Strip clubs v. Darwinism

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by David Klinghoffer

Materialism can mean buying a $23,000 Rolex. But in a philosophical context it means a world view where only material reality counts, an outlook which denies that human existence has a spiritual component, and certainly denies the religious outlook in which existence is all spirit with material reality thrown in mainly to confuse us. Two famous examples of materialism in ideological form are Marxism and Darwinism, both of which maintain that ultimately life can be explained in terms of molecules bumping up against one another.

Most of the passionate advocates of Marxism and Darwinism are on college campuses, but you find philosophical materialism elsewhere too. In fact, it would appear to find its perfect expression in the Body Shop, a strip joint on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. But as the silicone-buoyed torsos of the naked women there amply testify, appearances can be deceiving. Here is a mystery for you.

I visited the Body Shop recently in connection with the bachelor party of an old friend. (I note a defensive tone creeping in here.) Eleven guys were staying in two motel rooms a distance down Sunset. After we had been sitting around and drinking for a while, a collective decision was made to take a walk. We passed the Body Shop (not to be confused with the PC cosmetics chain), and the collectivity decided to go in. I could tell you that I would have preferred to keep walking, which is true, but you probably wouldn't believe me, so what's the point? Anyway, I would have seemed like a killjoy if I'd gone back to the motel by myself, and so I paid the $15 cover charge and went in.

As such places go, the Body Shop is a high-class establishment. In California, a strip joint can feature full nudity only on the condition that no liquor is served. So our group ordered Diet Cokes and Perrier waters and sat down.

The crowd was impressively sober. There were men alone, men in pairs, here and there a guy with a date, and a disproportionate number of Asians. A respectful hush was maintained throughout--no stamping, hooting, or whistling, which compared favorably with many Manhattan movie theaters.

The room is mirrored but dark, except for spotlights illuminating the runways. With your fizzy water or soft drink before you, you sit at a curved version of those long, thin tables that panel speakers at conferences sit behind. Between the tables are the runways, so that you face other men while you wait for the girls to go by.

One by one they emerge from behind a velvet curtain and strut dispassionately down the runway. Flawless in an unreal way and uniformly tanned, their bodies say, "Sex," but their faces, all masked by the same expression of total boredom, say, "Check, please." The guys aren't bored. A couple of Asians seated across and a few feet up from me look on as if stunned, the mouth of one of them hanging open in a way people's mouths normally do only in cartoons. At the end of the runway, there's a fire pole, and the girl generally climbs up on the pole and swings around it a couple of times.

Then she struts back to where she came from, every foot or two bending to pick up the dollar tips which the guys leave next to their ginger ale. If you don't leave a tip--something one of my companions thought he could get away with--you receive a dressing-down from the stripper. "What's the matter? You're not tipping. Hey, that's the way I make my living."

There are two ground rules here. One is, no booze. The other, no touching. Actually, some touching does occur. For $25 you can get a "lap dance" performed on you. As one member of our party explained 15 minutes after setting down that amount for the service, this means you go in a back room with one of the girls and she squirms around on your lap for a while. Don't get any dirty ideas about this. None of the man's clothes are removed or unzipped. No hands are employed. One assumes that if the customer takes any liberties, large muscled men, probably with mustaches, are waiting in an adjacent room, ready to swing into immediate action. So you sit there and experience the frustration as it mounts. It appears to be basically a form of self-torture.

Here is where the mystery comes in. It's hard to enter the Body Shop a philosophical materialist and exit in the same condition. Obviously, lots of men enjoy gazing at naked girls who are in excellent physical shape. And enough enjoy lap dances to justify strip clubs in offering them. I don't pretend to ask this question from the perspective of a detached observer. But trying to take as detached a view as possible of human sexual perversity, why do we enjoy this sort of thing?

Darwinism informs us that every aspect of our physiological being--including the neuron connections in the brain that make men want to visit strip clubs--developed in one way only: random mutations in the gene pool sorted through by natural selection, a process with no intelligence in control but a single criterion guiding it. That criterion is the survival of the human race. Whatever traits increase the chances of survival are retained. Whatever don't, are dropped. Period.