review comment
5 years ago
200 for a cbJ is pretty steep in this market. Flight Club has a reputation for being overpriced. Other mid tier options (Landing Strip, Criket and BT's Dearborn) offer better value.
discussion comment
5 years ago
@loper
Your point it well taken-- there are a number of factors above and beyond the religiously-motivated morality police that are mounting opposition to strip clubs (and many other aspects of the sex industry). Misguided feminism (the type that portrays women as being helpless victims of men and thus needing protection from all things sexual) is a good example.
However, I'm skeptical of your claim that the per capita strip clubs are higher in the Bible belt than elsewhere. Is that statement data-based or opinion-based? I don't have any hard data, but when I look at the areas that seem to have a very high number of strip clubs per capita (e.g., Portland, Oregon, the state of New Jersey), I don't identify those areas as Bible Belt areas.
discussion comment
5 years ago
I tend to get distracted when aroused--- do strippers have faces?
More seriously, I really like an attractive GND look. It fulfills a fantasy of corrupting those Catholic girls who start too late (Billy Joel reference for those who are too young to recall "Only the good die young").
discussion comment
5 years ago
I think that self-righteous Bible thumpers and over zealous government officials are a bigger threat to strip clubs than internet porn.
discussion comment
5 years ago
When I was 20 years old, I had a thing for 18 year old women. Now that I'm in my 60's, I realize what good taste I had when I was 20.
review comment
5 years ago
My experience in South Florida clubs is limited to Diamond Dolls, Pompano Beach. What is the rationale for going to Tootsies when fun can be had at DD for half the quoted price at Tootsies?
discussion comment
5 years ago
Regarding #3 on your unfulfilled list: I have made four visits to TJ. If the chica speaks any English, I often ask if anything is off limits for a session. If she says nothing is off limits, I will ask if anal was OK. I probably get a "yes" to anal on about 20% of my asks.
I seldom insist on anal in a session but in my experience, if a chica consents to anal she will be pretty open to nearly anything, including BBBJ, prostate massage, rimming, etc.
discussion comment
5 years ago
Sounds like a very good year!
Any idea how much $ you spent on your hobby (or is it an addiction?)
My strip club totals might be slightly higher than yours, but my AMP totals are much lower.
discussion comment
5 years ago
![]()
Book GuyI write it like I mean it, but mostly they just want my money.
Warrior nailed it-- several extras-friendly clubs near DTW, as well as hotels.
review comment
5 years ago
Thanks for the clarification!
review comment
5 years ago
Good review but $400 for 30 minutes without a happy ending?? I'll pass.
discussion comment
5 years ago
Keep your balls Out of the gutter until later. Have fun.
review comment
5 years ago
Last time I visited Subi's, they had medium quality dancers who were demanding premium prices. I left and went to a different club. When you add in a day time cover charge and a 2 drink minimum, it sounds like a formula to drive even more customers away.
review comment
5 years ago
She did mention that she had some Chinese heritage in her family tree but her Asian features were not especially prominent.
review comment
5 years ago
Unless things have changed, mileage in the private dances is very limited.
review comment
5 years ago
Accurate review, including the high price quotes. But, there is room for negotiation. If you don't get to a mutually agreeable price point, jut say no-- it is your money.
review comment
5 years ago
Good to see a review of an international club, even if it is missing helpful details. For the curious, 10,000 Armenian Drams= $21.
review comment
5 years ago
This is a review of Flight Club, not Landing Strip.
discussion comment
5 years ago
Sounds like you need a cause! How about some pro bono work to legalize prostitution?
discussion comment
5 years ago
Best strategies for a dancer to provide extras in a club that does not "tolerate" extras.
Best strategies for a customer to get extras in a club that does not "tolerate" extras.
How do dancers set the price of extras.
discussion comment
5 years ago
Makes me wonder if gastroenterologists run specials for strippers. "A colonoscopy and a gang bang, that you won't remember"
discussion comment
5 years ago
Here you go--- entertaining read.
Opinion
A Stripper’s Favorite Client
It wasn’t love. But it wasn’t just business either.
By Lily Burana
Ms. Burana is a journalist and a former stripper.
Nov. 9, 2019
Credit...Na Kim
The return address on the letter was from a Connecticut prison. Typed neatly over the address wasn’t a sender’s name, but rather, an inmate ID — a hashtag and a string of numerals.
I tore open the envelope. The letter was from M., my old strip club regular.
Within the taxonomy of strip club customers, M. wasn’t Captain Save-a-Ho, the type who thinks telling a stripper, “You’re better than this” is a compliment, and seeks to whisk you out of this hellhole. He also didn’t view dancers as a dating pool and hang about, lovelorn, like a Stage Door Johnny from vaudeville days. He greeted me exactly where I was, and in that spot, affection bloomed. I sat in his lap during a night shift in my San Francisco home club when he was in from the East Coast for work; we started talking, and couldn’t stop. When he laughed at all my jokes, the connection was sealed.
M. was gloriously larger than life, and also, well, gloriously large — a jovial bear with a classic Brooklyn accent. An up-from-nothing success story, he sounded like Jackie Mason and made it rain like Jay-Z.
He grew up poor, made a fortune, partied hard, and struggled with addiction. He had his own spiel about his hard-knock life.
Sign up for David Leonhardt's newsletter
David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.
“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.
“I’ve been drunk and I’ve been sober. Sober’s better.”
But M. would trip over the verdict on “I’ve been married, and I’ve been single.” He’d pause before saying, “Single’s better.” He was embroiled in a contentious divorce, and his ambivalence about romance was a sore spot.
That’s where the women came in.
He’d call me “sweetheart” and regale me with anecdotes about fancy golfing excursions that involved dalliances with stratospherically pricey escorts. His preferred agency hired women who looked like supermodels, and they earned like it, too, he said.
I played along. “Really? Like, how much?”
He held up his hand in a “stop” signal. “You don’t want to go messing around with that stuff,” he said.
Somewhere in his admonishment was a protective impulse I admired. “It’s O.K. for you, though? Just not me?”
Editors’ Picks
My Neighborhood Was on Fire. My Neighbors Came Together to Save It.
How Lying and Mistrust Could Hurt the American Economy
A 3D Print-Out You Could Call Home
He chuckled.
“Oh God, M.,” I sighed. “You’re trash.”
He roared as if I was the funniest woman alive.
M. would tell me what his three teenage daughters were up to, and what opera he’d seen lately (he was a huge buff). Often, he’d mention work, some murky finance gig, that, as he told it, had recently attracted the attention of the authorities. “I’m stressed out,” he’d say. “The feds are breathing down my neck again.” Or “The S.E.C. is after us.”
Whatever.
Strip clubs are built around flattering the male ego, and the customer’s own aggrandizement was often part of the package. Many a Steve from Middle Management became Steven the C.E.O., sometimes right down to the fake business card. Honestly, I thought M. was full of it.
But there I sat, in the privacy of my own home, with a letter from him, addressed to me in my real name. I was touched, amused and really weirded out. I hadn’t worked at that club in six years and had moved across the country.
I’d come to trust M. enough as a customer to step out from behind my stage persona. (Why do I call him M. here? Pseudonyms are customary for strippers; I extend a similar discretion to him as a courtesy.) He knew my ambitions, my age. And, thanks to Google, he knew I had a P.O. box. The letter, typed up and printed out, started with a bombshell: The S.E.C. had, indeed, caught up to him. He’d been arrested on charges of fiscal malfeasance and was partway through a multiple-year sentence.
What do you know? That son of a gun wasn’t lying.
Memory is protean. I haven’t forgotten much about stripping, but the significance of things has shifted over time. I recall an evening spent sitting in the restaurant section of Scores listening to a dancer describe her financial plan. She told me how she managed to put away $12,000 a month into a Charles Schwab brokerage account and, widening her blue eyes, she recited what she’d told a chief executive client who wanted to give her something special: “I’d be honored if you’d give me some of your company’s stock.”
I also remember seeing a dancer at my home club frowning at a thick gold chain a customer had just given her. She had it in a Ziploc bag, puzzling over what to do because she couldn’t bring it home. Her husband hated these gifts — didn’t like being shown up by expensive goods, and certainly didn’t appreciate the material intrusion of other men into their lives. I used to see these gifts and the labyrinthine relationships around them as “just business.” But in retrospect, they are more than that. It’s not just stuff that’s exchanged; it’s energy. The cash and trinkets become bonding agents.
Some people carry the imprint of others around with them. For the libertines and polyamorous overachievers among us, it’s probably no great shakes. But for those conflicted about monetizing certain things — romantic bandwidth and emotional access, to say nothing of bodies — such messy connections create a problem. You can’t not know what you know, and you can’t unfeel what you feel. A gift can have a certain psychic stickiness to it. So, too, I learned, can a letter.
As a rank-and-file stripper, I sometimes let professionalism smooth down the discomfort of certain dynamics. After all, a true pro must be sex positive! But there’s nothing sex negative about admitting that this enterprise can get very tangled, very quickly. The workplace imperative to be accommodating had me stifling my own misgivings. The hustle seems more insidious the more time passes, the interactions-as-transactions more freighted. I recall F. Scott Fitzgerald: “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
“When you’re famous enough, we’ll date,” M. once said. The notion was preposterous, simultaneously flattering (you got a future, kid!) and insulting (but you’re bupkis now), and notably left out any consideration of my feelings on the matter. It was also perfectly … him. My site-specific veneer of malleability led him to believe he might shape me in a way that would please him most and thus grant us real-world potential — an Eliza Doolittle in Lucite heels groomed by an irrepressible Wall Street wolf.
Sometimes the supportive “Sex work is real work” sentiment gets coupled with “It’s a job like any other job.” Is it real work? Lord, yes. No other job I’ve held required as much labor, physical or emotional. Strut, spin, flatter, serve — the constant flex of thighs and white lies. But a job just like any other job? Not in my experience. Not even close.
Stripping consists of all the ingredients of courtship: sweet talk, flirting, active listening, emotional support and, you know, nudity. But I put too much stock in the flimsy notion that it had a built-in limit. We all know this is just an act, right? And what happens in the club stays in the club? Everything packaged up as a transaction, neat and tidy and topped with a Benjamin folded origami-style to look like a bow?
The letter revealed to me the bright shining lie of compartmentalization. The glittery ribbons I’d kept tight as I earned thousands upon thousands of dollars were coming undone for the price of a postage stamp.
I could’ve visited M. in prison. I didn’t. I could’ve returned the correspondence. I knew I wouldn’t.
The letter sat buried in the mail pile on my secondhand dining room table until I finally decided to get rid of it. Throwing the envelope in the garbage, I felt lighter. I’d bid M. a fond, but final, farewell. Toss a letter, close a door.
As I hauled the bag to the curbside bin, I made one last joke I kind of wish he could’ve heard.
“See, M., you big goof? You’re trash.”
Lily Burana (@lilyburana) is the author of “Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America” and, most recently, “Grace for Amateurs: Field Notes on a Journey Back to Faith.”
discussion comment
5 years ago
This story screams for a good headline or two.
In addition to Shadow Cats suggestion, Beaver Township Bans Beavers and Boobs??
discussion comment
5 years ago
If I'm browsing the new and used cars at an auto dealer, I don't tip the salesperson for talking with me. Its just part of their sales job.
In a similar manner, I don't tip a dancer for just talking with me; its part of their sales job. On the other hand, if the dancer is handsy at the table, then I'll tip her for just sitting with me, even if I reject a private dance.
By the way, I'm not sure that analogy extends to the car sales person--- I've never found a car salesperson whose sales pitch included a hand job. :)
discussion comment
5 years ago
Hard to respond because "feminist" is somewhat ambiguous and covers a remarkable range of philosophies and values. I've encountered self-proclaimed feminists who believe that women should have the right to control their body, including using their body and talents to make a living in a sex industry, such as strip clubs. This of course presupposes consent on the part of both parties (and some of the examples above violate the consent assumption). This is a variation of the empowerment theme mentioned by Ishmael. For lack of a better word, let's call this "enlightened feminism."
I've also encountered self-proclaimed "feminists" who believe that men in general are the source of all evil and that a woman should never stoop so low as to cater to the sexual interests of men. Let's make up a word for this, how about "Misandric Feminists" (or less kindly "Feminazi's").
There are surely variations of the above two extremes. I could easily see an enlightened feminist working in a strip club---- not so sure about a male-hating misandric feminist.