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Where does a single (or sometimes married) man go on American TV when he wants to see some female flesh? Why, he goes to the Bikini Bar, where he can see young ladies dancing about in their lingerie, swimsuits, or wet T-shirts that suspiciously lack nipples. Cages are optional.
In case you haven't realized, exotic dancers never go topless (let alone fully nude) on American TV shows, even though such practices are commonplace in Real Life. Even the dance moves are practically ballet compared to what real strippers do to "pay for college." Post- Watershed British TV has no such problems. Some characters are rich enough to have this as their Paid Harem.
Examples:
Advertising
- The 2008 commercial of Orangina is a Bikini Bar... of animals.
Film
- Just because Lindsay Lohan played a stripper in I Know Who Killed Me doesn't mean she has to take her clothes off or anything.
- Appears in, of all things, The Movie of Frank Miller's Sin City: the comic featured nudity (both male and female); the movie left out most of the nudity, notably the nudity in the strip club. And the male nudity of the comic was right out.) The reason for the stripper being not nude is that Jessica Alba refused to do nudity.
- The Catscratch Club in Rent, where Mimi works. What's strange is that it was the movie's idea to show the club to begin with, whereas the play only alluded to its raunchiness. Understandably, the filmmakers probably wanted to avoid an "R" rating.
- In The Man with the Golden Gun, the Bottoms Up Club, although Godiva Hair was in place.
- Averted in My Best Friend's Girl. In it Tank (Dane Cook) takes a girl to the trashiest strip club he could find all to make the girl want to go back to her previous boyfriend. The strippers are naked from the top up and give Tank graphic lap dances.
- In Independence Day Jasmine works as an exotic dancer, but leaves her bra and panties on during her dance scene. Hey, the film was a PG-13 summer blockbuster, after all, and the film does deserve credit for making her no less sympathetic as a leading lady.
- In Armageddon Rockhound decides to spend the night before the mission getting lap dances at a strip club. Seeing that this film is also a PG-13 summer blockbuster the dancers leave their underwear on.
Live-Action TV
- MacGyver featured what must be a family-friendly version of one of this: women dancing around in tight leather.
- JAG: Bud Roberts’s womanizing drunk old sailor father has his son’s bachelor party in a strip club of this variety in "Wedding Bell Blues".
- Seth finds his aunt working at one of these in The OC.
- Smallville featured this, with Lois Lane going undercover.
- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (yep, the one in Las Vegas) features an episode involving a strip club. Not a single top is removed in the club and the only person who ends up completely naked in that episode (bar the corpses) is Warrick Brown. A man.
- Hell, there's an entire sub-plot about a BDSM brothel that pops up every few episodes and no one is depicted naked, just a few comedic scenes of guys getting spanked on the butt.
- Al Bundy is fond of going to these. It was supposed to be a "nudie" bar, but of course, no real nudity was ever shown, although there was at least one scene where, from the POV of the stage, a bra and a pair of panties hit Al in the face.
- When Titus was having money troubles Erin ended up working in one of these, running into Ken and Tommy. Even though she was only a waitress, this didn't stop Titus imagining the worst via "Worst Nightmare Cam".
- Titus' fears may not be completely unfounded. Many, many girls who work as dancers at strip clubs started out as cocktail waitresses there. There's even a saying that goes "If a girl works as a waitress at a strip club, it's only a matter of time before she ends up on the pole."
- Friends: Monica, Rachel & Phoebe take Chandler to one. Monica persuaded the hottest stripper there to go back to teaching the 3rd grade.
- Tracy takes Liz to one in the pilot of 30 Rock.
- Feature in several episodes of Law & Order shows, especially SVU.
- The Bada Bing in The Sopranos changed from a strip club to a Bikini Bar when the show was Edited for Syndication.
- The Bill, being (on the whole) a pre-Watershed show, sometimes features this. There was one episode where Cathy Bradford went undercover at a gentleman's club and had to take her top off in front of Nick Klein (another police officer) to maintain her cover since she was on camera, but we didn't see any nipples.
- The "Charlie Gets Crippled" episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
- Averted on Parks and Recreation: the strippers in the Glitter Factory, the strip club/bar favored by Tom Haverford, do take off their tops, with Pixellation making the episodes with scenes there safe for broadcast. Also a kind of Fridge Brilliance, as the show is a Mockumentary.
- Amusingly enough, Family Matters featured a male equivalent, given the hilarious name of "Club Buff." Needless to say, none of the studs go anywhere near the full Monty.
- Not only does the Super Force feature them, but one of the bad guys explicitly refers to them as such.
- Justified on Two and a Half Men. Charlie and Alan go to a strip club and Alan asks Charlie why the strippers are wearing bikinis, and Charlie replies that it is a bikini club, you get drinks but there is no nudity.
- Discussed at length in one episode of the HBO documentary series Real Sex, which featured a segment about a Miami strip club owner who tried to get around laws prohibiting his dancers from actually appearing nude on-stage. After some research, he found out that Florida laws actually do allow public nudity if it's part of a "legitimate" theatrical production, but not if it's just part of a strip club act. His solution? He got three of his dancers to put on a mini-production of Macbeth on-stage at the club, with the three of them playing the Witches. Completely naked.
Theatre
Video Games
- Chora's Den in Mass Effect.
- Afterlife in Mass Effect 2.
- Saints Row has several of these, including some in your cribs.
- Strip clubs in the Grand Theft Auto series.
- The Mile High Club in Just Cause 2.
- Gomorrah in Fallout New Vegas. Though some of the models wear nothing but electric tape over their nipples.
- Justified in that these are prostitutes, not strippers.
- Desele's House of Earthly Delights in The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind. Due to the lousy textures on NPCs in this game and the fairly ridiculous-looking animation for the dancers, it comes off as weird more than anything else.
- In The Saboteur, your main hide out is the back room of one. However if you buy new, you get the option to have them topless.
Webcomics
Web Original
- Broken Saints features the "Mars" club. Aside from the ladies, it features colorful strobing lights.
Western Animation
- In the Batman / Superman crossover "World's Finest," the two superheroes first meet in a gentleman's club in Metropolis. Batman gets extra points for throwing one of the (caged) women at some goons.
- Avoided in the Spawn Animated Series. Although the performers are shown only in silhouette, we see enough to deduce that the "entertainment" at the bar one of the bad guys is hanging out at is a live sex show.
- Family Guy: Joe complains about being taken to strip bars since he's paralyzed below the waist. He spends his time there yelling at his crotch in anger.
Real Life
- While they're not strip bars, all beach bars have the bikini outfit as standard for crew and patrons by definition.
- There's also a sports bars and grill by the name of Bikinis where the waitresses wear, well, bikinis. They do wear short shorts over the bikini bottoms, but they are VERY short shorts.
- New Jersey zoning laws have split "gentlemen's clubs" into go-go/bikini bars where alcohol can be served, and fully-nude "juice bars" without liquor licenses. So in the Garden State, you can get beer OR boobs with your lap dance, but not both.
- Florida has this law too.
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