I Was Terrified of Women

My visits to strip clubs started out as aversion therapy. I was terrified of women and in my early thirties I was not only single, but had never even had a relationship. I think perhaps that this should be explained in more depth because it will make things clearer for you.  I think I first asked out a girl when I was about 20 and only after an immense amount of soul searching and terror. She turned me down and I have to say, so did the rest of the girls that I asked out subsequently. So after ten years of rejection I decided to try counseling, which didn't work, largely because I didn't want to admit to myself what the real root cause of the problem was. Dating agencies got me on dates, but I tended to freeze up and run out of things to talk about, so people tended not to want to see me again. I had a problem without a solution. 

As I said, I suffered a crippling fear of women and this was due to a schoolteacher I was unfortunate to have when I was about 6 years old. Always shy and a little afraid of things and with an abiding fear of being 'told off', the teacher had an unfortunate tendency to interpret lack of understanding on the part of her pupils as a disciplinary issue. I distinctly remember her trying to teach me to tell the time, but I could not grasp the hour-minute duality of the clock face. In the end she gave up and made me stand outside the classroom for the rest of the day. In my year with this person she physically assaulted me, screamed at me everyday and I was thrown around and out of classroom on a weekly basis. I can still see her face clearly today. 

All of this left me with an abiding fear of women and also asking questions, largely because I had learned to be afraid of the consequences. I developed self esteem issues as well and became socially isolated. Most of this I conquered, but getting a girlfriend was always the final thing to be overcome. But first I had to overcome my fear of women. I then had a brilliant idea. I reasoned that if I was too scared to even speak to a girl in a normal bar, if I could muster the courage to speak to a stripper in a club it would be like aversion therapy. Strippers were very frightening to me, but it was a controlled environment so nothing could go wrong. Also as attractive girls were there all of the time, I could try as many times as I liked....

It took me a year of visiting clubs on a weekly basis before I actually managed to strike up a conversation with a stripper. Slowly my fear started to recede. My first ever date was with a stripper, although it wasn't exactly a date, she said she was hungry and I blurted out that maybe we could get something to eat. She agreed and after carefully leaving the venue separately, I had my first time out in a restaurant with a women. 

If you are thinking that this is a happy ending story, it is and it isn't. You see, the issue was that I started to get a reputation as being a 'nice' person to talk to for the dancers, so soon I was never short of people to talk to and sometimes I even asked them out and by and large I was successful. I ended up living with a dancer for 18 months and despite breaking up, we are still friends. Later I tried to transfer my new found confidence and skill to the outside world and sadly I failed again and failed repeatedly. You see, I overcame my fear of women, but only if they are strippers. 

In recent years, now I am well into my 40s I have decided to be content as I am. I still visit clubs, but for different reasons now. They are a good place to be alone or have company when I want it. I could't really care less about private dances and most times don't even look at the stage. I know most of the male customers and it works for me. Its like 'Cheers' with tits. Its a community that I like to be part of. When things in the rest of my life are bad, I know that I can escape from the problems for a couple of hours in a club and its the best therapy ever (cheaper than a therapist as well).

So going to clubs turned me into a better person. I soon stopped harbouring thoughts of revenge on that awful school teacher. I remember her and at times I wonder who else she may have damaged, but that's the extent of it. The one thing I do know is that the respect I showed the dancers was mostly returned to me 10 times over and without the clubs, I dread to think what would have become of me. So my initial purpose  for going to clubs no longer exists and to some extent the whole thing is running on inertia.  One day I know I will stop and not return, but for the time being, that's always next year.

I found peace with myself and that is priceless.

I Am Very Much an Introvert

When I was about 13 years old, I had a crush on a girl (my first big crush). She was pretty and popular; I was shy, chubby, and nerdy. Her family was fairly well off; mine lived in a trailer. I never planned to ask her out because of my certainty of rejection. I did, however, make a huge mistake in admitting my crush to a friend. He gossiped about it and eventually the news of my crush made it back to the girl.

I had anticipated rejection were I to ask her out - I never anticipated the cruelty she would show if she merely knew I thought she was cute. She openly and loudly mocked me on a long bus trip. She hugged me and sat on my lap. I had no chance to seek respite from the humiliation - I just sat in stunned silence. I thought she wasn't going to stop stomping until I was dead.

That moment stunted my romantic pursuits for the next decade of my life. I am very much an introvert and social interaction has carried a high cost for me for as long as I can remember. Asking someone on a date added not only carried the fear of rejection, but also a much greater fear of humiliation. I didn't date much. I wasn't very successful when I did, maintaining both physical and emotional distance. With every failure, I reinforced my previous fears and added new ones.

Enter strip clubs, providing a different kind of therapy where my visits to counselors had failed.

I first started going to strip clubs at the behest of my friends, with promises that you can't have a bad night at a strip club. They certainly were entertaining - that combination of drinking, smoking, and nude women was thrilling, in the way breaking social taboos can be.

I kept going once the initial thrill faded, though. Over the following two years after my first visit, I went as frequently as my grad school stipend would allow. I had read about sexual surrogates extensively online and slowly devised my own plan without the high up-front costs. The clear-cut social rules and monetary exchange of strip clubs created a safety zone for me to work through my issues and to work on some of my weaknesses. Things that would cause enormous emotional turmoil previously began to come more easily. I could let someone touch me and there was no mocking that followed; the expectation that it might be used against me faded. Telling someone that they're attractive ceased to carry an emotional cost for me. I worked on other social skills that had never come easily to me, too - making small talk, for instance. I'm still not good at it, but much better than I was before.

I stopped going to strip clubs a number of years ago. As my old fears were assuaged, I found myself capable of pursuing relationships without the self-imposed barriers that had plagued my earlier attempts.

I Had Become Bored

The last person to ask me that question was a twenty-four year old woman sitting on my lap with only a bikini on (the least amount of clothing allowable in that sort of club in the State where I lived). I had gone to strip clubs for years, beginning with an office sponsored event and then during a mostly drunken auto racing weekend with neighborhood friends. Curiosity and the desire for sexual arousal or even satisfaction (as much as that is possible while staying clothed) had led me on a veritable tour of practically every strip club in my area over the course of nearly 10 years. So I had had many excuses and reasons, but the woman who was sitting on my lap was the only reason that I had at that moment.

I first met her on a football Sunday when dances are relatively easy to get because the clubs are typically filled with men more interested in football than dances--perhaps because the financial implications of the games might impact their ability to finance a dance. She could have done body double work for Gwyneth Paltrow but while I was first attracted to her beauty it was her intelligence and sophistication that intensified our relationship. Over about a year we saw each other at least once and often twice a week for an hour or more, and though we never met outside the club we often called each other and texted. The dances I paid for were not really dances: the club she was at had remarkably private rooms in the back of an upstairs smoking lounge, with no camera monitors and only a small glass window on the door. Over time our sessions were more cuddling than anything else. She would often fall asleep as I massaged her back. We talked about everything. She looked at pictures of my wife, daughters and pets. I commiserated with her when her sister was sick; coached her on training a dog she adopted; and listened as she told me about her boyfriend, her pets and about how she eventually wanted to go to medical school. When I joked that her intolerance of the sight of blood did not seem to bode well for her in that role, she quickly responded: “I am going to be a radiologist.” Obviously she had thought things out. She loved poetry and would save my voicemails when I would recite poems to her--not sappy stuff: she preferred Greek, Latin and Russian poetry, especially Anna Akhmatova, whether in the original or translated.

But back to the question: my answer to her was not so much dishonest as incomplete. Even so my answer to her did not come quickly or easily. I told her that after more than 20 years of marriage I had become bored and that I enjoyed being able to have a relationship, even if not fully consummated, with another woman. She was bothered by that answer in part because she could imagine what it would be like for her in another 20 years when her future husband would make excuses for being out. She had never been as comfortable with the club as the other dancers. When I once referred to her as an angel she quietly said “then why am I here?” Not long afterwards she told me she was taking herself off the schedule and a few days later I got a “leave me alone” text. It has been years since that happened and only gradually have I come to appreciate that the question as to why I went to strip clubs related to a desire to escape not any one person or any one thing, but rather everything. What a strip club had come to mean for me was a sort of false eternity where a game was always on, the beer was always cold and the women were always young. So behind it all was not so much desire as fear, the fear of change and ultimately dying. The future radiologist may not have appreciated all of that then but with her question and how I answered it seems she saw through our relationship and saw something irreparable in it and the place it existed in. I had lots of reasons to go to strip clubs. She left me with a very good reason not to: she would not be there.