The Strip Club Dating Survival Guide (9 page)

If you do decide to go with a tie, or your outfit just doesn’t look right without one, loosen up the collar. Don’t pull the tie askew as if to suggest that your day at the insurance brokerage just kicked your ass sideways, and you can’t breathe from all the fucking excitement. Instead, artfully loosen up the tie as if you think you’re
Michael Buble 
about to hit the stage in Vegas or something.

And then there are shoes. If you have to scrimp on the cost and quality of your wardrobe due to financial constraints, shoes are the one place you should clearly make an exception. The quality, perceived cost, wear and condition of a person’s shoes say a lot about what kind of person they are, and this is something that most women are somehow directly jacked into.

If you look and feel fantastic, but your shoes are crap or are falling to pieces, any woman with half a brain in her head will make a mental note that you are full of shit, even if she doesn’t actually call you out on it.

Your shoes don’t have to be some ridiculously expensive set of Italian loafers, but they shouldn’t be picked up from your local discount retailer for $15 either. Even if you, for some reason don’t care what other people think, I promise you that shelling out a minimum $100 for
a decent set of kicks 
will make you a happier, more confident person.

The extra effort required to make sure that you look, smell and feel fantastic when you come in physical contact with soft, half-naked women is worth the relatively small amount of time and money that you’ll have to invest. Shop around for the stuff you wear, balancing quality with cost, avoiding the standard reliance on big-box retailers for your wardrobe.

Try, whenever you can, to have things
tailored
. If money is an issue, check your local dry cleaner for cheap tailoring services. It won’t be as slick or comprehensive as you would get at a men’s clothier or tailor, but they can usually make sure your clothes are
the right length, and the waistlines fit correctly.
Most guys don’t think of it much, but the accuracy of a hemline or fit of the pant waist can often make a
dramatic 
difference in a man’s appearance.

This is another helpful hint: place a mirror near the front door of your house or apartment. Get in the habit of checking yourself before walking out the door. Being forced to stare at yourself for a moment before going out in public can help you catch any issues with your appearance, as well as giving you the opportunity to practice looking good, standing tall, and projecting a confident persona.

Remember that how you look makes a statement about who you are; so take the time and effort to be a man that any stripper you meet will be attracted to.

Oh, and quit biting your fingernails, you
savages
.

Chapter 6. Love Machine

I’m in love with a stripper.

-
T
HOMAS
O
TWAY, AUTHOR OF THE 1681 COMEDY, “
T
HE
S
OLDIER’S
F
ORTUNE” IN WHICH THE TERM STRIPPING WAS FIRST USED IN REFERENCE TO A WOMAN TAKING HER CLOTHES OFF FOR MONEY.

Despite some of the things I have said so far, I truly do like strippers, quite a bit, in fact.

That’s why I would hate to think that some kind of misogynistic dick might be reading this book, thinking he’s gonna lay down all sorts of heinous crap with what he may learn from me. It’s particularly fucked when you stop to consider that he’d be pulling his shit on some unsuspecting girl probably sitting beside him dressed in nothing more than her underwear and a smile.

Growing up without their dads and not knowing what to do about it is the only crime most strippers are actually guilty of, thus becoming the target of some man-boy’s asinine crap fetish is something both
undeserved and wholly unfair. 
So, let’s clarify if we can. If you hate dancers, or women in general, please stop reading this book and go back to
torturing puppies, training to be a cage fighter, voting Republican
or whatever it is that you do with your time.

Gentlemen’s clubs are places you go to revel in the experience of intimately connecting with members of the opposite sex in a liberated, erotic, social environment. It’s like a church where you worship the idea of being with an
idealized version
of
femine sexuality.

If you don’t like, or can’t accept the idea of strip joint as a form of
sexual temple
, don’t worry about it. Instead, just think of it as a miniature theme park that allows you to forget the oft-depressing truth of your 9 to 5 life and, for a moment, touch, taste, smell, hear and see all that you have been missing. This, by the way, is a
lot.

ENVY

In this context, the correctly created strip club experience generates envy, and that is a marvelous thing. When I say envy I mean it as a distinct and separate emotional experience from jealousy
.
Envy
 is a
positive emotion
in moderation, whereas jealousy is always negative, regardless of what women’s magazines may be saying these days.

Envy is the emotional impulse that arises when we see something that we don’t currently possess, and feel a powerful desire to have it for ourselves. This urge is often coupled with the realization that we may have this thing if we want, and if we’re willing to do the work required to get it.
Jealousy
,
on the other hand, is that nasty thing that springs from fear of loss when we discover our wife or girlfriend
sexting
 with some other guy.

You and I should always be willing to accept the intrusion of envy into the crap routine that normally passes for our lives. The deep, underlying force of an emotion such as this stands as a reminder that
laziness and procrastination
 are nothing more than a way of
excusing the current, unfulfilling life conditions we may be willing to tolerate
.

Envy can be the cause of finally getting back to the gym and losing the weight you always planned to, changing the way you dress, switching jobs, altering spending patterns, putting some money in your savings, setting goals, going back to school, etc.

HATERS

Strip clubs are the ultimate temple to the powerful mental states of envy, desire, sexual arousal, and
escapist fantasy
. Somebody walking into one of these places with the need to denigrate women, using terms like
whore, slut, cunt
, or openly referring to the females as
bitches
has an evident problem. If, by some chance, you are one of these guys…
and yes, I know you’re not
,
but still
…I suggest that you pick up the phone and find yourself a therapist.

Honestly though, it’s not just the dancers who are victimized by such vulgar displays of
he-man-girl-hating
in the strip club either. Most of the male clientele aren’t there because they want to make asses of themselves, feel stupid, worthless, and unattractive or because they want other people to feel that way.

Most guys are coming into the club because they’re
lonely
 and they need someone to talk to. Maybe their wife is a cold shrew and a young, soft girl wriggling around in their laps is about the best they can hope for in life, how do you know? Hating on the strippers and acting like an
ass-hat
 blows the experience for the other customers, guys who are just looking for a little relief from their
shit-lives.

Negative assholes, the guys who are genuinely just
haters,
 generally don’t last long in the club anyway. Haters usually show their true colors sooner rather than later and get the heave-ho from the premises. Sometimes it’s starting fights, arguing or insulting the staff, refusing to pay for dances, trying to skip on a bar tab or flicking quarters at the girl on stage.

Whatever the issue is, they aren’t welcome for terribly long, yet some haters have a cunning ability to stick around even when they’re clearly not welcome. Hopefully, the club you hang around at doesn’t tolerate their form of bullshit much.

SUCKERS

The misogynistic dancer haters are generally at one end of the customer spectrum, but who is at the other end? At the other end, both literally and figuratively, is a guy who is fully engaged in being a gullible, mouth-breathing stripper-slave. This guy is truly a sucker for stripper-game, and can’t seem to keep things straight.
Suckers
 are
true believers
in wonder and beauty of the dancer that they’re into this week.

A sucker thinks of his stripper as a thoroughly lovely person who honestly just needs some help navigating this wicked world of ours, and he is just determined, for the moment, to be her knight in shining armor. Except that it never works out that way, not really.

The sucker worldview does not admit to
real human flaws in the real human dancers
. They do not, or perhaps cannot, conceive of a 23 year old topless showgirl as being someone who would be
selfish, dumb, inexperienced or petty.

Anything that a stripper does “wrong” is explained as outside circumstances acting in a way that just can’t be controlled. In other words, true suckers mirror the emotional states and worldviews of the young dancers that they are so enamored with, at least when they are in the context of the club. Maybe when these guys are at home alone they stop to reflect on things and soberly recognize that the girls are flawed beings full of their own bullshit…yeah,
probably not.

It has been my experience that most of these guys are true believers pretty much twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. When some girl finally disappoints them for the hundredth time, and they just can’t take it anymore, they simply switch the focus of their affection to some other dancer.

Despite any individual setbacks, however, the Sucker belief in the sanctity of the dancer remains generally unshaken, even if they are now forced to shun an individual girl or two who just couldn’t recognize the Sucker for the glittering cavalier that he believes himself to be.

Suckers are the type of guys who are sitting down to dinner with their family when their
ATF
(All Time Favorite) dancer secretly texts their phone with a message like,

“Get your ass down to the club right now or I will never speak to you again!”

Now, just between you and me, the idea that this dancer is never, ever going to call our guy again is quite ludicrous. Even if she did follow through on her threat it could likely be the
best thing
that could happen to this customer.

Because…Well, because she’s a fucking asshole and, if nothing else, deserves to get blown the fuck off by this guy.

Nonetheless, our sucker is probably going to freak the fuck out, thinking that his darling dancer girl is truly mad at him for
really-real.
He thinks that she deserves the best and that he has simply let his girl down, just like every other man in her life. He’s not one of them, is he? A follow-up message from his dominating stripper crush might read,

“You know that my rent is due tomorrow, how can you be so fucking irresponsible?”

In this case, our man would undoubtedly offer an excuse for leaving the dinner table, claiming some forgotten errand requiring a trip to the store before it closes for the night. While he may actually end up going to a store on his way to the club, it will be just to pick up some extra cash at the ATM, and some flowers for the stripper he has so thoroughly disappointed.

Dancers treat haters and suckers with practically opposite amounts of contempt, disgust, appreciation and respect. Haters normally get the respect of the dancers (if not the love), after all, they are seemingly unaffected by stripper game and are utterly unpredictable in temperament and action.

In many ways, this kind of guy can remind the girls of their abusive step dad or loser boyfriend and, in its way that can be attractive. Haters also get the disgust because they are assholes who, as I said, remind these vulnerable, psychologically scarred girls of their abusive step dads and loser boyfriends.

Suckers tend to pick up the reverse end on the emotional scale here. Suckers are treated, at least behind their backs, with total contempt mainly because no self-respecting attractive female can seriously think of a guy so easily henpecked and controlled as truly being a man. On the other hand, suckers are genuinely appreciated for what they are: a walking ATM that come when called.

The hater and the sucker may represent extreme ends of the strip club customer scale, but there are certainly plenty of other customer types that lay in the gulf between them. These two kinds of club denizens are not necessarily indicative of the kind of guy that patronizes clubs, hangs out with strippers or gets lap dances at a
bachelor party.
 They are simply highly visible and recognizable extremes.