So, you want to see some breasts. Noth­ing wrong with that. Where in Welling­ton should you go to see them? For the pur­pos­es of sci­en­tif­ic research, we head­ed to Dream Girls and Mer­maids to find out what you can expect. We also had a chat to a girl who’s worked in both places for the inside goss.

First though, let’s brush up on your strip club eti­quette.

  1. When a girl fin­ish­es danc­ing on stage, she’ll come around the room to col­lect tips. She may even give you a lit­tle dance on your table. If you want to tip her, get her atten­tion polite­ly, and tuck your Mermaids/Dreamgirls dol­lars into what­ev­er she indi­cates — her g‑string or her garter. Yes, you can hold the dol­lars between your teeth and she might pick it up with her boobs. No, there is no oth­er touch­ing at this stage.
  2. If you buy a pri­vate lap­dance, there might be touch­ing, or there might not. Our dancer friend says “Places have dif­fer­ent rules, mer­maids gen­er­al­ly dur­ing VIP you can touch, and Dream­girls depends on the indi­vid­ual dancer”.  As with any oth­er human being, you want to make sure that you ask before you touch, and respect their bound­aries. But you know that, right?
  3. A lot of the dancers are stu­dents, or trav­el­ers. Some of them are pro­fes­sion­al strip­pers. Nei­ther lifestyle is more or less valid than yours.
  4. Just because a girl is danc­ing in a strip club, and there is a broth­el upstairs, does not mean that you can pay her for sex.

Mer­maids is the big shiny place on Courte­nay Place with the red car­pet out­side, and the ter­ri­ble music blar­ing out. If you’ve seen the ads on the tele­vi­sion for the Auck­land branch, you might be expect­ing there to be a tank with girls swim­ming in it. You’re going to be dis­ap­point­ed in that case. Instead, there’s a cen­tral cat­walk hous­ing a cou­ple of poles, with stools all around it, and around the edges of the room there are booths with tables with poles. Let me tell you this now: the ladies’ toi­lets are faaaaaaaan­cy. So are the back rooms where you go for the pri­vate lap dances. I’d actu­al­ly like to throw a par­ty in the back room with its star­ry-ceilinged court­yard and cur­tained-offed areas, even if there weren’t top­less women gyrat­ing on my lap. The cen­tral stage though is a bit more like a pit as it’s set down from the stools, and that didn’t sit well with the fem­i­nist in me.

Dream­girls down the road on Dixon Street is much less fan­cy with its fitout, but the stage is raised, which makes me hap­pi­er. The back­rooms are not fan­cy at all, and the women’s bath­room is pret­ty crap­py. How­ev­er, at Mer­maids, the cheap­est bot­tle of wine is $500. Yes, you heard me. Fuck­ing insane. You can buy crap­py over­ly sweet bub­bles for $50 at Dream­girls. The admis­sion price to Mer­maids is usu­al­ly $20 for guys, but entry to Dream­girls seems to be free.

As for the girls them­selves, from one vis­it to each bar, my impres­sion was the girls at Mer­maids are more “pro­fes­sion­al” — expect to see more pole tricks and less laugh­ing — but that might have been because we were at Dream­girls ear­ly on a Wednes­day, and late on a Fri­day (peak time) at Mer­maids. Also, the girls at Mer­maids don’t get ful­ly naked — g‑strings have to stay on. On the whole, I’d say Dream­girls is a more fun expe­ri­ence, pos­si­bly because it feels slight­ly seed­i­er, but the man­age­ment are nicer. Either way, I high­ly rec­om­mend you find your­self a friend who likes buy­ing you lap­dances before you vis­it either place, since they’re $180 per half hour at Dream­girls and god only knows how much they cost at Mer­maids.

[Pho­to by Eric Nopa­nen on Unsplash]