History and Legal Issues
Lap dancing clubs are a development of the earlier strip clubs, in which strippers danced on stage and were paid a wage. In the 1970s, New York's Melody Theater introduced audience participation and called it "Mardi Gras". The Melody Theater became the Harmony Theater and operated in two locations in Manhattan for over 20 years until it was closed down in 1998.
In 1980, San Francisco's Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre changed its policy so that customers could have dancers come to sit naked on their laps for a $1 tip. The practice quickly spread. It suited club owners, because it brought in more customers and it meant they could pay the dancers less. This then evolved into lap dancing.
In some areas of the U.S. and Canada, local authorities began cracking down on lap dancing after reports that some clubs allowed customers to engage in sexual intercourse or other sexual activity with the dancer during lap dance sessions.
Read more about this topic: Lap Dance
Famous quotes containing the words history and, history, legal and/or issues:
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)