ooooo love a think about strip clubs, I do.
A) Your friend's a dick because anyone who tries to make someone do something they've said they don't want to do and in fact actively dislike the idea of doing, is a dick. This applies whether it's stripping or sodding zorb football.
B) - long rant -
I have stripper friends, and I have attended many, many strip shows, both in mixed groups and groups of women only. Never been to a male strip club, don't care about going, it's not my thing.
I'll admit it, I love watching strippers. I love watching dancing, generally, and frankly I find female dancers a ton more fun to watch than men. I like that strippers are encouraged to look powerful, and to perform feats that require bravery and strong muscles. I also like the glitter and the sultriness.
I think that a strip club is the only place where women of body types that are well outside the 'thin white blonde' norm are regarded as properly sexy, in the sense of 'sexy' that we expect from actresses/pop stars/ all females presented in all media. There's no niche here, no othering of the chubby, the black, the bespectacled. If you can work a pole, you're 'sexy' - despite it being only in that shameful 'male gaze has value' way - but honestly watching strippers has made me personally feel better about my body. I NEVER see my own body in bodies on show that are regarded as 'sexy'. Except at strip clubs.
- HOWEVER - ---
I used to feel that all of this made strip clubs ok. That and 'well, if someone wants to be a stripper then that's her call' and also 'who am I to judge what led a woman to do this, and let's talk about ways women have to make money' and also 'if men are going to be dicks about it then that's their problem and lets look at that, rather than the women or the clubs themselves.'
But then, the more I went, the more I realised that what I'm essentially doing is making it ok for the asshole dudes, the dudes who go 'as a joke' (what joke? where is the joke? what 'laffs' are we having, here) to feel like they're not asshole dudes.
And also, no matter what my reasons are, my great reasons for loving strip clubs and my 'real' enjoyment of the 'art' and whatever I might personally feel about female bodily empowerment, I am still, by standing up for it, enabling a whole lot of leering pricks to feel better about what leering pricks they are, because they can point at me and say 'well, she's here! See! Women like strippers too!'
The strippers I know, to varying degrees, don't think much of men. I guess dealing with leering pricks will do that to you. But it worries me. I think to an extent it ruins your opinion of men. Though... the fact that that happens maybe says something pretty depressing about men.
Basically, I think it just fundamentally can't be ok, in the world we live in. Because it's just such a pure view of how transactional women's bodies are thought to be. And of what we're valued for. And it doesn't matter what I personally think about it. It shouldn't be ok for men to think they can go leer at women as long as they pay them. And to be allowed to think that if you pay a woman and she's polite to you, it means she liked you.
TL;DR - I used to like strip clubs and now I don't, because I think my liking them, on balance, does more harm than good.