UK Edition
At least the legendary nightclub owner protected his dancers. Today's porn has fewer scruples
Of all the tributes and arched barbs aimed at the late Peter Stringfellow this week, the word "morality" has, predictably, been has hard to locate compared to, say, "mane", "cleavage" and "leopard print".
Yet, when I chatted with the night club owner back in 2006 (say what you will about Stringfellow, he never knowingly refused an interview request from the press) I left the Soho branch of his eponymous nightclub with a feeling of having met a man in possession of a recondite, but definitely adroit, ethical code.
“No girl who dances here will ever leave with a customer on the same night,” he stated with typical Yorkshire bluntness.
“If they want to meet the next day for lunch and start dating then that’s fine,” he continued, sipping a sparkling water in his white suit, sans shirt, his displayed chest hair greying but still substantial.
“But the men who come here have to realise that there are rules. And respecting the women who work here is top of that list of rules.”
Frankly, this almost headmasterly sternness was not what I’d been expecting.
Peter’s clubs, which, back in their Eighties and Nineties heyday had attracted the likes of Christian Slater, Mel Gibson and Damon Albarn, had long since lost their A-list lustre by the mid-noughties, with City boys, tourists and reality show contestants keeping the strippers' poles busy with exotic, mononymously named dancers.
Yet Stringfellow’s passing, alongside the long decline of his club’s in terms of celeb cache, has been, mistakenly, taken by some as yet more proof that the battle against laddish misogyny and lurid objectification of women is over. Swap my pornos for Pankhurst biographies, fellas? Consider it already done.
Strip clubs are never going to be the most fertile of grazing pastures in which to debate equality. But the rules imposed on Stringfellow’s customers by Peter have a certain quaintness to them. Don’t touch the dancers. Don’t insult the dancers. Keep your trousers on. And behave yourself.
But now of course, there’s a different kind of strip club for men who, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t consider being an audience for titillation without first expending cash on strangers for the experience.
In the world of online porn an erection is just a connection away. The virtual strip shows are (often) free. You can surf for the rest of your lifetime and never see the same girl’s body twice. And you don’t have to put clothes on, head into Soho or buy an overpriced gin and tonic from the bar to get any of it.
Liberating as this may be, there’s a problem: namely the complete, total and absolute lack of a door policy or house rules in the virtual strip club and sex show that dominates the vast majority of the internet.
Anyone can come in and do whatever they want with legal implications that are so laughably remote as to be beyond consideration. You want to shout abuse at women while they dance online on your screen? Go ahead mate. It’s on that site over there in the corner. You’re fine. Nobody’s looking. You want to humiliate and coerce women forever with no palpable consequences? Yep, you’ve come to the right place.
I yearn for the day (and I do think that day will come in my lifetime) when women and men alike are so in touch with our sexualities, our peccadillos and our bodies that the need for strip clubs in their present form will be as useful as edible underpants or falafel-flavoured condoms.
But until then, I'll take Stringfellow’s analogue approach towards overt displays of female sexuality for a male audience any day over digital orgiastic anarchy where culpability for criminal acts can be evaded with little more than a change of IP address.
Some men, and I do only mean some, haven’t been reformed in the post-Weinstein landscape, they've simply gone ever deeper online. And here lies a world of nocturnal debasement that no club owner, no matter how impressive his chest hair, could ever hope, or even desire to police.
Why seedy misogyny did not die with Peter Stringfellow – and it might be even worse