The Playboy club is returning to London next year.
There was one at 45 Park Lane from 1966 until 1981, when it had its gaming licences revoked; it was known as ?the hutch on the park?.
The new club will occupy different premises, although still in Mayfair ? it?s a supposedly classy kind of gent you get around there, you see ? and will include a cocktail bar, a disco and three casinos.
And, yes, adult women half dressed as rabbits.
?With Playboy now more popular than ever,? Hugh Hefner, the brand?s founder, said last week, ?I look forward to our return to London and again sharing the notions that are celebrated in the magazine ? the concept of good food and drink, pretty girls and exciting entertainment.? Hefner is 84, so we might forgive him the delusion that Playboy, both the magazine and the brand, is ?classy? in anything other than the Argos duvet cover sense.
My youngest sister, not what you would call Amish in her views, went away to university in 1998. In the three years she was gone, strip clubs were allowed to proliferate by the government. Having gone up and down Tottenham Court Road, in central London, since she was an infant, my sister was astonished to find that it now played host to Spearmint Rhino, a huge lap-dancing club, with blokes in suits lining up outside so that a stranger in a G-string could gyrate onto them until they were satisfied. Similar establishments were popping up all over the capital.
I remember her saying how bizarre this was and how I should write about it, but like many other people I was swept along by the novelty of the whole thing. I spouted the usual line about how no one was being forced, how the women were paid properly, how strip clubs had always existed and why should they be doomed to be in Soho basements with ill-looking girls and their dubious protectors?
I was taken to places such as Spearmint Rhino myself, feeling ? as a woman ? thrillingly modern, although it?s kind of hard to know how to compose your face when a male companion buys you a lap dance and all you want to do is ask the woman whether she waxes or shaves and how often and what about regrowth.
My take on all of this has always been: I like sex (and gambling); I don?t have as much of a problem with pornography as many women I know; I support the rights of sex workers both to exist and to work in safety; I think brothels should be legalised. I don?t shriek and run, gathering my petticoats, at the suggestion of people paying either for sex or for a simulated version of it. But neither do I love the idea of blokes in suits sitting by the stage in a state of excitement at four in the afternoon, with Nigel from accounts believing the woman grinding for him is uncontrollably aroused. However, it?s a free country. The male capacity for self-delusion is infinite, and there you go.
I?ve changed my mind over the past couple of years: I don?t think lap-dancing or strip clubs are harmless any more. I think they degrade everybody. All of the above views still hold, but now I feel women have been sold the most gigantic pup. The pup was this: that the idea of a strip club on every high street marked evolution; that the British had stopped being uptight about sex; that such clubs were fun, like going out to drink cocktails is fun; that anyone who disagreed was a ghastly old killjoy from grannyland. And then, most crazy: that this was good for women, so we had a duty not only to embrace it all, but also to be grateful for it ? that we emerged empowered, having reclaimed some aspect of our sexuality.
I object to explaining to my six-year-old daughter that taking your clothes off for money is a career option Well, that died a death soon enough. We became complicit in the pornification of our world ? and, worse, did so with a fixed ?ironic?, ?post-feminist? smile, even as we bleached our teeth and waxed everything off and contemplated hair extensions, even as we frowned at children?s T-shirts saying ?Porn star?, even as we trotted off to pole-dancing class or a burlesque night, pushing to the back of our minds the thought that burlesque was just stripping and there wasn?t much in it for us.
I see that sexuality is elastic, but I can?t say I?ve ever found myself turned on by a random woman removing her clothes for money. Fascinated the first couple of times, yes, but then I guess I?d have been fascinated by Victorian freak shows, or by a lion eating an antelope.
So here we are, some of us resolutely sticking to our guns, still intent on believing this is harmless progress, and some of us thinking, ?Good grief, how embarrassing to have ever thought that way.? I see there?s a nimbyness in my argument: I don?t object to strip clubs and their ilk per se (men are dorks, basically, and if women want to make money out of it, fine), but I object to them being situated near my house because I object to explaining to my six-year-old daughter that taking your clothes off for money is a career option.
I want them to be ghettoised ? clean, well lit, well monitored, safe, pleasant environments, but in a designated neck of the woods, as they are in Holland or Germany. Not next to Morrisons, thanks.
Playboy?s hope is clearly to tap into all this ? the irony, the post-feministness, the idea that cool, evolved women will have no problem with accompanying their boyfriends to a place where the drinks are served by women wearing ears and a tail. There was a brilliant line in the sublime television series Mad Men a few weeks ago when Peggy Olson, the lone woman creative, is waiting for a colleague to finish reading a porn mag so they can get on with some work. ?Stop looking at women who can?t look back at you,? she says.
In the series it is the mid-1960s. In the real world it?s 2010 and the women who can?t look back haven?t gone away ? even if they believe, naively, that their eyes are wide open. Some of them are so dehumanised they?re not even women; they are ?bunnies?. Does anyone seriously still believe this is okay? That it?s still fun? That we?re all chortling, roaring with empowerment? Because I don?t. I believe Hefner should hop off sharpish.