Why strip clubs could be good for your marriage

 Strippers         Photo: Courtesy

At last, the call came.

“...My wife just arrived. You will find us on the second floor,” the caller says, his voice drowned in loud music and the sounds of men shouting their approval to something that was happening in the background.

We walk around the Khoja roundabout, towards the direction of Kirinyaga Road. In between the many yellow-stained buildings with seedy eateries on the ground-floor and narrow roads that form the posher and much safer side of downtown, we hit the first strip club. It is well decorated with the modern trappings found in many Nairobi clubs.

Neon lights beckon eager revellers, with dark-red walls along the corridor adding to the heady ambiance. We pay a charge fee and access the joint, which has lewd posters on the walls.

On one of the floors that form a three-tier strip club, we find a smartly dressed gentleman with his crisp tie loosened. Next to him was a lady wearing a grey skirt suit and high heels, looking fresh from top to bottom.

Farther in, the sight of a topless waiter walking around with a tray full of drinks greets my eyes. She is unperturbed and even before I absorb all these, another, this time with a skimpy top and nothing else passes right in front of me.

I try to act normal, behave as if this kind of thing happens every day. Everyone else is, after all. As we walk towards the VIP section, the women get more scantily dressed, before I see one who has nothing on.

In this part of the strip club they are many, as I will later learn.

I look around and at the top corner, there is television on the wall showing pornography, the crude kind where it is just men humping on women in all manner of contortionist styles.

NUDITY AND FOREPLAY

“Oh, karibuni,” our host says, cutting short my thoughts.

We get comfortable, my sidekick quickly ordering a potent drink.

“This is the writer I was telling you about,” my host, Erick, tells his wife, who looks at us sheepishly.

I was linked up to Erick by a mutual friend who knows the couple’s story. Eric and his wife are strip club enthusiasts, and their conversion into the world of nudity and foreplay is an interesting tale.

Erick had been a fan of strip clubs ever since his days at the university. When they started dating, he would sneak into a strip whenever she was running late for a date. One day, she came to bail him out after he mysteriously lost his wallet while at a strip club, and their lives changed. She liked what she saw.

“The next weekend, she asked if we could go back,” says Eric, with shock written on his face. They did, and she enjoyed seeing other ladies naked, even getting her first strip dance, and tipping the dancer. “I was a bit apprehensive at the beginning, but I later became comfortable with it.”

 

Njeri, his wife, shifts on her seat, before adding: “It was the best thing I had ever seen... I loved the erotic atmosphere and the fact that my man would meet me even after leaving the tempting presence of naked women.”

The two got married two years ago and spent a number of nights on their honeymoon hopping into different strip clubs across Mombasa.

“It is now part of our lives,” says Eric, adding that it has become a running joke whenever younger members of their families meet.

The two are not alone.

ROUTINE, LIKE FOOTBALL

While strip clubs are not the preserve of many, there is a large number of revellers in the cities who consider them a routine. Like football over the weekend to others, they are religiously loyal to strippers and strip clubs, and pay any amount to frequent these places.

While this happens all over the world, it is their choice of company that stands out; they visit these places with their spouses.

An advocate by profession, Dennis frequents a strip club in downtown Nairobi with this fiancée almost every weekend. The two are known to regularly patronise the VIP section of the seedy joint, where there is pole dancing by completely naked dancers and, at some point of the night, there is a sex act. The two just stare back as all this is going on.

“We were drinking in town with Denno and his friends when he wanted to go to this place but seemed uneasy about it. When I discovered it was a strip club, I was first angry but hoping to discourage him, dared him to go with me,” recalls Christine.

Christine swears when they got home, the man was highly aroused and performed “wonders” in the bedroom. “As long as he does not sleep around, I see no problem with him sampling some flesh. He particularly loves the lap dance where the girls grind on his manhood,” she reveals.

In towns like Kiambu or Thika, where strippers are available on Thursdays, the clubs are full for that one day of the week. In Nairobi, some clubs are strictly for strippers, and the crowds are always lucrative and extremely generous with tips.

Unlike Eric and Njeri, not all couples operate as a “tag team”. Others are comfortable with their partner visiting strip joints, even though they themselves do not fancy the adventure.

I had earlier met Rose Maritim, who runs an online marketing firm. The mother of one explains how she is married to a man who never misses to step into a strip joint every week.

“He is always in one popular club in downtown Nairobi or somewhere along Ngong’ Road or Hurlingham, where I heard the poshest strip clubs are,” she said.

Is she okay with the whole arrangement?

 

NO SUSPICIONS

 

“Oh yes! I have no problem with it. He is into strip clubs the same way I am always shopping for dresses... He performs all his duties as my husband and the father to our kids and never disappoints. Strip clubs have never come between us,” she said adding that she has never suspected her husband of sleeping with the strippers, much as some clubs have a backroom for that, for a fee and some protection.

Rose has another reason why she lets his husband spend his evenings sampling other naked goodies. “That is where he gets his kick...you know, the hunger for me,” Rose says, blushing from the confession.

“He comes home more ‘hungry’...sometimes texting me erotic messages while he is still over there. It feels nice to know your man is thinking about you even in the midst of all that flesh,” she says.

I posed a similar question to Njeri, and she looks at Eric before they both burst into a laughter.

“The fact that we are both regulars says something, doesn’t it?” Njeri cheekily asks.

“As a couple, we sat down and set a budget for strip clubs. Otherwise, we would have run broke a long time ago,” Njeri says, her darting eyes attracted to a stripper who is suggestively taking off her nurse’s outfit.

“She likes them plump,” Eric whispers, as her face glows with drunken admiration. The guilty pleasures of these downtown are thought to be the preserve of the uneducated and uncultured, but visits to a number of strip clubs, mostly the seedy type where the washrooms did not have running water, shows a different trend. Not only are the patrons educated and well-off people, but a number of the customers come in as couples, mostly with their wives and girlfriends, we were told.

In another strip club with an exotic Caribbean name tucked away on River Road, we found a group of four middle-aged men, their table filled with assorted drinks.

They are well dressed and unlike most younger men in the club who are sitting on the edges of the raised platforms where the strippers perform, these men are sitting at the back, engaged in small talk and enjoying the show almost absent-mindedly.

I ask a young waitress who was serving us why the men seem not to realise they are in a strip club, and she explained that married, older men were usually nonplussed with nakedness.

“Older men cheat with their eyes,” she cheekily offers.

“They are just here to feel horny and get their hearts pounding, before they go to their wives, who are probably dressed in promotional T-shirts looking all lazy and tired,” she adds.

“Visiting strip clubs can spice up the sex life in a couple. More wives should follow their husbands to such places,” said Njeri, who only missed the visits during the time she was pregnant with the couple’s first child.