PLAIN TRUTH: Husbands do not belong in strip clubs

I was woken up by a frantic call from a friend this morning. She just found out that her husband has been frequenting a certain seedy club in Nairobi. Understandably, she was unnerved.

Her predicament took me back to conversations I had with men like her husband not very long ago while on an assignment to look into the Nairobi nightlife. “Why do you visit these clubs?” I asked.  One of them, who admitted to popping in one or two nights every week told me off. He wondered why I was making such a fuss and yet he was spending his money and not anyone else’s.

And this is where we are going wrong. I know that a lot of things in this life have everything to do with money. This one, however, is one of those few things that have nothing to do with money. It doesn’t.

Visiting a strip club frequently is disrespectful to your marriage, your partner, who is probably busy reheating your favourite meal as you indulge, and believe it or not, it is disrespectful even to the young women who strip for money. It doesn’t matter that he earned the money he is spending or even that he is an excellent provider whose family lacks for nothing. It shouldn’t matter.

I remember one or two gentlemen (I use this term very loosely here) telling me that they were in fact doing this for their wives. How so? Apparently, when a man comes here, then he gets to go home and spice things up.

This is just another lie that men tell themselves to feel better about their behaviour. The truth is that strip clubs and everything they sell is just a fantasy. Even these impossibly lithe and attractive young girls you throw money at will cease being real once the bright lights are turned on.

These perfect women do not exist. When a man frequents these joints, he starts believing that they do. This only raises his expectations of women to impossible standards and ends up destroying the very thing he thinks he is building.

And women who take their husbands to strip clubs, stop. Just stop. “But he is going to lust over other women anyway, I might as well be there when he does it,” you will say.

What I hear is a woman who quietly believes that she needs to do anything she can to keep a man. And so when he declares that he would like to go to one of those joints down town, she offers to go with him as a show of support.  Honey, you are helping him disrespect you. The truth is that you can’t keep a man that doesn’t want to be kept.

Raise your standards a little bit. Do you think your man would be enthusiastic at the thought of you going to leer over naked men? I don’t think so. So why are you pretending to be?