Traffick Alert

Of course lap-dancing clubs are “sex encounter establishments”.

As to who is encountering whom, my friends who are respectively the Leader of a District Council and a member of its Licensing Committee, and who long to be able to say that lap-dancing clubs are totally unacceptable and that is that (they are both men, if it matters), find that by far the worst behaviour is reported on “ladies’ nights”. Some “ladies”, by all accounts.

For such evenings, licenses are apparently required until five o’clock in the morning, so much greater is the demand. Who on God’s green earth, of either sex, wishes to look at strippers at half past four in the morning?

And who are these male lap-dancers? Where have the come from? I think we can safely so that they are no more local than their female counterparts, but have presumably been brought in from the same places, for the same reason of extreme poverty, and doubtless by the same violent and deceitful means.

I remember the fairly early days of male stripping from when I was a barman, although readers who know me, as it were, in the flesh will be reassured to learn that I myself never performed. The “you can look, but you can’t touch” culture among men, departures from which are very widespread and alarming but are departures all the same, did not, and apparently still does not, apply among women.

In those days, the octogenarian grandmother of the bride would mount the stage and pull off the jockstrap. These days, sexual assaults against male strippers seem to be routine, and no one regards them remotely seriously. After all, if you must be either a Marxist or a feminist even if only for the sake of one argument, then it is perfectly obvious who has the power and who has not here.

Someone really does need to look into this. There is a whole industry, I would bet anything you liked on it if I were a betting man, of the trafficking of men from the poorer parts of Europe or elsewhere to be degraded for a pittance at these increasingly popular, and socially entirely acceptable events, in relation to which they can expect to be sexually assaulted on a very regularly basis.