Women are whispering. A friend recently expressed concern that her boyfriend had visited a lapdancing club as part of a work social. She didn’t want to be perceived as prudish or uptight and she didn’t want her boyfriend to be the odd one out at work for abstaining when his colleagues headed into the club. Her hushed ambivalence is a common response to the lapdancing clubs springing up all across the country recently as a result of a legal loophole.

Lapdancing clubs have proliferated¹ since they were allowed to be licensed in the same way as cafes and restaurants. Previously, they had to be licensed as sex encounter establishments along with sex cinemas, sex shops and peep shows. The 2003 Licensing Act states that a successful premises licence applicant does not require any other licence. Lapdancing clubs have capitalised on this clause and obtained premises licences only. These cannot be revoked unless a complainant proves that one of the four licensing objectives of “public order”, “public safety”, “protecting children from harm” or “creating a public nuisance” has been breached.

The legal redress is clear. The Licensing Act need not exempt sex encounter establishments from requiring their own licence type. This utilises existing legislation, allows that legislation to perform the function it was intended to, and does not require any new legislation. Furthermore, it allows local authorities to consider their gender equality duty when making such decisions.

Today, Roberta Blackman-Woods MP is proposing a ten-minute rule bill on this subject in parliament. She makes it clear that local authorities in London already have these separate licensing powers and that they could be extended countrywide.

Yet the question of lapdancing clubs goes beyond the legislative argument and into the far murkier debate that surrounds this new social phenomenon. There is the personal and the political, inextricably linked. Barrister Philip Kolvin is advising both The Fawcett Society and Object on their campaigns to license lapdancing clubs as sex encounter establishments. Kolvin’s own reason for representing the Fawcett Society was personal. He is alarmed by the presence of lapdancing clubs around Gray’s Inn, where he works. His colleagues shamelessly go to the clubs after work, and he reports that there are limousines containing naked women having sex on the floor being provided as part of the transport service.

Kolvin warns us that any cultural arguments are hazardous. We don’t want to go back to censorship. We don’t want to be accused of prudery. If we say there is a line, then the next question could be, what forms of sexual imagery do women approve of? At a Compass conference, the feminist scholar Angela McRobbie said she wants to see women having this discussion and dealing with the difficult questions. If women decide that they are fine about lapdancing clubs and see them as modern and empowering, she will accept that. But she doesn’t believe women are really involved in this debate. Instead she observes a strange silence on the issue. She also advocates the need to consider the responses of black and Asian women to lapdancing clubs.

Are lapdancing clubs harmless? If the no-contact rules are adhered to, then presumably the lapdancing clubs leave lots of sexually frustrated men wandering the streets at night. Otherwise, we can assume that rules have been contravened and that lapdancing clubs are just another route into the sex industry at large. If neither of these harmful effects prevail, then perhaps these clubs are not needed, and men attend them with some newfound sense of social obligation in an increasingly commodified society where every pleasure must be paid for.

I am of the view that the sexual empowerment argument for women is a myth. Women are reduced to sex objects for male gratification. They are emancipated only in the context of wage-earning capacity and participation in consumer culture. Increasingly, we find our power as citizens misleadingly equated with our power to consume or not to consume, to earn or not to earn.

So I say let local communities be allowed to decide whether or not lapdancing clubs are approved in their area. Do you want one on your doorstep? At the Compass meeting, a lady in the audience voiced the liberal argument that lapdancers are choosing to work and benefiting from it. A former lapdancer countered her by saying, “This argument really annoys me. It’s all very well you saying that, but would you choose this job for your daughter, or your sister, or your wife, or even yourself?”

Lets bring this back into the public domain and have a conversation about it in the public space. Let communities have a say in licensing these establishments, and let women have a say in their own representation. And let’s quit the double standards.