OPENING a lap-dancing club in Paphos must have seemed a good idea at the time. It’s is a massive business in Europe, it’s less tacky than Cyprus-style cabarets, and there’s a big British market to tap which is perhaps more comfortable with this type of titillation.
The VIP Members Club opened in August trumpeting a unique selling point. This was a ‘no eastern European girls’ zone. Only British girls worked in the club run by Andre, an Anglo-Cypriot, and his English wife.
This British-only stipulation was a deliberate attempt to differentiate the Paphos club from the crude and blatant sex-for-sale offered by the hundreds of indigenous cabarets plying their trade in every town in Cyprus. Worldwide lap dancing clubs are promoted as places of almost innocent entertainment, somewhere men and women can go and have a bit of laugh, where chaps get boozed up on their stag nights and spend serious money comparing and contrasting various Brazilian wax jobs. This is what Andre had in mind for his VIP Members Club.
The night I went in the company of a 33-year-old Cypriot male, the club was empty except for a young attractive woman, standing behind the bar, who was blessed with a body that would have turned heads in a spinal injury ward. Her excitement at having a couple of customers – even if one was a middle-aged woman – didn’t seem to faze her in the slightest, and along with Andre we all settled down so I could find out more about the workings of the establishment.
Andre explained that the ‘girls’ worked from 9-30 pm till 3 am and 4 am on Saturdays. They got a cut of the bar bill from each of their customers. “We charge 7 euros for a beer and from that the girls get 2 euros,” he said. “Shots are 5 euros and we have champagne and the like which the girls like to drink and the man pays for.”
They also received a cut from the dances they performed, the amount depending on ‘how far’ the dancer went. “Each dance lasts about three minutes and costs 30 euros for topless, and 40 euros if she ends the dance by taking her knickers off,” Andre explained.
Andre was keen to stress the business was all about fun. It was just entertainment and all above board, and sex for money did not enter into it.
As I spoke to one of the women it rapidly became clear she was working to her strengths, in fact quite possibly her one and only strength: her perfect face and body. Louise, an early school leaver, had worked as a bar tender before making the leap into lap dancing. Part of her job was to initially sit and chat away to her male clients, eventually getting them to pay her to dance.
I had to ask how, if on her own admission she was a “bit on the dim side”, how did she go about engaging the men. “I don’t really speak a lot,” she said. “The men come here and talk about their work, their wife and families and I just sit and listen, that’s all. If there are any men who give any trouble, we are looked after by Andre, so it’s all right really.”
Later, Louise went on to give my friend Yannis a full sampling of her talents in the private curtained off area used for lap dancing. He exited a few minutes later looking more than a little pleased, but, when asked what he thought of his first experience of lap dancing, his reply was 100 per cent cultural.
“It was very nice, but a bit like going in hungry to a top class restaurant. You read the tempting menu, only for the waiter to tell you the kitchen’s closed.
“This will never work here,” he said. “Cypriot men if they are paying for it don’t want titillation, they want the real thing.”
And that’s almost certainly one reason why – only a few weeks after opening – Andre closed down the club. The plan to promote the club within the wedding/stag tourist party/business/corporate market also failed, according to Andre, mainly “because insufficient numbers of quality British girls were available to come to Paphos to work”. Certainly moneywise, the women would tuck a lot more money into their G-strings back home.
But the bottom line is that, while Paphos may be ready for a lot of things, sexy dancing in place of the heat-seeking missile of a professional cabaret gal is not one of them.
Side Bar.
Lap dancing, is a type of erotic dance in which the patron (punter) is seated, and the dancer is either in immediate contact with the patron or at least positioned within a very short distance
Depending on the rules of the club, the lap dance can involve touching, and the dancer will be either naked, topless or fully clothed.
In the UK there are estimated to be 200 clubs currently in operation ranging from upmarket London establishments popular with the stars and minor royals, to forlorn downmarket provincial dives.
Lap dancing clubs are considered to be the fastest growing sector of the entertainment and leisure business which generates in excess of one billion pounds annually.
Spearmint Rhino leads the way in this highly lucrative business. They have 27 clubs in the USA and boast an annual turnover of $30 million. Their flagship club in Las Vegas takes more than a million dollars from customers every month and in the five days before Christmas 2008 the lap dancers helped boost the takings by $300,000.
In 2007 based on statistics from 18 dancers over 60 days during which they performed 5,300 lap dances, it was noted that female lap dancers earned the highest tips around the time of ovulation, during the most fertile period of their menstrual cycle. The lowest tips were during menstruation, and the average difference in earning between these two times amounted to 60euros per hour. Women on the pill earned overall less than those not on the pill. The results were interpreted as evidence of estrus (being in heat) in humans: females apparently advertising their fertility status to males.
