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]