They often make love with other lap-dancers, but never have sex with the men who they tease and titillate for £10 a dance. Ester and Jo are professional sex goddesses and they are in control. Exuberant extroverts both, they make me feel safe in their world, in the hazy, red light of the private dancing area in Angels of Leeson Street, surrounded by mirrors and by women wearing only G-strings. The young, attractive men are poised on banquettes, their legs apart as lap-dancers writhe, caress and flirt, their breasts millimetres away from men's faces, their thighs and bottoms stroking men's laps. The women perform with seductive Penthouse poses and well-aimed contact. The men sit passively, not allowed to touch or taste. This is fun. This is hip. This is the new Ireland.
Sexy, brown-haired Jo from Belfast left the "boring" civil service to earn between £100 and £300 a night lap-dancing; she has a two-year-old son. To earn that kind of money, a dancer has to work very hard, constantly circulating through the main bar, chatting up guys, efficiently clocking up dances. Ester, a gorgeous blonde from the Netherlands, has an arts degree and is married to a male stripper. She comes to Dublin for three weeks at a time, then goes home with a large amount of money. Most lap-dancers come from abroad on contracts organised by agencies. The foreign girls are not allowed to have boyfriends in Dublin and live together in houses paid for by the management. This is the case both at Angels and its upmarket rival, Club Lapello. Both clubs buy the dancers return tickets - from London, Portugal, the Netherlands, Czech Republic - so they are free to leave at any time.
Brought to and from the clubs by taxi (men - including boyfriends and husbands - are never allowed to collect dancers from work, to eliminate the possibility of prostitution), the foreign lap-dancers see little of Irish life and exist, like geishas, within their own female worlds. "Women know how to pleasure women," Ester smiles - which also coincides with male fantasies about women together - then offers me a dance. She pushes my knees apart with her thighs and starts to dance between my legs with a motion like seaweed floating to and fro in the current. She is stunningly beautiful, and I am in awe of her perfect, willowy body and her silicone-enhanced breasts. She caresses, using her body like a feather. For the five minutes the dance lasts, Ester is in love with me. She is very convincing. For a minute, I think I know what the men feel - £10 for a two-and-a-half minutes of rejection-free fantasy. Five minutes if the girl likes you - or if you decide to buy more vouchers.
The men at Angels are mostly young and attractive - not the older, sleazy types I had expected to find. There are stag parties from London, Irish men in from the pub, and men in for a gawk, who "have never seen anything that didn't have six tits", as one of the girls puts it.
"Ninety-nine point five per cent of the men are here for the laugh. Only half of one per cent get a sexual thrill," (oh yes?) claims an Angels' manager, Gerry Heapes, who was a witness in the Catherine Nevin trial. Angels is so successful that there is talk of opening a male lap-dancing club in Dublin - which should, by rights, be called Devils. Outside the private dancing area, in a milling bar packed with well over 100 men, around 30 dancers work the room, engaging them in conversation. If a man likes what he sees, he buys a £10 voucher for a dance and gives it to the girl. On the stage, meanwhile, dancers take turns on the pole, dancing flirtatiously and simulating arousal, to entice men to buy private dances. The girls watch themselves in the mirrors, appearing to turn themselves on. Jo and a friend do a dance together.
"They're from lesbiana," says a punter.
"What part of Europe is that in?" asks his friend.
"You know, they beat Estonia two-nil."
The dance ends and Jo leans down from the stage and kisses me. Girl power. All part of the show. The dancers seem to be saying to the men, "You don't think we really, really want men, do you?" And, the girls tell me, after a night of manipulating men's libidos, they really, really don't. I've been standing watching, next to a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket who describes himself as a daily Irish Times reader. He stands for hours, watching the pole-dancing, which is both feminine and athletic as women spin themselves upside down and cling on with their thighs, then let themselves slip slowly down. The dancers pick their own music - one likes house, another Bob the Builder.
The Irish Times reader never has a private "dance". But this means the bar, and not the girls, gets his money. He comes here when his wife is away. "Why don't you bring her?" I ask him, because there are a few couples in the club, some of them regulars. "I should. Maybe she'd learn a thing or two."
Even though I am surrounded by crowds of men with one thing on their minds, there is no sense of threat. I feel safer than I would in the average nightclub. The rules are the rules. Men must not touch women. No dancing by punters, no dancing outside the private dancing area. Break the rules and you're out. "It's so unfair," squeals a tall, slim 20year-old with long, curly hair who is visiting with her boyfriend. "I wanna dance! I wanna be on that pole! I could do that! I'm as good-looking as they are! "They get £300 per night? I get £300 a week. This is much better work."
A few men at Angels ask me for "a dance" - which I find strange since I am fully clothed and surrounded by scantily clad beauties in sexy lingerie and impossibly high platform heels. Then I realise it's only because I'm a challenge: in a club where all the women strip naked to a G-string, some men find the sight of a clothed woman enticing. They want what they cannot have. As one of them says: "It's more of a challenge to get into a woman's head than her body."
But when I decline to "dance", there's only good-natured disappointment, no aggro or resentment. The bouncers make sure of that.
Yet the reassurance comes from something more than just the fact that the place is carefully policed. The unchallenged polarising of the genders in this marketplace means everyone knows what to expect. I had expected to see pathetic women being exploited because they had no other options in life. What I find when talking with the women and hearing their stories, is empowerment. There's the woman who keeps horses in the country and dances at weekends to fund her lifestyle, and the woman who prefers to work for a few weeks at a time, then travel. These are women who have turned the tables on men. They tell me they would never engage in prostitution. Dancing isn't the same thing at all. Claire, a social sciences graduate with three children, says "this is social work". Earning money at the weekends enables her to be a full-time mother during the week.
Continued on Weekend 3