d21 > News > Durham Strip Club Debate Goes National
Durham Strip Club Debate Goes National
Added on 01/04/2008
Oliver Gregory updates us on the ongoing North Road strip club saga, which has now led to parliamentary debate...
Local MP Roberta Blackman-Woods led a debate in parliament on how the 2003 Licensing act has been poorly implemented particularly by Durham City Council.
This act significantly changed the way alcohol and entertainment venues were regulated, bringing some welcome changes such as greater power for local councils to make decisions on whether to grant licenses.
However, the ardent campaigner against the development is quoted as saying that she ‘does not believe that Durham City Council has done enough to monitor the effect of their licensing decisions and has not given enough consideration to the impact of those decisions on local people.’
The focus of her disquiet was Durham City Councils decision to grant a license to allow Vimac Leisure, the owners of the Loft nightclub, to allow lap dancing on the premises. This was later overturned by an appeal in the Magistrates court; who ruled that the council was wrong to grant the license as the club didn’t meet the objectives of the Licensing Act.
The purpose of the debate is to address such licensing issue problems: “I will be using my adjournment debate in Westminster Hall on Wednesday to highlight these and other licensing issues in Durham and to press the Minister on how Durham City Council can better use the powers it has, and whether more needs to be done to tackle late-night disturbance to local people, and to make it easier for lap-dancing clubs to be turned down."
The situation in Durham is reflective of a nationwide increase in strip clubs, with over 300 opening in the past decade. This is partly attributable to the 2003 act, which despite giving authorities greater control, no longer requires venues to get special permission for displays of nudity. As such they are covered under the same premises regulations which are used for normal pubs and bars despite the significant difference the nature of the establishments.
One organisation, Object, is trying to get a change in the legislation with its Lap-Dance Challenge. They want lap dancing clubs and the like to be classified as ‘sex encounter establishments’ which would lead them to be regarded as part of the sex industry. Such a change would allow authorities to appropriately regulate them in ways that the 2003 act does not. Such regulation would enable any proposed venue to be properly scrutinised and not considered in the same way as a conventional bar would be. These regulations would have to include the assurance that such establishments are not placed in locations where they could pose a possible risk to, or are ardently opposed by, the general public.
Aside from any moral debate concerning the presence of such a club, statistics indicate that the presence of such establishments significantly increase the incidence of sexually motivated crimes. The Lilith project in Camden found that in the three years before and after four lap dancing clubs opened the level of rape rose by 50 per cent and sexual assault by 57 per cent. Although the proposed Loft development isn’t on the same scale it is possible to foresee how its opening could lead to a rise of such incidents, placing student safety at significant risk.
The proposals for the club are still ongoing with Vimac Leisure applying for a judicial review of the overturning of their application, despite the long-term campaign against it by residents and students alike.
Oliver Gregory
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Comments for "Durham Strip Club Debate Goes National"
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And I do think there is a link between young girls being targeted for pole dancing kits and the acceptance of lapdancing/strip clubs as a normal form of entertainment now. It's permeating down through society so that it becomes the norm for even young girls and gives them an ideal to live up to, that quite frankly they probably won't or shouldn't be trying to live up to anyway.
If you want the full story, I suggest you read Ariel Levy's book on the rise of raunch culture in which she quotes shocking cosmetic surgery statistics among young women (and yes, I am aware that it is probably rising among men as well, but in no way to the same degree). They, unsurprisingly, have increased almost exponentially in the last decade. This is a situation which almost exclusively benefits men and the small minority of women who perhaps feel empowered by taking their clothes off for men who have to pay for it, but I would imagine that they are in a very small minority.
15/05/2008 10:58
07/05/2008 09:41
the petition Stephanie provided a link to isn't calling for a ban, but for a reclassification, so the stuff about people's right to do this is rather irrelevant.
I think a useful (if loose) comparison can be made between the consumption of sex and the consumption of alcohol. A lot of people can drink and not start fights, drink drive, indulge in public urination etc, but across society a significant minority are incapable of not overindulging. This isn't the fault of the alcohol industry, but it doesn't mean that the alcohol industry shouldn't be closely regulated to minimise this behaviour.
Similarly, I don't doubt that a lot of customers of strip-clubs recognise what they are doing as very different to prostitution or exploitation, but across society there will a significant minority who won't understand where the line is drawn, or who will just ignore it. We can recognise this is problem without calling for prohibition.
Incidentally, whose Mum does 'extras', and does anyone have her phone number?
06/05/2008 17:49
>"Don't all you guys think that it's sad that pole dancing kits were being marketed to 10 and 11 year old girls last Christmas in Argos?"
What in the world does that have to do with adults visiting strip clubs? I abhor the marketing of pole dancing kits to children, but why does being against the sexualization of children automatically imply being against something that adults do with their free time?
>"If the situation were reversed, and women were paying fit young guys to dance around for them, guys would soon feel insecure and object."
The situation *IS* reversed - haven't you ever of heard of male strippers?! I am unaware of any male organizations who are calling for a ban on that.
I trust you are also unaware that various groups in Durham have employed (sorry, should I say "objectified"?) topless men at various functions, e.g. as waiters at a performance of the vagina monologues? Do you also object to that?
>"women are expected to just accept men doing this because 'they are men' and 'this is what men do'."
I don't expect you to approve of anything *for those reasons*. However, I do expect you to respect that men (and women) have the right to do so, regardless what other people may think, on account of being adults that live in a free society.
As an aside, can I just point out that I am rather disappointed with some of the arguments brought forth by the anti-strip side? And not just the "the women don't enjoy their jobs" stuff, but also the very disingenuous and slapdash use of statistics in the Lilith Report, which has done more to push me towards the pro side than anything else. Is some proper research and well supported arguments too much to expect from an organization that tries to influence public policy?
04/05/2008 17:59
http://www.celiabarlow.org.uk/98d7827a-d358-60e4-61dd-221b0b2223b0?PageId=dd2f6bcc-f586-9f44-a171-49255181d73a
You can also visit www.object.org.uk. They are running a campaign and you can download a model letter to send to your MP about this issue.
I think it's important that these places are recategorised. Society seems to regressing a few decades in its treatment of women. Don't all you guys think that it's sad that pole dancing kits were being marketed to 10 and 11 year old girls last Christmas in Argos? Do you want your daughters growing up thinking that it's normal for their dads to pay girls barely older than them to take their clothes off?
If the situation were reversed, and women were paying fit young guys to dance around for them, guys would soon feel insecure and object. Yet women are expected to just accept men doing this because 'they are men' and 'this is what men do'. That is an argument from the 1950s.
04/05/2008 11:33
you all go on like little kids !!!!
02/05/2008 14:29
Wow, this thread has degenerated into immaturity quickly...
29/04/2008 10:35
29/04/2008 00:31
28/04/2008 22:42
28/04/2008 20:16
28/04/2008 18:40
"i wouldnt live in an area anywhere near a strip club, it brings arseholes and rowdy drunken chauvinists."
Dear oh dear. Gotta be one of the most laughable bouts of prejudice I've ever read. Truly Hitler-esque. If written about any group other than men, you'd probs get a police knock.
"Im glad to say not every man agrees to such places and infact the majority are sensitive and moral enough to realise how sordid and pathetic these places are."
Have you ever actually been in one of "these places"?? To be fair, I'm happy to admit I have and was thoroughly turned off by it.
The exploitation (by the girls) was 100 per cent sickening and the drinks were outrageously expensive.
The whole place was nowhere near as seedy as I'd hoped, none of the girls were dressed half as sexily/scantily as the girls I'd been surrounded by earlier in the night and am every time I go out and none of the girls seemed to do 'extras'.
Each to their own though I say, let those that do enjoy these fully licensed, fully regulated, fully expensive establishments to do so in peace.
Personally I'd rather ban snobbish, outdated, dictator stylee views like yours. Banning them would make the world a better place.
28/04/2008 00:20
Rapes Clubs open
1999 46 2
2000 83 4
2001 79 5
2002 69 6
2003 47 6
2004 51 5
2005 72 5
Choose 1999 as your base year (in 2003) and compare it with 2002 and hey presto 50% increase!
Completely selective use of statistics.
26/04/2008 16:32
In scotland it is illegal to strip fully in these places, at least they have gone that far.but banning them all together would make the world a better place.
25/04/2008 12:03
What I do object to is being called a "daily mail reading bandwagonningdoogooder" simply for having an opinion that does not match yours (and by the way, I never suggested strip clubs should be banned, I was simply defending Laura's point about how giving a man a lap dance might be viewed as something more sordid and quite different from two people having sex because they feel like it,not because they stand to gain something from it).
23/04/2008 17:28
This is the kind of absolute gold I expect when it comes to a discussion like this. Do you think you a foreign, low-skilled toilet cleaner enjoys hosing the shite off pub toilets? Do you think Donnchadh enjoys teaching philosophy to snotty nosed first years? No-one enjoys their job except possibly those mentally touched men who work in slaughterhouses; its no excuse not to open a place of questionable leisure because those working there may or may not enjoy it.
I think you're visualising some scrutty little place where tiny skag-addled belarussian teenagers are ushered in like goats by enormous bearded mean and are forced to strip while hordes of salivating punters sit nursing erections and throwing pennies. I think Sean's description is more accurrate though.
For the record I've never been or wanted to go to a strip club but I do object to daily mail reading bandwagonningdoogooders who have enormous misconceptions about the whole thing.
23/04/2008 03:36
I don't know what sort of strip clubs you've been to (or know of) but all the ones I've been to have dancers who are anything but poor or foreign - even in the Middlesbrough one (Middlesbrough for christ's sake!) the girls are if anything middle class, and do it because they're comfortable with experience and it's pretty easy money (£10 for a five minute dance?!). Obviously that's not the same everywhere and there are some more seedy establishments but if we're talking about strip clubs on a whole yet focussing on just the bad ones that conform to this stereotypical view of unregulated brothels full of drunken, violent men abusing exploited, vulnerable women then we could do the same for pretty much any walk of life (in terms of the exploitation and 'coercion' of the work). Modern strip clubs (ie the ones with licenses, not the dodgy back street ones that some seem to keep imagining in this debate about a licensed club) are clean, sanitised environments with the safety and wellbeing of the dancers at mind.
And a smaller point - to be honest, my girlfriend probably is a bit gay, but she's even more heterosexual and that doesn't mean she's having sex with every man she sees. Although (maybe this won't be such a small point after all), now I've thought about it, there's nothing that sexual about the experience, I genuinely feel like it's just a beautiful and enjoyable thing to watch - if it was anything sexual I wouldn't need to pay £10 a pop (as well as the extortionate entrance and drink prices) for the privilege in this day and age.
23/04/2008 00:01
As for the guy who goes to strip clubs with his girlfriend, are we talking about mixed strip clubs here? Cos if we're not then there may be a slight chance that his girlfriend is more gay than open minded..
22/04/2008 22:21
Though in all seriousness, with satisfaction being a subjective concept and us enjoying strip clubs a lot, no, not really.
As for the government running strip clubs as a tax - I'd say the sky-high cost for a license is effectively that already.
21/04/2008 17:05
if that's your idea of trying to get someone's views straight, I'd hate to see you lazily mischaracterising them. It's hardly ridiculous to comment on strip clubs in response to an article on, well, strip clubs. More to the point, there are good reasons to feel particularly uneasy about these emporia, for reasons to do with the context in which the ogling of the female form occurs. I don't think the 'consensual-nonconsensual' distinction quite captures it, but there's a pretty obvious difference between two (or more, if they're feeling particularly adventurous) persons having sex in private, and sexual titillation being procured and enjoyed in public. (You might procure your pornography in public, but chances are you don't enjoy it there.)
On a slightly different note, spending money at stripclubs must be one of the most profoundly dumb pursuits ever invented. Economists call lotteries a tax on stupidity - maybe the government should start running strip clubs as a tax on sexual frustration. That's one resource we're unlikely to ever run out of. (And as for the guy who goes to one with his girlfriend, could you honestly think of nothing more satisfying to do with her on a Saturday night?)
20/04/2008 17:21
19/04/2008 20:08
'Lapdancing clubs encourage one to reformulate sex as something that is not only not mutually pleasurable, but also not fully consensual.'
That would come from the fact that a man or woman has paid for the pleasure of having a sexual lap-dance and the lapdancer is obliged to dance? What about nude models? Does that portray a wonderful picture of consenual sex? And not even necessarily nude models: models themselves become sex objects who are paid for the pleasure of posing for men. All pornography, I'm sure, would be tarred with this brush also, regardless of the degree of sensuality it's trying to portray.
What I'm saying, of course, is singling out strip clubs as objectifying women and causing sexual harrassment whilst the media is absolutely filled to the brim with images of female non-consensual sexuality is the most ridiculous and laughable comment on society one could make.
I assume then, that if you were to stop the building of the strip club, you would ignore the plethora of other mediums available that do the same thing?
One last point: as Sean has already said, his girlfiend attends the stripclub and thousands of other women do every year. This 'Lilth project', which is absolutely riddled with causational problems anyway, talks about sexual assault but I suspect they are greatly referring to male on female assault. The women that attend these clubs manage not to go around raping and assaulting everyone they see (as I'm sure you see the booze fuelled shaven chimps leaving the strip club).
18/04/2008 11:01
That's not what they tell me on a standard night out in Planet...
16/04/2008 22:44
Laura, my problem with your statement was not the actual link between the two but your reasons for that link. I can't see any reason to believe that "Lapdancing clubs encourage one to reformulate sex as something that is not only not mutually pleasurable, but also not fully consensual."
15/04/2008 14:54
15/04/2008 12:11
15/04/2008 09:40
Laura - I fail to see how you can argue lapdancing has nothing to do with sex and then go on to link lapdancing as the cause to men being encouraged to feel entitled to sex.
On a more personal note, me and my girlfriend regularly attend the strip club in Middlesbrough and get dances together and we thoroughly enjoy ourselves (even though the prices are unbelievably extortionate). Of all the times we've been we've also never seen or heard of any trouble, and yes, that's including times when big groups of 'lads' are together being 'rowdy' and, I would imagine, thinking about sexually abusing and raping all the dancers. Because that's what men do.
13/04/2008 11:27
Sex is a consensual and, if done properly, enjoyable, act between two people. It has nothing to do with lapdancing/stripping, which is instead about men feeling entitled to perv over and freely comment on women's bodies. As the article said, "the Lilith project in Camden found that in the three years before and after four lap dancing clubs opened the level of rape rose by 50 per cent and sexual assault by 57 per cent." Lapdancing creates an environment in which men are encouraged to feel entitled to sex, and therefore to resent women who do not want to have sex with them. This is one of many contributing factors that lead to a society in which one in ten women will be sexually assaulted during her lifetime, with little chance of a conviction for her assaulter (less than five percent of rape cases currently result in conviction). It also leads to a society in which a woman can be blamed for her own rape because she 'led the man on'. If you're insecure about sex, get counselling. But access to women's bodies, whether in a strip club or everyday life, isn't something you're entitled to. Get over it.
12/04/2008 06:20
Funny, but, it's people like you who are ensuring that sex remains a taboo to be sniggered at and for people to feel desperately insecure about. Thanks a lot.
10/04/2008 18:39
I went to that, it was really good. The drinks were reasonably priced and it was a good laugh.
I agree that it was incredibly bad taste, but we all had a good time and it raised quite a lot of money for charity.
09/04/2008 17:57
I am not "opposed" to, or in favour of banning, porn by any means. I am open to occasionally hearing/reading about the experiences, good or bad, of those who've worked in the sex industry. Having said that, I do feel uncomfortable about the idea of the media being over-saturated with it. A few years ago, also while at Durham, an acquaintance I had met barely half an hour earlier started casually chatting to me all about his visit to a strip club the weekend before as if he was talking about the cinema or the pub. It's not so much the idea itself that bothers me but the idea of endless matter-of-fact promotion of it. So, you enjoy buying/selling sex? Jolly good. I like buying chocolate. I don't readily announce the fact to everyone I meet, buy rubbish magazines devoted to it that are on the main shelf in every petrol station, or go on rowdy daytrips to Thorntons with my friends.
09/04/2008 15:22