My first love was when I was a young teenager, enduring the middle school years in a Catholic school. Let’s call her “Melanie.” She was beautiful, and I was in love. I never did work up the nerve to tell her how I felt, and when the eighth grade year came around, I went to a different school. So, I later learned, did Melanie. Only then did I learn that she had felt much the same. The terrible regret of what might have been, if only I had said something, haunted me for years. It drove me to never lose anything again for fear, and so I have. I have failed for incompetence, for ill luck, for bad timing, for all manner of other reasons–but since then, never for fear. I often wondered, reflecting on how much I have changed since then, what happened to Melanie; what path she traveled, where she was, how she had fared. Those questions were answered for me last Friday, when she stripped down in front of me and gyrated her vagina inches from my face so that I would stuff a single American dollar into her garter.

A very old friend of mine will be married soon, and I’m one of his groomsmen. Last Friday was his bachelor party. I had never been to a strip club before. The entire phenomenon puzzled me. Yes, there are naked women gyrating for the male’s titillation, but the “look but don’t touch” policy–and the general rudeness of public masturbation–should make this an exercise in frustration the likes of which even Tantalus could not endure. What I did not understand was that the experience is not about sex at all. As I told Giuli that night, the strip club is to sex what a Roman purgatorium once was to eating.

The table dances are little more than a market. While tips can bring in some amount of money, the real profit is made in the back rooms with private lap dances and such. I was not about to spend that kind of money for something so transient, but the “bar” itself was a fascinating experience all on its own.

The smoke, the lights, everything was geared towards the idea of realizing a dream. It plays to a male fantasy, but not even necessarily–nor even primarily–a sexual fantasy. The stripper makes her way across the table, her eyes locked onto you. She begins to dance for you, moving her body in the most seductive manner for you, and you alone, of everyone in that bar. You spend the night with your lungs filled with smoke, surrounded by the most lecherous, frightening, horny men, but everything is geared towards the fantasy that the stripper is there for you, and you alone.

Men are forever coming out of such clubs, convinced that this or that stripper loves them–the fantasy is that real. My fellow groomsmen spent nearly as much time merely passing conversation with the strippers as tipping them. The ultimate fulfillment of that fantasy is the private lap dance in the back room; that is why they are willing to pay so much for it.

It’s easy to run through a great deal of money in such a place, because they cater to a deep, abiding need. The need to feel wanted, special, desired. The stripper’s role is only secondarily to entice. It is difficult to maintain much arousal in such a comically exaggerated environment, in a public space filled with other men, but all that only heightens the stripper’s primary role: to make the customer feel desired.

It made me consider the world where such establishments are required, to fulfill such basic, human needs. It made me return to the idea that our modern life is nothing so much as dehumanizing.

Once upon a time, my love for Melanie was so innocent and pure I could only barely bring myself to even fantasize about kissing her. She was less a person than an ideal. Friday night, she was no more a person than I had ever made her. She was a bit player in every man’s fantasy. I did not lose any respect for her. I’m not a prude who sees such a place as a den of sin and iniquity; nor is my vision so romanticized that I cannot appreciate its reality. My ideal and her current profession counter-balanced each other, and for the very first time, I could appreciate Melanie as a person. I wondered what lay behind each of them, if they liked their lives….

For years, the bitter regret hung like a loose string from my life. Now I know she became a bit of a goth while I became a primitivist. She’s married, and I live with my girlfriend, Giuli. I spend my days working on search engines–and she gives men a brief, precious illusion that someone wants them.

I decided to skip on the lap dance with her; the table was wierd enough.