Connect / Eddie Holt: Peter Stringfellow dates his clubs. That perma-smile, long silver hair, orange complexion and his bizarre fixation with (mercifully false) leopard-skin is just a slightly updated version of Hugh Hefner's Playboy carry-on.
Stringfellows is perhaps not quite as absurd as "the Playboy lifestyle", which involves lying around in a dressing gown, cravat and a wig, but it's not much more evolved either.
Basically, Stringfellows, like Playboy, is a business. It's an attempt to make an activity that's undeniably sleazy suitable for sale. In that sense, the commodity - sexual titillation - is given a veneer of laughter, youth and well-being.
Really, it's a contemporary version of Playboy clubs in which Bunny Girls, dressed in swimsuits and rabbits' ears, used to pander to randy men.
Now, it seems, full nudity is regular. ("Sexual titillation workers of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your swimsuits and rabbits' ears!") That's clearly a debatable form of "progress", but market logic demands ever increasing sexual stimuli. The truth, however, is that the addition of Stringfellows strip club to Dublin in 2006 is likely to be regressive for both men and women.
Sure, it's possible for a female - or even another male - to buy a male lap dance, but most of the business will be conventional: males paying females. Presumably females can buy dances from other females but that won't constitute the bulk of sales either. According to reports, most punters who paid in on Wednesday's opening night were "businessmen and well-dressed couples".
They paid €20 each to go to Stringfellows. Protesters shouted chants of "go back to your wives" and "shame on you" as the attenders queued for admission. It sounds like a clash of cultures - secular, business-orientated, New Ireland against religious, faith-orientated, Old Ireland. In one sense, it was, but in other ways it was simply locals versus interlopers to Parnell Street.
Part of the problem is that Stringfellows makes Dublin more like other European cities. A survey by Tourism Ireland published this week found the State's growing cosmopolitanism is irritating some holidaymakers. They see Dublin as less distinguishable from other European cities. With the arrival of Stringfellows after the British chain stores invasion, that's unsurprising. (When, by the way, did Irish towns and cities develop "High Streets"? Many urban settlements here had "Main Streets" but media now appear to have adopted the British habit of often calling a main street the "High Street". So, not only are the streets becoming outlets for British chain stores, imported terminology such as "High Street stores" is even eliding the context of the transformation.)
We've seen the names given to new housing estates become embarrassingly British-ised. The ruling logic appears to be to choose an English shire town: Shrewsbury, say. Then add words like "Downs", "Copse" or "Gallops" to the name of the shire town: "Shrewsbury Downs", "Shrewsbury Copse" or "Shrewsbury Gallops". That should add thousands of euro to the sale price.
Meanwhile, of course, such nonsense makes Ireland seem increasingly like an ersatz Britain. Little wonder then that Mark Henry, Tourism Ireland's director of central marketing, noted that holidaymakers, particularly from Britain, said that Ireland was "not different or exotic enough" compared with new east European destinations, increasingly well-serviced by cheap flights.
Anyway, back to Stringfellows. Despite the initial complement of "businessmen and well-dressed couples", it's difficult to see that trend continuing. Certainly, sex sells - it is, after all, used to flog all manner of items from petrol to food - but beneath the Stringfellow veneer of laughter, youth and well-being, the sex industry is guaranteed to take a heavy toll on its workers.
Everybody knows that a dearth of sexual life can sometimes have adverse effects on individuals. But a surfeit of sexual activity is likely to produce - not in everybody but in many people - comparable effects. Presumably the dancers in Stringfellows are in or close to their sexual primes yet, even given their youthful energy, they risk becoming prematurely aged and arid.
It's difficult to imagine a Dublin Stringfellows "regular". Apart from the prohibitive amount of money required to service such an, eh, "lifestyle", a Stringfellow's "regular" would surely be, in the contemporary sense of the word, "sad". Perhaps some people could convince themselves and others they were going for the music, the food or the ambience, but that seems unlikely.
When, because it used the word "shift", J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World caused rioting in The Abbey Theatre in 1907, most educated sympathies went with the theatre and against the audience. There's still a sense abroad that "Holy Ireland" needs to liberalise even further but the problem with Stringfellows is that it reinforces ancient sexual and financial stereotypes.
In that sense, Stringfellows is not about making Ireland more liberal. It's more old-fashioned than that. It's about men paying women for sexual favours of varying intensity. Its primary aim is profit and Peter Stringfellow will maintain his perma-smile, silver hair and even the hideous, ersatz leopard-skin seats only so long as it delivers. Sad but true.