Zoe Williams, in the Guardian today:
It's the kind of loophole the sex industry must have been dreaming of: in 2003, when the Licensing Act came into force, lapdancing clubs could suddenly be opened as easily as a karaoke bar or a Starbucks. Previously they needed a special nudity licence. The results are striking - the number of clubs in Britain has doubled, to 300, in just four years. Advocates of these seedy places are always on about no-touching rules, and how stripping just couldn't be more different to prostitution, but the evidence says differently. Research presented at the Kilkenny conference on human trafficking and the sex industry this year found that most women working as prostitutes start off at the legal end of the sex trade, and lapdancing clubs are like market day for traffickers.
I'm not surprised, either, if the proliferation of these clubs leads to more exploitation of women. You might as well think building casinos won't lead to more gambling. It's astonishing that lapdancing has become fairly mainstream in British society, with City firms hosting clients in them, for instance - which shows the childishness of laddish finance culture. Whatever the cultural causes, licensing legislation needs to be reformed urgently to make it much more difficult to open a lapdancing club - I don't necessarily go as far as to say none should exist at all - while making it easier to open and run a more socially responsible venue like a jazz club or gastropub. Then we might begin to reverse the sad process which led to the closure of Ronnie Scott's in Birmingham, to be replaced by this.
A last thought: does any man go to a lapdancing club on his own? I think it may principally be a group activity; and I've always thought there's something distinctly homoerotic about gangs of men sharing sexual titillation. Like a wanking circle.
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