Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of moden Ireland
There's a pretty obvious sort that hangs out at newly-opened lap-dancing clubs. They loiter around the entrance, trying to look neither embarrassed nor excited. They nip inside, where they sup on the cheapest drink they can order and furtively watch the girls, while giving the impression that they are ogling. If they order a lap dance, they endure it rather than outwardly enjoy it. And then they go home to their wives and families and tell them, and the rest of the country, all about it. Because they are journalists. And no new lap-dancing club would survive without their custom.
When a lap-dancing club opens in Ireland, it is still a cause for great curiosity, and makes for an unusual and arduous assignment for some eager reporters. Although, they can't appear too eager. Whenever a male journalist goes to a report on a lap-dancing club (the same goes for a sexually explicit movie) he always makes sure to insist that it lacked any eroticism whatsoever. That the whole experience was wooden. But not that kind of wooden, you understand. We will be waiting a long time before a reporter goes to one of these things and writes: "On the stage a woman slid backwards down a pole. I felt a stirring . . ."
Although, given that it has been something of a growth industry in recent years, there are obviously enough men out there who want to spend a night drinking over-priced champagne in the mixed company of stag parties, foreign businessmen and journalists. They sit stock still as a young naked woman jiggles about them in the manner of a dog scratching themselves on a tree. But, as several of these clubs have closed down in less time that it takes to slide down a pole, it seems that it will be some time before most Irish men will accept the idea. Most obviously, if a place like Stringfellows doesn't do roaring business on the weekend of an Ard Fheis or an All-Ireland final, then it'll never happen.
There remains in this country much distaste at lap-dancing clubs' flagrant hawking of sexuality. The Irish were, for many years, something of the world champions of sexual repression. We were deeply uncomfortable with the open flaunting of nudity, of the brashness of the sex industry. Such wanton displays of flesh, naked marketing of desire, was unseemly. Sex was not something that should be so public. It was so much more preferable when it was hidden away on particularly dark parts of the local canal, or confined to the dodgy comings and goings of a local massage parlour. That was a sex industry we could ignore.