The UK has taken its lap-dancing cues from across the Atlantic Ocean in recent years. Clubs providing women taking their clothes off may have been around in Britain since The Windmill Club opened its Soho doors in 1931, but the rise of the clubs across the country owes more to the American model – flashier, more expensive, more lucrative and legitimised. As we have seen, the ease with which a club can open has long since meant they are no longer confined to Soho backstreets.

The success of clubs in the US has been phenomenal.  According to “Nudar”, a strip club search engine of sorts, there are around 3500 licensed strip clubs in the US (view a map here).The country’s largest club, The Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club in Las Vegas, covers 70,000 square feet and is open 24 hours a day, all year round.  It is also a largely visible industry – increasingly legitimized in popular culture. 

Quite how much money the industry generates as a whole is secretive and generally difficult to pin down due to the fragmented, disparate nature of the vast number of different clubs, but VCG Holdings – “a leading consolidator and operator of adult nightclubs in the United States” – who run twenty venues across ten states, reported a 61% increase in their total revenue in the first nine months of 2008 compared to the same period the previous year, rising to $15.2 million.

The VCG company profile perhaps demonstrates that while the UK may be following the lap-dancing lead of the Americans, the public furore that has arisen over here is largely absent over there. Indeed, the VCG profile states: “For years, sexual content has been increasing in the media including movies, television, magazines, newspapers and the Internet.  Public acceptance and demand for the premium quality adult entertainment nightclubs have become common in both cities and suburbs throughout the United States as there is an increasingly open and healthy attitude toward sexuality”

Read the full text of the profile here.

In the UK, this kind of acceptance of lap-dancing as “sexual content” is exactly the kind of thing that groups like Object are campaigning against, and what groups like the LDA strenuously deny. The assumption that, simply, sex sells functions as a business model in the US, but the British are finding it hard to stomach such a glaring conclusion, as shown by the fact that lap-dancing clubs are still legally “entertainment”, and not “sexually stimulating.”

The figures bear out the success of strip clubs. Their huge popularity of lap-dancing clubs, of course, is based on the basic notion of sex as lucrative marketing tool. Academics point to gender-based power struggles at work within the clubs. Allen Gregg, bar manager of The Clubhouse, a two floor behemoth on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas, thinks it is all to do with make-believe.

“People are buying into a fantasy, and they’re happy to pay for it,” he says, serving soft drinks across the bar. The Clubhouse offers fully nude dancing, and as such, under Dallas city ordnance, cannot serve alcohol. It is strictly BYOB. “Places like this, you can mingle with rockstars. You can be a rockstar if you want to. You can turn up in a stretch Hummer. You can drink Cristal. You can literally throw your money around. You can't do that at work. And there are girls everywhere. And these girls like you. At least for one song.”

The Clubhouse barely sleeps – its doors open at 11AM, shut at 4AM on weekends, with anywhere between ten and a hundred girls “on the floor” at any one time. Now it is after midnight on a Saturday, and the place is heaving. Here, the “no-touching” rule is strictly enforced theoretically, but generally utterly ignored by dancers and clients alike. Doormen hover everywhere, but as long as everything is running smoothly, it seems blind eyes are turned. A room in another part of the building is bathed in UV light – customers can daub the dancers with neon paint as they disrobe.

I am with a party of six. It is my friend’s bachelor party. He is getting married in a week. He is nowhere to be seen.

The Clubhouse is not a free for all. But if the UK continues taking its strip-club cues from the US, then those worried about the current trend of clubs in Britain haven’t seen anything yet. There is little doubt about the commoditisation of women in this environment. The rules here are made to be broken it seems; although there is certainly complicity between dancer and client when breaking the rules. Similarly, it is not clear whether or not the commodification of women is dictated by the men who run and fund club, or by the women themselves. After all, Allen tells me that the most successful of the dancers who work The Clubhouse and the countless other strip-joints in Dallas, can quite easily collect six figure incomes.

“Why do you think people like strip clubs, man?” says Allen. “Look around you.”