"Just Trying to Relax": Masculinity, Masculinizing Practices, And Strip Club Regulars‪.‬

Strip clubs are a visible, profitable, and growing form of entertainment in the contemporary United States and are primarily, though not exclusively, marketed to and visited by heterosexual men. Not all American men, of course, enjoy visiting strip clubs. The focus here is on those regular male customers who visit strip clubs often enough to consider this a significant personal practice, returning again and again to venues where contact and sexual release are prohibited and for whom voyeurism and conversation are the eroticized practices. What exactly is the appeal of modern strip clubs in this particular voyeuristic form for certain groups of late 20th-century heterosexually identified American men? One assumption in the literature has been that men are motivated to use the sex industry out of a desire to maintain sexual mastery and power over women (Edwards, 1993). Granted, strip clubs as they now exist are indeed intertwined with male privilege. Although euphemistically called "adult entertainment," most commodified sexual productions, from strip clubs to pornography to erotic massages, are still aimed at male consumers. Most strip clubs are owned and operated by men, and many also have roles prohibiting women from entering unless escorted by a male, precluding some women from becoming customers even if they so desire. Men may do business in strip clubs on corporate expense, something for which there is no comparable practice for women. Further, despite the fact that men experience some stigma as a result of being customers, this stigma is relatively small when compared with that experienced by the women who work in the clubs. Customers also often have particular advantages over dancers in terms of educational and social capital. And finally, there are also often large discrepancies between the earning power of male customers and female dancers (even though dancers may do quite well compared with women working in other service industry jobs).