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Related links: Obsessions Listing

Traditionally the home the socially backward and the computer programmer, the up market strip bar has become rather like an over friendly drunken uncle at Christmas reunions. Often seen as an embarrassment. They can take things too far.... no one likes to talk about them... and yet they don't do anything really legally wrong. Just sometimes you can think they're a bit morally wrong. With just one joke close to the PC line too many and the jovial hi jinks and digs in the rips become annoying and you just want them to go home.

However, when in the Christmas spirit, with a few eye openers inside you, a few swift ones to take away the winter edge and when, truth to be said, everyone remembers to enjoy life and stop being so damn British about PCness and all of a sudden you remember why you loved them. With this thought on my mind I made my way down to Obsession, on a cold wet night, sometime before ten, somewhere along Deansgate locks, with some people, who should have known better.

I had never been to strip bar... In Manchester... in the rain... so early in the evening. It's true. Even though I love a joke and a giggle, as much as the next school girl, I have never been to a strip bar in Manchester (full stop) I kid you not. Surprised?

You see strip bars for me, are like the people who I tend to go there with. My embarrassing uncles...my old school friends who know the teenager inside me far more than the grown up we become, the business men who I have been desperately gaining rapport with, in moments worthy of the corniest 80 films, with very similar results. Funny though.

These people are strip bar buddies for me, people who I don't really know anymore and people who I really don't care what they think about me, on a deeper level. This is one of the reasons, why I have never been to a strip bar in Manchester, other reasons include: that you should never shit where you eat and never start an obsession with anything near home you enjoy more than really good sex (i.e. heroin) and / or for me 'a strip bar habit'.

You see...

I love strip bars, always have, always will. And I am proud to call them Strip bars and not doff my hat to PCness of the gentlemen's club. And believe you me, in the Victorian habit of doffing one's hat, dipping the velvet and buggeration, you don't want Gentlemen's clubs to come back in vogue. Or opium as standard, for that matter.

I love strip bars, always have, always will. I love the causal desire and attraction part of the experience, I love the lack of pretence that the girls and their shows have, the shallowness of the visual spectacle, the stupidity of my fellow men, the wall of testosterone and hunting mentality clashing with modern sensibilities. I love the real hustle of the interaction, the power plays and moments of clarity, the basic honesty of the exchanges, contrasting with the sympathetic / pathetic ears that fake listen to you without a sense of irony (as the girls work out when you are going to buy) And more than anything else I love that, in the doe like eyes of the young law students, that all men are created equal.

There is no where like such places in real life, and as we know this is never real life. It's fantasy, that's what I love about it. Like the way women might feel with a good book, like if they love moments in a hot deep bath, with their imaginations creating Mr Darcey, striding purposefully, proudly, out of the big mill pond. Like the way they felt riding their first pony, thinking of the kiss from Gone with the Wind. Like all these things and more…..Strip bars for me are a wonderful fantasy world that just makes my soul sing.

But what about the morality of this fantasy, don't these women get abused and taunted and aren't you just exploiting them for your own sickness. I hear an uncle hater shout from the back of the room, someone (too often a man, often a single man, not usually married, a man who desperately wants women to love him again, if just for a minute) 'hear hear' they cry, and 'down with this sort of thing', as the catholic ring their hands and their church bells, whilst others cover up every part of a woman to stop men's filthy eyes. No names here.

However, religious stereotyping aside, women in these bars make money, lots of money, and they choose to do this. In these places, and by these places, I mean legally non PC but certainly not slave houses, the majority of upstanding strip bars in large cities in the UK.

Erotic dancers, the PC term for strippers (and one i concor with) make more money than lawyers and doctors, and they are often trainee versions of both (working their way through college: ala Chris Rocks genius set of complete strip bar truths) Such dancers can make £500 - £1000 a night, they make money through men's stupidity and the face that they provide a fantasy service, a sad one, maybe, but service non the less. A fantasy whose female equivalent is on most good girls book shelves (and rightly so but you just can't see it straight away. And this is the crux.

Just like an erection, a man's pleasure is all to easy to see, often shunned by society as rude and offensive, whilst a woman can happily (and many do) get turned on whilst reading about sex on a bus, and no one is any the wiser. And hurrah for them, I say.

I think it is this point which this blog is trying to make: Men are visual, our pleasures are visual, men are simple, and our pleasures are simple….. Men's bits are large n simple, what we love is simply large bits. But just because it shows, we shouldn't be punished.... no matter how basic it seems to the others. Unless we're into punishment but this is a totally different subject. And not one 'dearly beloved' we will get into here.

Yours Dan Wilde