Skills? The dancers on Strictly Come Dancing are skilled dancers. The "dancers" in lap dancing clubs are there to get their clothes off and rub on men's laps. I could do that!
I do have respect for pole dancers though. Very hard to do. But it's a shame that men go to watch women dancing round a phallic symbol and to see the girls' bodies and not to admire their dancing skills. If it was about the dancing, they wouldn't be doing it in their underwear and more men would pole dance.
Sakura - why was he horrible? He was slimy and hypocritical. He tried to be charming but looked at me with his head cocked to one side, eyes looking out from under his eyelids like he was trying to flirt with me but all the while being incredibly patronising. He told me he would see me in church on Sunday implying I was part of some religious moral sect. This guy is a Muslim, in his 50s with daughters, and apparently his Muslim neighbours are horrified by what he's been trying to do (set up a lap dancing club with the intention of knocking it in the one next door to make a super-club and run it as a brothel too).
He's set up a few businesses in the city where I live and let them all fold.
He told me that he thought I was an ex-dancer and that was why I was so against them (?!). And apparently he also wants to open up a lap dancing club because he likes having young women fawning over him.
His "plan" was to run the place as a restaurant until 9pm at which point the place would turn into a lap dancing club.
So there you are....having a romantic meal with your other half and at 9pm the candles and the table gets whipped away and the poles are wheeled out. Yeah right!
The slight flaw in his application was that the plan didn't include a kitchen so quite where they were going to cook the food, we don't know! It was all clearly a front and thankfully the planning committee threw it out and the planning inspectorate upheld the decision after he took it to appeal. This is despite the chair of our licensing committee who was on the planning committee that day voting in favour of it (he is in favour of the sex industry).
It was claimed in the application that it would regenerate that part of the city and would attract the gay and lesbian communities. Yes, of course, because gay men and lesbians love hanging around that bastion of Neanderthal masculinity - a lap dancing club.
There's a guy who runs some lap dancing clubs in the South West and every time I hear him on the radio I feel like I need a shower. One of his clubs had its licence removed because it was breaching its licence conditions by offering "full body contact". It went to appeal and operated without a licence in the meantime for a year. In that year, it built a special "full body contact" area in the club. Police officers went in one evening with headcams and there is footage of one guy in the specially built area with his head buried in a naked lap dancer's breasts. The pair both panic when they see the officer! The owner and the manager are both sat there in the club arrogantly thinking they can get away with whatever they want. The licence got turned down on appeal and the club has closed.
He could open it as a normal club but why bother when he's lost his main source of income - the girls who paid £50 to £100 a night to work there. He's raking in thousands every week just by charging them to come to work.
The owner still whines to anyone who'll listen that it wasn't his fault, that it was local campaigners' fault, that the police had a vendetta against him, that women have been put out of work. The only person who lost him his licence was him because he failed, continually, to adhere to the licence conditions. They were told not to offer full body contact "during performances" so they just offered before and after instead!
And if that club is offering full body contact, the club up the road will want to do the same in order to compete.
As for the argument about well run and badly run clubs, the more I know about lap dancing, the more I disagree with them. I wouldn't use the word "well run" in conjunction with an industry which profits from women being treated as disposable sexual objects. The industry, as it is now, is tightly regulated but there are all sorts of problems associated with it - sex trafficking, prostitution, sexual assault. And the sense of entitlement that it gives to men is the worst outcome of all, IMO.