The cartoon you linked could just as easily have directed the speech-bubble to all the FEMALES in the room with "I'm not like all the other girls in here."
So ... warning, more philosophical thoughts. Feel free to PM me here, or just read this below and what-not. To the rest of the guys in the thread, hey, don't tell me "TLDR" I knew that already. :)
Well, to the original post-er -- I hear ya. I personally spent a lot of my life using strip-clubbing as a "crutch," a way to get some kind of female interaction which (so I rationalized) otherwise I was "unable" to receive. And it's true, the experience is, in some ways, the ONLY way that I would get people who are female, with those super-hot bodies, to crawl all over me with relative impunity and in such quick short time-frames, as I would experience in the strip-club. But it's also true that something MORE enjoyable, though different, can be had via other venues and other experiences, and it's furthermore also true that something JUST AS enjoyable can sometimes be had for less money and experienced outside of strip-clubs.
Nevertheless, I spent some large part of my life thinking about these same issues. I would hem and haw over them, knowing I was deceiving myself, knowing I was unable to deceive myself. I would "write my journal" to myself in the form of posts on TUSCL (or a host of other internet bulletin boards). In fact, I initially was given my internet nick-name for use on adult-oriented websites because of this propensity of mine. Can't recall where, was it TUSCL? Club Hombre? Ignatz-Micers? Big Doggie? TER? On one or another of the many adult-oriented bulletin-boards such as this one, someone else said something like "Dude all you ever do is write long books that nobody reads! We should call you the book guy!" So I took it up.
So, if you do a TUSCL search WAY back, if you can figure out how, you'll find some old old posts by me that discuss similar topics. And come to similar non-conclusions. And then repeat themselves. It was a heart-wrenching time for me, in some ways. I will concede that I was likely "addicted" to the act of going to strip clubs -- though that involved, in one way or another, the thrill of spending money for a service (the mere act of having a fistful of $20 bills in my hand could be almost an erotic turn-on, because I knew what it portended); and the addiction to alcohol that inevitably went with the clubbing (I still very seldom ENJOY myself in a club the way that I did when I allowed myself to get totally plat-flastered wasted in them).
One of my solutions was to move on from attending strip clubs. I chose to go on a no-clubs drought, which I succeeded in observing for a full five years. I had been attending clubs since, roughly, 1992 or so; straight through to 2012 or so; so, it adds up to two decades, give or take. Then I simply quit going. I had tried to do this several times previously and failed (by which I started to realize, I was "addicted" in the classic sense).
Then I managed to "succeed" by means of some new tactics. Beating the "addiction" to strip clubs required, among other supports, an internet site for defeating internet-porn-addiction (I found it difficult to deal with the assumptions behind it; too much was based on pseudo-science of the evolutionary-psychology and therefore never-verified-by-experiment kind; and there was too high a quotient of fundamentalist preaching going on, of Christian Protestant sort or not). I also had a new lifestyle going on in which I was creating better social outlets for myself. I also was growing older and no longer believed I "deserved" sexual contact with hot-enough women. I had simply grown out of my early-adulthood DEMAND that women be hot enough for me (a task which North America fails at regularly; viz., the fact that I didn't have much of an addiction whenever I worked abroad -- generally Northern Europe -- because the people I was meeting were less obese, consequently the women I felt "free" to chase were also physically ADEQUATE for me, whether or not I actually succeeded in the chase). I had also begun to grow out of my addictiveness-prone period of life. Most counselors, social workers, and other aid-givers will tell you that a young male's addictive behavior PROBABLY has a "shelf life" and that he PROBABLY will simply age out of it. Well, that happened with me. And, finally, I began to take (for other, though related, reasons) an SSRI. The selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor (initially Luvox, IIRC; now the generic version of Prozac called fluoxetine) simply "ate up" my cravings. I no longer "had to" do anything that previously I felt I "had to" do, including (but not limited to) attending strip clubs, binge drinking to excess, complaining about how women manipulated me and treated me badly, etc. etc..
I came back to strip clubs after that five-year hiatus, having adequately convinced myself that the "addiction" part was under control (if indeed ever there had been such a thing going on, it can't really be proven). I now "use" strip-clubbing attendance for fun, and enjoy it, and only go when I want to. I don't really feel "compelled" as much as I used to. And the alcohol certainly doesn't control me, although (as mentioned above) it does to some extent control whether or not I'm enjoying my strip-clubbing experience as much as I used to.
I don't denigrate other guys who go to clubs. I defend like hell their right to their own sexual and adult-entertainment-oriented choices. I think prostitution, strip-clubbing, whacking off, and all the other related stuff, are all victimless crimes (as long as trafficking, and unwillingly forced participants, are eliminated from the equation). Therefore, I think the government has NO business regulating or precluding it (and, in fact, the surest way to increase the ONE associated problem, of trafficking of unwillingly forced participants, is for the government to drive the businesses underground by trying to regulate or preclude it). I'm a staunch supporter of strip-clubbing's right to exist.
Frankly, I believe a good HALF of the guys who participate regularly in TUSCL, whether discussions or reviews, are people who are conflicted in some way or other with the whole concept of strip-clubbing. They probably agree with me in that whole previous Libertarian paragraph, but still think to themselves (as I often did), "shit man if ONLY I could get me JUST ONE chick who is AS FURKIN' HOT as the chick on the pole right now, then I would NOT NEED TO BE HERE IN A STRIP CLUB" and furthermore "I'd probably put up with her girlie shit, just to create a mutually supportive, decent relationship with her and SHE probably would like it JUST AS MUCH AS ME." For me, then, it came down to how I perceived myself as "lacking pick-up skills," not lacking RELATIONSHIP skills. I always felt I could be a just-fine boyfriend, if only the girls I was getting together with were hot-enough and stopped the whole obese-North-American thing. I also felt that, although I could probably be a just-fine boyfriend IF the relationship WERE STARTED UP by some instigating factor, nevertheless I could probably NOT figure out HOW to start up the relationship (and here I would blame women for picking "the wrong guys," how hot chicks "only go out with assholes" whereas I believed of myself I was "too nice to get laid" and so on and so forth).
My self-perceptions were about not being able to get what I needed and wanted, nothing was sufficient, and it was the fault of "the system" and the "other people" in it. My solution, however, was NOT to learn to work the system better. I didn't develop pick-up skills, or become someone who could control the feelings of hot-enough chicks, that I could "cause" them to wish to date me. I did indeed try try try to develop thse skills, in all the sensible and not-so-sensible manners. Eventually, though, I simply grew out of the need for the women. It was fluoxetine pills, it was age, it was kicking the addiction. It was not becoming a pick-up guru. My solution was not, to get what I wanted. It was, to no longer want what I thought I couldn't have.
So, that's my story. It is only tangentially related to yours. But it might give you some perspective.