asshole to leave. Rather than giving him a free t-shirt.