Mixed Signals

I went into Boobie Bar's archives and read a series of posts. The blog is basically a place to put stories about misbehaving customers for the Customers Suck discussion board. After you've read a few posts, you've got the plot of just about every story:

Customer: sexual desire + booze + naked boobs = jerk
Dancer: applies psychological smackdown

What was interesting to me was the effect the stories had on me. I started viewing everyone in the stories as one dimensional characters. The ill behaved customers were conflated into a single jerk character, and the dancer administering the smackdown was the Bitch Goddess of Stripper Revenge. (Almost every story involved the same dancer.) At some point, after I had made the gradual shift away from viewing the people involved as human beings, I had a sudden shift back; it suddenly occurred to me that the dancer was a girl whose feelings had been hurt. Underneath the anger at having someone stick his hand down her thong or try to grab her tits or stick his finger up her ass, there's the pain of being treated inconsiderately. In her own blog, the dancer Casey writes

...that the feel of someone touching me somewhere I DON'T want to be touched, is the sickest, most bitter, nauseating feeling I know.

However, Casey writes this in the context of telling how she met her current boyfriend. He came into the bar where she was dancing, they went back to a room for a private dance, and he performed cunnilingus on her until she had three orgasms.

Does anyone have trouble seeing how guys might be confused?

Strippers tell customers that they don't date customers, but I've known a couple of guys that dated strippers they met in the strippers' clubs. Strippers tell the customers that they can't touch, but then many strippers allow it, and some actually enjoy it, if it's the right customer touching them. Guys go into a strip club, see naked girls, come into very close contact with them, and know from their own past experience or the experience of someone they know that what they're seeing is available, but for some reason it's not available to them right now. The result is your typical ill behaved customer; drunk, confused, and sexually frustrated.

In fairness to Boobie Bar, there's no hint in her stories that she's ever allowed a customer to cross the line with her. And that may be true for the majority of strippers. But the customers don't know that.

Behavioral psychologists have done research on how people respond to success and failure. If someone tries something, and it never works, the person gives up quickly. If they try something and it always works, but then suddenly stops working, they'll give up quickly. But if something usually doesn't work, but works sometimes, people will keep trying even in the face of repeated failure, because they know that it works sometimes. So ill behaved customers will keep acting badly because every once in a while they get to feel a dancer's crotch or tit, or someone they know got a blow job or a date.

My sympathy is with the dancers. It's a lot worse to have people repeatedly grabbing your body than to have your sexual advances repeatedly rejected. But there's a reason guys act the way we do. We may be drunken idiots, but we're drunken human idiots.