I have to tell you something,” says Dorothy Stratten in the new Disney Plus series Welcome to Chippendales. “Women get horny.” What happened next was the invention of the first all-male strip club, launched in 1979 and aimed exclusively at female consumers. Think greased-up abs and baby oil. Tear-away trousers and bedazzled G-strings. Chippendales was the blueprint.
Thanks to the apparently shocking revelation that women enjoy sex, and the fact that women’s pockets were getting deeper as they found economic independence in the Eighties, Chippendales was a roaring success. Fireman uniforms? Women’s jaws would hit the floor. Men dry-humping the air in police garb? They’d scream for more. For the first time in erotic history, women were the ones throwing money at sexualised bodies.
