| Date: 12/28/2007 6:19pm |
Name: qbg |
| Subject: On dilution, etc. Was "RE: Residence Upset . . ." |
[qbg]--> I was just going to let this stand, as I didn't really disagree with most of what you said, but Z has made a good point about the evolution from stripping to lapping, and that brings some other things to mind.
[saxbeat]--> I'm not worried about competing for anyone's attention at the clubs I go to. If there were half as many clubs, perhaps each club would have twice as many dancers!
[qbg]--> Perhaps! But not likely. It doesn't seem to me that the trend toward more clubs has been accompanied by one toward smaller clubs. Maybe the opposite.
[saxbeat]--> When I started clubbing, there were not many clubs in L.A. I'd guess fewer than a dozen. And EVERY dancer was at least an 8. It's not fuzzy memory or nostalgia, or wishful thinking. They were all fantastic in face and body, and frequently, in attitude.
[qbg]--> Heh-heh, fantastic attitude is understandable, when they could manipulate us pervs from six feet away rather than facing us in all our oily proximity.
[saxbeat]--> Over the years, the dancers have gotten plainer and plainer. The best dancer at the best club I've seen in the last 10 years can't compete with the worst dancer at an average club (there really weren't any bad clubs) in, say, 1985.
[qbg]--> I'll take your word for it; I wasn't into clubbing back then. And It seems reasonable on the face of it that dancers have gotten, on average, worse-looking as clubs have proliferated. As for your flight of hyperbole: Having no useful memory of those days, I'll not complain. I'll just note that Jamie of the Bare, whose absence is noted in recent posts by drmatt, is not only the best-looking dancer I saw this year, but the best-looking dancer I could imagine seeing. Different strokes, I guess.
[saxbeat]--> The dancers at Bare Elegance in 1987 were literally Playboy quality. It was like every dancer was a 9 or a 10. Last time I was there, they were barely Suicide Girls quality. I don't think one struck me as better than an 8.
Even Venus Faire had knockout dancers in 1985.
I remember going to a club called "The Sunset Strip" on Sunset Blvd., near Tower Records, back in the late '70s and it was as if I'd walked into a party at the Playboy Mansion.
There is nowhere now, where I'd be likely to have that feeling. Even the venerable 4Play and Bare Elegance are getting by with shifts full of 7s. Most clubs are getting by with mostly 5s and 6s. There are many times I have been to a club and not seen a single girl over a 7. (Yes, I know this is very subjective.)
Now, I still enjoy myself, and some of these ladies are sexy in their own way, and many of them give fine lap dances, but it just isn't the same, and I blame the dilution of having 100+ clubs in L.A.
[qbg]--> Again, I agree, dilution seems a reasonable culprit. If the number of strip clubs grows faster than the population, and thus faster than the population of strippers, we'll have (we've had) dilution. This is partly mitigated by the influx of more young women into the stripper pool, on account of the money to be made from lap dancing. But not completely. Probably nowhere near completely.
You seem primarily concerned with looks, and you've said about all that needs to be said about that. But it seems to me there's more to it. As you said, some dancers are sexy in their own way and give a fine lap -- but it's not the same. To which I'd reply: Thank God! I can only imagine, or I prefer not to imagine, what kind of laps those former 10's and 9's would have given. The game has changed. Dancer looks have run downhill not just because of dilution along a single quality axis but because a couple more axes have been added. Nowadays, a stripper has to be able to lap, and to lap, for many of us, she has to be able to talk. It goes almost without saying that selection in favor of talking and lapping abilities is going to mean selection against looks. We can't have everything. And it's we PLs who are doing this selecting. Sounds a little crazy to say a guy doesn't want a club with the best-looking girls possible, but he doesn't. And he shows it every visit by declining the little-sister laps the club's best looker is offering in favor of the girl who takes her thong off most quickly on stage. As a result, the club's best looker quits, and the club's average looxometer rating goes down, but its average lapometer rating goes up.
Club management would probably just as soon have lookers, and they'll keep some unproductive lookers around just for, well, just for looks, but it's easier than I imagine it used to be for a girl with merely passable looks to get a shot at a job in an SC. Furthermore, the lookers themselves select against stripping, in the sense that the current environment selects for girls who are willing to get up close and personal with the customers, and there's no reason to believe that's a quality that's correlated with looks.
But looks, as you say, are subjective. I'm not sure how comfortable I'd feel in a club that called to mind a party at the Playboy Mansion. And not just for the environment, but I don't always find Playboy models that attractive. Aside from that, though, I don't see the point in letting the great be the enemy of the good. Especially when it's the past great vs. the present good. You allow that today's girls can be sexy "in their own way." That's a nice bit of damning with faint praise -- but I'm glad that my faves are not sexy in somebody else's way. I dunno, maybe it's age, but I walk into the Bare these days, I don't really need better-looking girls.
So when a new club opens, I'm more likely to think of it as a way of making more girls available to me than of diluting the pool. True, the pool may be diluted. Most of the hires new to the area will register worse on the combined looks-lap-like scale that for me passes for true quality in the current era. But a few won't. And for me, it only takes a few to turn a club from a statistic on this site into a destination.
[saxbeat]-->Just out of curiosity, what are the four nudie clubs on the Westside? Only three come to mind off the top of my head.
- 4Play
- Silver Reign
- Skin
- ???
Fantasy Island and Plan B aren't nude, of course; are you using the term "nudie" colloquially?
[qbg]--> I was thinking of the Star Strip. Not exactly west side, maybe, but I was trying to make the point that the area does not have many clubs, so I bent over backward to include everything. But not too far backward. Skin is no farther west than the Star is, and it's closer to the Star than to Silver Reign, which is several miles away.
qb "not so much diluted as deluded" g |
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