What Really Happens in the VIP Room of a Strip Club
By: Erin Taylor
Tags: Work, Mental Health, Money, Relationships, Sexuality

What really happens in the VIP room at a strip club?

On my first night in the champagne room, I really didn’t know what to expect. I knew I would dance in a private room for my customer, but I hoped I wouldn’t be dancing for the entire hour — I’d be exhausted if that were the case.

(For anyone unfamiliar, a champagne room is a curtained off or closed-door private room where the customer pays a flat fee per hour. The customer is also usually required to purchase a bottle of champagne or wine to use the room. Sometimes it’s just cocktails. Either way, it’s privacy and alcohol for you and the customer, although cameras are always on and your VIP server will come in from time to time to check-in.)

Thankfully, as soon as we got our drinks that night, my customer *John asked me to sit down so we could talk.

“Ahh, a talker. Score,” I thought. “I won’t have to dance the entire time.”

Yes, he was a talker, but I’d soon find out he was a broken soul.

I didn’t know what to do with this fifty-year-old man who ended up crying in my lap. He sobbed for most of our hour together about his lesbian wife cheating on him with her best friend in their bed while he was away on business. I wanted to console him, but honestly, I didn’t know what to say. I was 22 years old. No one had warned me about this depressing side of the strip club. And I’d discover over the years that this was something that happened often.

With time, I learned and tried to be as kind and healing to these wounded men as I could.

Imagine the most naked, unethical, and drunken therapist, with long hair extensions and fake eyelashes — that was me.

Over the next three years, I held the hands of many broken men.

I met an older man who was struggling with his sexuality and could not leave his wife of 30+ years. After he became a regular of mine, I wondered why he wasn’t going to see a licensed professional clinician. Or going to a gay club for dances. I asked him about it once I’d gotten comfortable enough with him.

He explained to me there were a solace and familiarity holding a nearly naked woman. It scared him to bring such an irreversible shift into his life, and he wanted to keep things as normal as possible for as long as he could. Strip clubs and naked women for him were normal, so he kept coming until one day, I never heard from him again.

I also held the hands of couples who weren’t right for each other.

There was a couple who came in every Saturday night to get “couple-dances” from me and then left in a raging fight. It never failed.

I couldn’t just tell them that insecure women and strip clubs do not mix — you never call an insecure woman insecure — so they kept coming back to the club and asking for me. It was excruciating, but they tipped me well, so I played my part in their game.

At one point, they stopped paying me to dance and instead paid me to listen to their awkward disagreements and plans for threesomes and then ask me to give my educated opinion.

Again, a professional therapist would’ve been more helpful for these two (and probably cheaper), but they insisted on my company. So, I stuck around.

They texted me months after I saw them that they were getting a divorce and wouldn’t be coming in again. It was awkward — even more so when the man in the relationship returned to see me without his wife, begging me to date him outside of the club.

It’s no secret that many people have strong negative opinions of strip clubs and, by association, strippers. These places are not for everyone and there’s nothing wrong with accepting that you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing naked women prance around making thousands of dollars a night–or watching your significant other getting rubbed on by an attractive woman wearing almost nothing. It’s not for everyone, and it says nothing bad about you or your relationship if you don’t enjoy adult entertainment.

But I write this story to provide a glimpse into the human side of the club.

Strippers are not there to steal your men. We’re working, paying our bills, feeding our families, and just trying to make the best of our situation. Many of us are there because we want to be. Some of us are not there by choice.

Most of the time, we’re there to be a pretty companion and listen. We pretend to be interested in conversations about the latest episode of Big Bang Theory. We listen to married men cry about their failing marriage and offer advice. We listen to men who can’t get it up in the bedroom and are looking for Viagra. And we listen with an open mind because it’s part of the job.

While the movies and rap videos paint strip clubs in a certain light, darkened by hard drugs, home wreckers, sinful women and cheating men, there is more than meets the eye.

The women (and men) who work there, and the men who frequent them, are human. They have families; they have marital problems, money troubles, work issues.

They like to be entertained by flashing lights, gorgeous women, and piles of money, but besides that, they seek a connection with another human to distract them from everything else in their life. That’s why they are there.

And no matter who you are, what you look like, how old you are, or how you found yourself at this place, the strip club welcomes anyone with a pocket full of cash. And if you’re willing to play into the fantasy, then we are too. We’re looking for that distraction, just as you are. Only we’re getting paid while we search.

© Erin Taylor 2020. All Rights Reserved.