I'm wondering how much impact the recent court decisions in California will have on hiring practices, assuming this becomes a nationwide issue. Now that strippers must (eventually) be classified as employees (vs independent contractors) there is a lot of case law that talks about hiring based on BFOQs (Bone fide occupational qualifications). The main theme of these is: A company can only require a candidate to have the qualifications that are relevant to the job. So a company cannot decline to hire someone based on unrelated criteria. For example, a teacher needs to be able to teach students, but requiring a candidate to also clean the restrooms may not be allowed.
The closest case that relates to stripper looks is the case from the airlines (I think it was PanAm) about requiring flight attendants (called "stewardesses" at the time) to be pretty (also female), slim, and young. The court held that the primary purpose of a flight attendant is passenger safety. Attractiveness (by whatever subjective criteria) was not required to keep passengers safe. So now flight attendants cannot be denied hire based on looks, age or gender.
In the stripper world, there may be parallels to consider. What is the primary duty of a stripper? Is it to dance on stage/laps, or is it to sell dances? Ultimately, if a dancer can deliver huge amounts of sales, should the club really care what she looks like? So let's assume for this discussion that the primary duty of a stripper is to sell dances, VIP's and drinks. If the club cannot objectively prove that certain physical attributes are required to make sales, they may not be able to discriminate hiring strippers because they are too "fat", "old", "dark", "short" or whatever. These are going to be too subjective.
So what I suspect they will end up doing to avoid costly litigation, is use a consistent objective criteria, like hourly/weekly/monthly sales. As employees (and de facto sales reps for dances), they can be required to meet a specific minimum target for sales or revenue for the club. If a dancer fails to meet the requirement over some period of time, the club can fire them.
What might be interesting about this is that policy will tend to either prove or disprove all of the ad hoc opinions above that strippers of a certain physical look or age-range will make more money than others. Those dancers who perform poorly (fail to sell) will be removed, regardless of subjective criteria. Those who perform at, or above, target, will survive and thrive. A club need only collect enough data under this policy to eventually create an objective policy about looks - IF - a certain physical trait consistently performs well or poorly. I suspect that they will not. Although there will still be many challenges to firing an under-performing strippers based on allegations about poor training, access to tools/education/coaching, unfair schedules, lack of dressing room amenities, etc. I.e.: If the club used unfair practices to prevent a stripper from being successful, they will be in trouble.
In the end, a club would be eventually more successful if they judged a stripper by actual earnings performance rather than by a subjective judgement about POTENTIAL earnings based on race, looks, age.
NOTE: All of this presumes that the services provided by any given stripper are the same. Strippers who possibly provide extras (if the club gets a share through additional VIPs, drinks, etc.) will earn a higher sales rate. So someone who might not be earning a lot of non-extras revenues might embellish their results by providing extras, recognizing the increased risk of LE, STD's and firing for not following company policy.
I wonder how those clubs that have unionized (in NY?) are addressing this topic?