How has "clubbing" changed your life, if at all?
DougS
Florida
I can think of MANY aspects of my life that are different than how they'd be if I hadn't gotten involved with "clubbing"...
> Money... Because of clubbing (and the fact that I'm married and my wife wouldn't quite understand), I established my "entertainment fund" close to 10 years ago. This is what finances my hobby, and is not visible to the wife.
> Love Life... Well, because I tend to "fall" for my current fave, my love life at home suffers somewhat, as I find that I'm less drawn to my wife, even though she remains very pretty, and fit. This is the biggest negative... Even though there still is a "love life", it's probably not where it should be.
> Riding the Roller Coaster ... I tend to experience a "roller coaster" of emotions when dealing with "my girls"... highs and lows... usually nothing in between.
> Business Trips ... Most (if not all) of my business trips seem to be planned and center around clubs. Especially now, I try to find ANY excuse for getting down to Indianapolis, to see a certain someone.
> Attire... I wear a lot more docker-type pants, have switched to wearing boxers - rarely wear jeans if there's any chance I will be at a club or spending time with my girls.
> Grooming... Now shave "down there".
> At Work... Now spend about 30min a day, several days a week, talking to a "certain someone" on the phone, usually "disappearing" during this time to a more private spot in the office, or outside.
That's enough to start with... don't want to take everyone's ideas...
> Money... Because of clubbing (and the fact that I'm married and my wife wouldn't quite understand), I established my "entertainment fund" close to 10 years ago. This is what finances my hobby, and is not visible to the wife.
> Love Life... Well, because I tend to "fall" for my current fave, my love life at home suffers somewhat, as I find that I'm less drawn to my wife, even though she remains very pretty, and fit. This is the biggest negative... Even though there still is a "love life", it's probably not where it should be.
> Riding the Roller Coaster ... I tend to experience a "roller coaster" of emotions when dealing with "my girls"... highs and lows... usually nothing in between.
> Business Trips ... Most (if not all) of my business trips seem to be planned and center around clubs. Especially now, I try to find ANY excuse for getting down to Indianapolis, to see a certain someone.
> Attire... I wear a lot more docker-type pants, have switched to wearing boxers - rarely wear jeans if there's any chance I will be at a club or spending time with my girls.
> Grooming... Now shave "down there".
> At Work... Now spend about 30min a day, several days a week, talking to a "certain someone" on the phone, usually "disappearing" during this time to a more private spot in the office, or outside.
That's enough to start with... don't want to take everyone's ideas...
31 comments
I'm sure that a lot of you think I'm in love with my ATF but that's not true, nor was it ever true. I'm very fond of her boyfriend and feel no jealousy at all. I do love her very much, but as a friend not as a love interest in the sense that we usually mean that. When I was younger I always wished I had a younger sister and that's sort of what it's like (except that there is some lust involved.) She's the closest friend I've ever had. I can't imagine my life without her in it. I honestly believe that she saved my life, if I hadn't met her I'd probably be dead by now.
So I'd have to say that clubbing has had a very positive impact on my life.
I fell for my ATF after spending about 20 hours with her. Now, months later, after spending many hours and OTCs together, I'm so far into her, that if she gave me the word, I'd move to her city and start over with her. (as crazy as that sounds)
I hope you are careful with your situation. Sounds like it could lead to big trouble. Make sure you get to know the real person and aren't caught up in the fantasy.
I guess, to the negative, this means that a large portion of "formative influences" were had by means of a social crutch rather than a socially more "solid" venture. I don't know how to meet women my own age who are attractive to me. I don't know how to "date", at least not in an effective manner, to the point that a girl I like might end up liking me, too. I have a strange ability to be hail-fellow-well-met with everyone, intimate with no one. I am not sure if strip clubbing has contributed to this, or whether maybe going to the clubs is more a symptom than a cause, of this syndrome.
Either way, I do feel that learning to go clubbing probably cut me off from a group of friends among whom I might have developed a more normal social life. But "normal" is over-rated sometimes. I might have ended up marrying some manipulative bitch who realized I was good for money, and desperate for sex, if I hadn't been getting sex through the brothel clubs I was frequenting, for example. Or I might have gotten some ugly chick pregnant just because, as a young male with a normal level of horniness, I was desperate for it and surrounded by American women.
So, it could be that strip clubs SAVED me from the typical disaster of sexual desperation that is the hallmark of our Puritanical culture. Or it could be that they were merely a band-aid cure for a gaping wound that should have been addressed more thoroughly. That wound being, my inability to relate to my own peers in anything more than a superficial manner, and therefore my inability to get the girl I might have wanted.
I dunno about the rest of it. I did start shaving my balls "because of" strip clubs, har ... I read about it on the 'net. But then, I might have read about it and done it without ever having visited a club, too.
The money thing ... I don't want to think about it. I've probably averaged about $7,000.oo to $10,000.oo US a year on clubbing and mongering. (I realize that the original question centers more on non-monger-style clubbing, as in, just going to get legal lap-dances. But my own clubbing is nearly always as a sub-set of my overall mongering experience -- getting sexual service in some manner -- so I can't separate out the strip-clubbing from the higher-service experiences.) Financially, I certainly could not have afforded that amount of money in any given year, yet somehow I figured out how to spend it. I guess it all adds up to about $120,000.oo total, which I wish I had now to invest in some high-cap low-margin high-yield penny-ante blue-chip standard-and-poor something-or-other.
Funny thing is, I could look it up and be specific if I wanted. I have meticulous records of all my money transactions, cash or credit or bank or investment or what-not. I guess there's some pretty incriminating evidence in those accounts. "August 9, 2002. Suzie. AMP on Main Street. $150 plus $30 door fee. Miscellaneous comments: Rates a B+ in body, C in service." I wonder how many of those there are ...
I also am now rather more picky with the women I'll try to date. I don't really feel the necessity to go out with a girl just because we get along. I used to kind of believe, that if you "clicked" emotionally, then the guy was "supposed to" look past such undesirables as a fat butt or a bit of a moustache on a girl. Now, I'm damned picky. "What's that? She doesn't live up to the bare minimum 'spinner' standard of the top tier girls at Deja Vu Barely Legal? Then I don't want to bother. She can damn well hit the gym. I don't CARE if she's nice to small animals ..." It's kind of isolated me further, in fact. I'm incapable of interacting with ugly women -- especially women who LET themselves get ugly, by the lack of grooming or exercising that is so common in American culture, or by the lack of "carrying yourself with pride and sexuality" that European women seem to have mastered and Yanks just DON'T get the concept of.
In fact, I'm so distant from most people in a typical office setting, that I've kind of gone out of my way -- some of it rather more inadvertent and "I just happened to do it" than planned -- to end up failing in office settings. I'm actually considering career and city changes in order to be closer to attractive young women -- getting into theater management, modeling and photography, maybe fashion; trying to transfer whatever skills I have from the fields I have worked in, in order to get to where the girls are.
But then I think, what makes me think I could possibly LAND a hot girl?
Sure, I'll be another desperate middle-aged man slavering and drooling over her tight buns at the photo shoot or the dress rehearsal, but I won't be any more likely to bang her and get "the one I want" as a REAL girlfriend any more, nowadays, than back then when I was as young and innocent as her. What makes me think I could get what I want just because I surround myself with it? It doesn't work at strip clubs, it never worked in real life. And now that I've frequented strip clubs instead of making a real "pick up guru" of myself by practice practice practice, I don't even know the LEAST thing about approaching a stranger at a bar. And I'm SURE she won't respond as positively as the last stripper did, when I asked "Why haven't you asked me if I wanna dance?" :)
So, have strip clubs been good to me or bad to me? I dunno, are they the symptom, the cause, or the cure, of my social distance and inability to accomplish what I know I want to accomplish?
I think one additional benefit for me is that my ATF worked in a juice bar so spending time at her club cut down on my drinking. I always did most of my clubbing when out of town on business, and the clubbing was a substitute for going to a nice restaurant and having an expensive meal or sitting in a bar, neither of which I never much enjoyed doing alone. So my expense account probably paid for a lot of my clubbing.
By the way, Founder, nice job on the new Web site layout!
But my hobby has also affected me negatively. I am just a bit embarrassed about lying and sneaking around. I am not married, so I don't mean in that way. This isn't so bad -- in fact it might even be funny. When I fly to Florida to see my retired father, he insists on picking me up at the Orlando airport (he is bored with retirement and likes the drive.) But since I am too embarrassed to tell him I go to strip clubs, I lie about my return flight and have him take me to the airport a day early, then I rent a car and drive to Tampa for the night and drive back to Orlando the next day. (I know...sounds silly...maybe I am just a PL).
Anyway, the lying seems like a classic sympton of someone with an addiction. So am I addicted to my hobby? Maybe, maybe not. I would like to think not, since I went over 5 years from 2001 to 2006 without visiting a club while I went back to school and earned my graduate degree. So, I try just to have fun and not think too much about it.
A mutual interest in health and fitness is one of the major things that originally brought my ATF and I together. When we first met she was out of shape and trying to improve (she'd already lost about 40 pounds by that point - she was 185 lbs in high school, today she's about 125 with a killer body), and I'd been studying fitness and was a little ahead of her knowledge-wise. I encouraged her to join a gym and start working out regularly, and we used to talk about our mutual fitness programs all the time. Later we started working out together. It's one of the areas where we've really helped each other, she's been my trainer and I've been hers. Now when we're together we either go to the gym or go for a run every day. Neither one of us could quit today even if we wanted to, we'd feel like we were letting the other person down.
By the way, it's a great conversation topic with dancers, an awful lot of them are looking for fitness advice. It's also a great first OTC "date" - go to a gym or go for a run together.
David, why don't you fly from Orlando to Tampa, then fly home from there? It'll not only save you a lot of driving, you won't have to lie about it.
Also, I wonder if clubbing leads any guys to gain weight. Patrons I see on the whole don't seem to be paragons of fitness. If anything, knowing that strippers care more about how fat our wallets are probably leads a lot of PLs to let themselves go.
I'm sorry to report, this is my experience as well. For a while, clubbing was good for me because it relieved the sexual pressure, especially since I was attending "full service" clubs where I could access full sexual services. But then, the access to those services simply increased my desire for them, to the point that my dissatisfaction at how much I was getting laid didn't change at all. I was getting it more, but I wanted it even more than before.
My hope has always been, to fuck a girl whom I think of as hot enough to warrant fucking. If she turns me on physically, then physically I'm turned on, and would therefore be willing to try to engage in a relationship with her. I had thought that clubbing was some kind of "side route" to that arrangement, but it's turned out (no surprise) that it isn't. I'm still trying to land a hottie or two. Wouldn't it be nice, to meet people whom I'm attracted to, get to know some of them, hit it off with a few (and dislike some, if not most; that's fine, my human nature can't be compatible with everyone else's!), and then among those few whom I like, I choose one or two to try to date, and select again. But I don't have CHOICE. I never MEET people whom I attracted to, not people who are as hot as a stripper that I want to bone. So, the dating pool for me is "people who are so ugly I have to think about someone else when I'm trying to seduce them." Is it any wonder that I don't get very many second dates?
Chandler again: "Also, I wonder if clubbing leads any guys to gain weight. Patrons I see on the whole don't seem to be paragons of fitness. If anything, knowing that strippers care more about how fat our wallets are probably leads a lot of PLs to let themselves go."
I think clubbing is a symptom of the same syndrome that leads to overweight. Both spring from the same root cause, consumption. Taking in, rather than putting out, your life force. Looking to the rest of the world to "give" (in terms of what you buy, or finagle, or bater for, or steal) to you positive experiences, rather than looking outward from yourself and thinking, "How can I GIVE positive experiences UNTO the world at large?" I don't criticize this attitude -- I'm very much a participant in it, especially when it comes to attractive females; I "need" them to provide for me an "improvement" on my otherwise date-less lifestyle -- and I certainly understand how it comes about and how it's hard to get away from it. But I also think it's pretty self-explanatory if you think of it that way.
Consumers and producers. We are, all of us, both of those things. Men who go to strip clubs have learned to "produce" in some other area of their lives -- making a living, fattening up their wallets so that their bodies and their sex-drives can be catered to by means of creating a leaner wallet at certain locations on certain nights of the week.
No, really, having civilian real-world non-strip-club dates with (and eventual sex with) beautiful women is a high priority to me but I haven't had much of that at all. It's a high priority, but wishing don't make it so.
I find it pretty funny that a PL would expect real world women to respond to his newgained confidence like strippers do. It's like that Chris Rock bit about going to a dance club with a friend who's a strip club addict. After the first woman he asks to dance is ambivalent, he elbows his friends, "Fuck this shit, let's get out of here, go to a titty bar."
I think we had a similar thread a few months ago about seeing girls on the street and wondering if they were strippers.
I told this story to my ATF when I got to the club and said this was probably only something that a guy who goes to strip clubs too much would think of. Actually, she told me she thinks the same thing. She claims she is pretty good at picking our fellow strippers when she sees certain girls out in public.
Anyway, I never saw that girl at the club that night...so maybe she works at one of the other clubs in town. (At least I can still hope for that.)
Often, on Bourbon Street, you can identify strippers this way. The parking is difficult, several blocks from any given club; and the clubs only have one front door; so the girls have to walk through the crowd of revelers for two or three blocks to get to their workplace. Many call for an attendant, so some loser-Bluto wearing all black, or a dumb waiter's tuxedo, will be accompanying them along the street.
I don't necessarily agree with Chandler that all the best looking non-strippers are inherently better looking than all the strippers. But I do agree to an extent, that very many strippers are much less attractive in "civilian" life than you might expect. The "stunners" on a given night at Platinum Plus in Memphis (they were my favorite kinds of girls; small, petite even; natural tits; lithe mildly athletic bodies; generally middle-class Caucasian, in 'style' if not also in ethnicity) would leave the club and become merely solid 7.5s or 8s in "real" life.
Then again, last night on Bourbon Street, a gaggle of Penthouse Pets were partying. One of them had a little mini-bridal-veil tiara thing, so it must have been a bahcelorette night. I knew they were from the Penthouse franchise because their clothes and jackets all had those key logos on them, and eventually most of them disappeared into the Penthouse club just off Bourbon. They were hot hot hot, in civilian clothes. Hotter by far than most "civilian" girls on the street. Skinny, smooth-skinned, with pleasant girl-next-door smiling happy faces, well-done non-cosmetic-like make-up and hairstyles, tight form-fitting clothing, but not excessively revealing (tight jeans; midriff-showing halter-tops and jackets; or a blousy men's style shirt; high heels), in that "tramp but classy" stripper style.
So, SOME girls who get naked for money are also super-hot even in real life. :)