Scan Magazine

By Mette Lisby

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IS IT JUST ME… Who is slightly bewildered by the concept of strip clubs?

Hot women endlessly and deliberately ­excite and arouse men, but the men do not get to be with them? Isn’t that like paying to watch someone play with food when you’re really hungry?  “You see this burger? Doesn’t it look GREAT! Imagine how fantastic it must taste. Oh, here’s the fun part… you can’t have it.”

Apparently strip clubs are not subject to the logic that exists in the real world.  In real life, men get totally pissed off if women entice them and then back out. In the real world, if a woman is scantily clad it’s perceived as an invitation to ALL men, obviously contradicting the self-declared exclusivity of strip clubs. In real life, scantily clad women are not oozing exclusivity at all – they’re regarded more like a “help-yourself-buffet”.

A friend of mine recently went through a period of a pretty high frequency of strip club visits, only to reach the point where he declared it made him slightly delusional because it “lured him into believing that every woman wanted him.” He gave it up, repulsed by himself, when he sincerely suspected a sweater-clad, rucksack-carrying librarian to be “shooting him hot looks and definitely being up to something.”

That’s the illusion a strip club creates. That the guy is center of the universe and is simply THAT irresistible to ALL women, and that women surely have no purpose on this Earth except to please him. Imagine if the same clubs existed for women. I am not talking about clubs boosting Chippendale shows; after all, square-built men covered in baby-oil, dancing strictly in formation, take up a significantly small space in the female hierarchy of needs. No, I mean little oases where women could go and meet good-looking, selfless men who stroked our hair, told us we were gorgeous and beautiful and assured us that they would take care of the laundry and empty the dishwasher. We would line up immediately.

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Mette Lisby is Denmark’s leading female comedian. She invites you to laugh along with her monthly humour columns. Since her stand-up debut in 1992, Mette has hosted the Danish versions of “Have I Got News For You” and “Room 101”.