Here's what it's like to be a woman living near an Edinburgh strip club – Susan Dalgety
Women report feeling ‘uncomfortable, vulnerable or unsafe’ when passing strip clubs at night
n the 1990s I, like so many young women, believed the war of the sexes had been largely won. Girl power was where it was at. Women celebrated their sexuality with abandon while boasting of their individual aspirations. The collectivism of the 1970s had given way to the Spice Girls and Riot Grrrl, with music and short shorts replacing dungarees and activism.
As a young Edinburgh councillor and a member of the capital’s licensing committee, I had swallowed much of the new feminist Kool Aid. When an application for a sauna (a brothel) came up, like the majority of my colleagues I voted to grant it. Prostitution was legitimate work after all, the epitome of ‘girl power’.
Women using their bodies to earn a decent wage, what could be more empowering? It was the same with the ‘go-go dancers’ who performed in a handful of city pubs. So what if young women wanted to strip off for the titillation of lunchtime drinkers? Who was being harmed? No one. My Labour colleagues and I thought we were progressive. But we were just plain wrong.
Exploitation rebranded as ‘sex work’
Reading the research published by feminist group FiLiA earlier this week made me cringe. I found their report, Life near Strip Clubs: Women’s Voices from UK Cities, a tough read. Not because of what it revealed – that the majority of women living and working near these clubs opposed them – but because of my small role 30 years ago in helping create an environment in Edinburgh where it is acceptable to have an area nicknamed the ‘Pubic Triangle’.
My views over the years may have matured, but society has regressed. Violent pornography is freely available to children on their smartphones. Channel 4’s peak-time viewing includes shows such as Virgin Island, where participants endure an “intimacy course” for mass entertainment. And the sexual exploitation of women – mostly working class – has been re-branded as ‘sex work’ by a succession of largely middle-class politicians, who dismiss opposition to strip clubs and prostitution as ‘right wing’.
But as FiLiA’s report by Dr Laura Favaro reveals, sexual entertainment venues (the technical term for strip clubs) affect not just the women working in them, but those living, working and visiting the neighbourhood. Dr Favaro spoke to women in three cities, Manchester, Cardiff and Edinburgh.
In all of them, women said they felt “uncomfortable, vulnerable or unsafe” when passing the venues, particularly at night. Some described how they altered their route and daily routine to reduce risk. There were reports of intimidation or harassment by male customers outside the venues, and the majority believed that strip clubs contribute to a broader culture where women are devalued and subjected to discrimination and violence.
READ MORE: Shocking new poll finding about Gen Z men suggests battle of the sexes is about to get nasty
‘Complicity of silence’
Take just three of the Edinburgh respondents, out of the 700 women interviewed. An Edinburgh University student described sexual ‘entertainment’ as “gross”. She said: “I don’t think it is actually empowering, it is a misogynistic thing. What it says to women, and vulnerable women, that this is something to do if you are struggling.”
Another woman who lived in the area said: “When you walk through here you feel horrible." And a local business owner told the researchers: “I see all sorts of men go in. What they are doing is male pack-bonding. In the clubs, there is a false caring for the women. It is a fantasy. We have the complicity of silence by men about the abuse of women. It’s depressing.”
Several years ago, the minority Labour administration on Edinburgh City Council attempted to ban the city’s strip clubs by setting the maximum number of sexual entertainment venues to zero. After a two-year campaign that included a court case, they were eventually defeated by a coalition of Green, SNP, Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors who voted to keep the city’s three venues open – all in the infamous Pubic Triangle between the Old Town and Edinburgh University.
At the meeting in February 2024 to decide the fate of the clubs, SNP councillor Martha Mattos Coelho told her colleagues they were “not here to make moral assumptions”.
Perhaps not councillor, but surely you have a duty to protect all the women in the city, from the teenage girls who perform sex acts for groups of drunken men in premises licensed by you and your colleagues, to the female students too scared to walk home at night. Now would be a good time to revisit your decision to support commercial sexual exploitation.
Marginalised women with few options
But others have an obligation, both moral and political. The Scottish Government insists it is committed to ending male violence against women, yet it passes the responsibility for the licensing of strip clubs to councils, while at the same time insisting that commercial sexual exploitation is a form of violence against women.
Scotland’s new equalities minister, Simita Kumar, was until a few weeks ago the leader of the SNP group on Edinburgh City Council. Will she continue to support strip clubs now that she has responsibility for tackling male violence against women? And women deserve to know if her adherence to equality and human rights extends to all women, in particular those who society regards as nothing more than a commodity to be abused.
As Lisa-Marie Taylor, co-founder and chief executive of FiLiA, writes in the foreword of the report: “The sex trade preys most ruthlessly on women with the fewest options: marginalised women from working-class communities, women navigating poverty, single motherhood, trauma and more.”
The very women whose rights Ms Kumar is now charged with protecting. It took me several years to realise that I had been wrong to support the sex industry. Let’s hope the new equality minister learns my lesson in women’s rights much more quickly.
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