Yeah, take it off! Please? No? Okay, nevermind...
An exotic dancer whose outfit is revealing enough to be sexy, but modest enough to not offend censors because the show isn't rated for nudity. The show is ostensibly family-friendly, but the characters visit a strip club for plot-related reasons. Her dance moves, while alluring, are no more risqué than what you'd see in the average music video, especially compared to what real strippers will do to pay for nursing school. Any "stripping" will involve a jacket, dress, or some other outer layer of clothing, and her remaining outfit, while sparkly, is essentially lingerie with all naughty bits covered.
Despite what the name entails, this trope need not appear exclusively in family-friendly works, as it may just involve an actress who refuses to go nude or topless. Case in point, Jessica Alba in Sin City.
Needless to say, premium cable television and post-Watershed British TV are far more likely to show all the goods. Contrast Gay Bar, which tends to be wilder onscreen than in real life.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- The Superhero-themed strip club Superiors in Secret Six, featuring "supervillain team-up" group dances and a Stan-Lee sounding DJ. Deadshot even lampshades the lack of nudity.
Film — Animation
- Justified in The Great Mouse Detective. Miss Kitty's song-and-dance number is period-accurate for Victorian-era England, with her just showing some leg in a leotard.
- Esmeralda's dance at the Feast of Fools in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Her actual dress isn't much skimpier than her regular outfit, but she lifts it enough to show off her legs and bare feet, and at the end she grabs a spear from a guard, sticks it into the stage, and spins around it. She even jumps into Frollo's lap and ties a scarf around him, which he remembers a little too well for anyone's good. Might also be played with considering church-based ideas about lewdness in medieval France, where Esmerelda's dance really would be considered risque.
- Gazelle's backup dancers in Zootopia are muscular anthropomorphic tigers wearing only tight shorts and glitter, dancing as suggestively as it is allowed in a PG-rated movie.
Film — Live-Action
- Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: Australian cowboy-themed male strippers show up, but they don't do anything but perform a few tricks for the titular character's birthday party. This is actually enforced by Alex's parents; knowing that the kid loves Australia, they hired the strippers based on the "Australian cowboy" part and missed the "male stripper" part, but managed to catch their mistake in time to tell them to keep it PG.
- In Armageddon (1998) 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.
- The Black Dahlia's porno film in-universe just shows the girls in sexy outfits playing with a dildo - though the police turn it off in disgust, so presumably it would get more explicit.
- Blood Simple isn't safe for children anyways due to all the violence and sexual references throughout, but for whatever reason the amateur stripper shaking her stuff on the bar during one of the scenes at the honky-tonk is framed from the thighs down as she dances her way past the characters whom the scene features.
- Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle- The Angels go undercover at a sleazy strip club filled with criminals. Instead of strippers, we get the Pussycat Dolls and zero nudity.
- Darling Lili:
- Crepe Suzette's act consists of a striptease, but she has her hat acting as Hand-or-Object Underwear to conceal her modesty. She tosses it away as she walks through a bead curtain, so her audience only sees a little.
- When Lili herself turns her act into a striptease, she only strips down to a leotard. She removes it but still holds it in front of her - and tosses it aside as the lights go down and she rushes off stage (but you can see more if you pause at the right time).
- Death Proof - Arlene (nicknamed Butterfly) is persuaded to perform a lap dance for Stuntman Mike. She does so while keeping all her clothes on. Of course she's not actually a stripper, but keeping the clothes on is used to show her as more prudish than the second set of girls (who are far more open about their sexuality).
- Flashdance: Artistic dancing and the nipple-free wet T-shirts.
- From Dusk Till Dawn features Salma Hayek performing as an exotic dancer who just wears Black Bra and Panties with a snake draped around her shoulders. Of course since the dance is just a way to distract the lecherous customers before the vampires murder them all, she'd have no reason to go further if she didn't want to.
- In Gilda, securely within Hays Code years, Rita Hayworth performs an amazingly sexy strip-tease ... in which she takes off her gloves and her necklace. In story she would have gone further, but gets stopped by her jealous lover.
- In The Goodbye Girl Elliot gets a job as a street barker outside a strip club. The dancers keep bikinis on. This is in New York in the 1970s.
- The Harvey Girls is a movie made in 1946, featuring saloon dancers in the seedy place in town. They just dance in leotards with Fluffy Fashion Feathers.
- Amy's act at Club Scum in Hobgoblins involves her stripping down to her bodice and underwear, which together cover as much of her body as a strapless one-piece bathing suit. ("Right down to the workout gear!" as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version puts it.) This is treated as a major embarrassment.
- House of Wax (2005) (which was R-rated but featured no nudity) has a scene where Paris Hilton performs a striptease for her boyfriend. She goes down to her underwear and that's it (they're interrupted by the killer shortly after). She was planning to tell him she might be pregnant right after this.
- While there are nude fanservice extras, the principal cast of Hustlers are this trope, even when the characters are doing private dances for high-roller executives flush with cash.
- 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.
- Imitation of Life (1959) has a sequence where Annie discovers that Sarah Jane is working in a "dive", and is horrified. Sarah Jane performs a song and dance in a tight corset, and that's about it. The implication appears to be that she's working as some kind of stripper.
- 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. Also, justified in that she was just starting her routine, and then stopped dancing and left after noticing that no one was watching because the few patrons in the club were glued to the TV watching news reports about the alien invasion.
- In Iron Man, the stewardesses on Tony's jet start dancing around a pole that comes down from the ceiling, but don't even remove the outer layers of their uniforms.
- Johnny Be Good: When Johnny and some other prospective students visit a strip club, all the strippers wear sexy cowgirl outfits, but never take off anything.
- Lady of Burlesque a movie about a burlesque theatre, shows only skimpy costumes and emphasises the comedy performance. As this was during the days of the Hays Code, no stripping is shown at all. They still do at least have a murder being done with a G-string.
- The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) was another movie made during the Hays Code era; the girls at the local strip club never go past a bra-and-girdle ensemble.
- In Nemesis Game, Marie works in a bar where all of the waitresses wear Stripperific outfits. Sara refers to it as "a strip club", but it is not clear if it really is a strip club or if she is just being deliberately insulting.
- Planet Terror has a memorable opening sequence of Rose McGowan dancing around a stripper pole. She doesn't remove any clothes so she refuses to refer to herself as a stripper (preferring 'go-go dancer').
- In the film version of RENT, there are a couple scenes of stripper Mimi at work, but she's clad in lingerie.
- The film Salome features another Rita Hayworth example. Based off the legend that Salome performed the 'dance of the seven veils' - the sequence does indeed show her removing each of the veils that make up her skirt. What she's wearing by the end of the dance is fairly risque by 1950s standards but still covers up plenty.
- Enforced in Shish O Besh, where Panis poses as a very fully-clothed hooker and Sexy Secretary for various cons. Iranian films are subject to fairly strict censorship, and genuine Fanservice is limited to showing the face and a little hair. The rest must be implied.
- Appears in, of all things, the film adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City: the comic featured nudity (both male and female); the movie kept most of the female nudity, axed all of the male nudity, and most notably took out the nudity in the strip club. The reason for this was Jessica Alba's career-long refusal to do nude scenes. Robert Rodriguez agreed, feeling the nudity didn't serve the plot in any way.
- None other than Gypsy Rose Lee herself performs an extremely family-friendly strip in Stage Door Canteen (1943). Mostly, she removes various undergarments, such as a petticoat and garter belt, from under a voluminous skirt and then holds them up.
- Sucker Punch features a brothel (or a fantasy of one) where the girls only perform in sexy costumes. There is no stripping or nudity shown.
- Take Aim at the Police Van: Tamon's investigation takes him to a sleazy bikini bar strip club, where the sister of one of the two murdered prisoners works. (1960 Japan wasn't quite ready to show topless women in movies, although that would change within a few years.)
- Tango & Cash has Tango's younger sister Katherine (Teri Hatcher) doing a stripper-like routine in a night club, playing water-covered drums while wearing a skimpy flesh-colored outfit.
- The Thirsty Dead opens in a 'strip club' in Manila where Claire is performing, but she never actually takes anything off.
- In Zola this is a Discussed Trope, as Zola is used to performing in full-nude strip clubs, but Stefani tells her that the club they're going to perform at doesn't allow full nudity. We do see characters in pasties, however.
Literature
- Troll exotic dancers in Discworld are Family Friendly by default, as trolls normally wear very little and consider putting on clothing to be risque.
- In Eva Ibbotson's The Secret of Platform 13, the complicated plan of the magical creatures to kidnap their lost prince back involves the fairy of the group replacing a dancing girl, in order to distract the people. The usual dance number is a striptease where the light is switched off exactly when the last veil could fall. The very prim and proper fairy consents to the plan, but insists on wearing her very long, very decent underwear under the seven veils, just in case there's a problem with the light switch. Hilarity ensues.
Live-Action TV
- Oddly, considering the show has had no trouble depicting both male and female nudity, American Gods (2017)'s flashback to Mr. Wednesday's burlesque days has this. Its opening number goes on about how it has "ten terrific girls... but only nine costumes'', but the tenth girl is simply wearing a skin-tone colored bodysuit with glitter and sequins over the naughty bits. Later on, in Columbia's dance number, she strips down to her panties and some pasties, but is never nude. Then it swings the other way, showing a girl doing a fan-dance, completely nude, but we only see her from behind.
- Angel: in the episode 'Soul Purpose' Spike celebrates being made corporeal by going to a strip club where he is approached by Lindsey posing as "Doyle". We see absolutely nothing but lingerie clad dancers, the intended gag being Spike observes he doesn't believe his lap dancer's name is really "Sunshine" and Lindsey recognises her as ex-cop Kate Lochley from seasons 1 and 2 and agrees (but Elizabeth Rohm couldn't get the time off 'Law and Order' to make the cameo). In the DVD commentary the writer comments that the way to make yourself popular with the cast and crew is to set scenes in a strip club.
- 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.
- Charmed (1998) has an episode with a demonic strip club, but the dancers just wear skimpy costumes. In fact, said outfits are more modest than what the Halliwells wear in some episodes (such as when Phoebe gets possessed by an Egyptian demon and dons a belly dancer costume). In the sixth season finale, the evil universe counterpart to Piper's nightclub turns out to be a strip club of this variety.
- The title character of Cleopatra 2525 is an exotic dancer by trade, but the few times her talents are called upon, usually in a seedy bar setting of some sort, she never goes down to anything beyond a relatively modest bikini. In one episode, to create a diversion, she even takes over for a dancer who is wearing far less (but still in a skimpy bikini) and ends up enthralling the crowd with her PG-rated striptease.
- CSI (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.
- Desperate Housewives: Susan inherits a half share in one from her ex-husband Karl who leaves it to her as a parting joke following his death in a plane crash. Karl's business partner eventually buys her out, but not before she does a striptease dressed as a handy-woman stripper for her plumber husband Mike to convince him he shouldn't come there any more. She later virtually adopts one of the strippers, Robin Gallagher (Julie Benz), Mike commenting "I'm okay with it, I just can't help but think it's some kind of trap?".
- 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.
- Forever Knight. In "Dance by the Light of the Moon", the Villain of the Week is a Femme Fatale stripper. When Nick visits her workplace, the strippers are all dancing in lingerie, or bras and hot pants. Later however there's a Toplessness from the Back shot of the villainess, who then turns to face Nick just as he's raising his police badge to obscure her chest area from the audience. Unsurprisingly this shot is included in the Title Sequence.
- Friends: The girls take Chandler to a strip club to help him get over a recent breakup. The dancers at the club wear skimpy costumes that still keep them covered enough to air in primetime. After leaving the club the girls discuss how cute the dancers were and mention the different themed costumes they were wearing.
- While Fish Mooney's place on Gotham is theoretically a high class burlesque bar/restaurant, the dancers onstage never show any sign of taking off their admittedly skimpy costumes.
- How I Met Your Mother features scenes inside the Lusty Leopard strip club on several occasions, but this is still broadcast TV (also, getting Alyson Hannigan to do a stripper act while pregnant was pretty unlikely). So the Lusty Leopard is a well-lit strip club, where the performers wear elaborate burlesque costumes that never come off, and where the music is sufficiently muted to permit the dialog.
- The second episode of Longmire has several scenes in a strip club where the Victim of the Week was dancing. None of the dancers are shown in anything less than (fairly modest) lingerie on-screen. Vic persuades the people in the bar to give her the name of a suspect by stripping on a pole, but she gets the evidence she wants after doing no more than remove her jacket and shirt to reveal her tank top.
- Lucifer's bar, Lux, in Lucifer is never actually stated to be a strip club, but it regularly has large numbers of attractive women in matching outfits that reveal about as much as the average swimsuit who dance provocatively on stages or the club floor.
- MacGyver featured what must be a family-friendly version of one of this: women dancing around in tight leather.
- Averted at least a couple of times on Mad Men (shown late at night on AMC and set in The '60s) especially in the pilot where a Marilyn Monroe esque stripper is first shown stripping off her gloves, then her gown, and later her bra to reveal the pasties on her breasts.
- Season Two "Maidenform" had several dancers in very skimpy dress, showing off their pasty-covered breasts, and making very provocative dance moves.
- Married... with Children: Al Bundy is fond of going to these. It is supposed to be a "nudie" bar, but of course, no real nudity is ever shown, although there is at least one scene where, from the POV of the stage, a bra and a pair of panties hit Al in the face. However, another episode shows a topless woman from behind.
- The M*A*S*H season ten opener "That's Showbiz" featured the character of Brandy Doyle, a stripper who performed a nudity-free routine. Justified considering she was no longer of the age typical of a stripper - and it was made clear that in her youth her act was not so family-friendly.
- Miami Vice: This regularly appears in the show as a location for criminals and low lifes to gather, allowing the viewer plenty of Male Gaze while remaining safe for broadcast. The pilot, for instance, has a lengthy scene of a dancer in one of these.
- Motive: "Undertow" opens in a bikini bar (referred to as a 'strip club') that a drug dealer is using as his base of operations. Angie and Oscar later visit it during the course of their investigation.
- One episode of NCIS: Los Angeles has Deeks explicitly stating that a given bar they need to check out is a bikini bar rather than a strip club due to either Los Angeles city law or California state law prohibiting a bar from offering both alcohol and nudity.
- In 2018, ITV produced a pair of documentaries in aid of cancer awareness, called The Real Full Monty. The "Ladies' Night" edition was a classic example of this trope: seven female celebrities trained to perform a group stripper dance, but careful editing of a performance to an invited audience showed only Shoulders-Up Nudity, or Toplessness from the Back, to TV viewers. note The programme focused not so much on the idea of celebrities stripping naked, but became a more serious discussion on the effects and the implications of breast cancer.
- Smallville: Lois goes undercover at a "Gentlemen's Club" and dances on a pole in a bikini, but never takes off her top.
- In the Supernatural episode "Heart" (S02, Ep17), Dean visits a strip club while tracking a suspect and only the legs of the stripper are shown.
- Titus: 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".
- On Two and a Half Men Charlie and Alan go to a strip club. 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. (See the real-life section for the explanation.)
- Wings. On "The Lyin' King," where an exotic dancer (played by supermodel Carol Alt) is coming to town for her final performance. Only the back of her legs are shown.
- Even serious documentaries exploring the lives of the girls can be prone to this trope. A critically well-received docu which followed four girls' lives and aspirations as they prepared and entered for the coveted "Stripper of the Year" competition shied away from nudity, despite the fact that accepted practice in the business is to end with complete (but artistic, of course) nudity.
Podcasts
- Frequently discussed on The Flophouse, as the three hosts are equally annoyed by the bizarre implication that such bikini bars exist in the universes of these bad movies as well as being denied seeing the goods.
Pro Wrestling
- Magnum TOKYO was a stripper character, but naturally he only stripped down to his wrestling tights.
- Tyler Reks and Curt Hawkins debuted a striptease gimmick (while WWE was PG no less) but Reks asked for his release a week later. In their one appearance with the gimmick, they stripped down to trunks.
- Randy Orton hosted a striptease segment one night when he was in charge of Raw. The girls only stripped down to modest lingerie.
- Rayna Von Tosh portrayed a burlesque pin-up girl at the family friendly SHIMMER promotion. She only peeled off her gloves and did a sexy dance (while in a corset).
- Kelly Kelly debuted performing a striptease segment. It would be a Running Gag that she'd get stopped before she took off her bra or showed full nudity. Ironically this was on the WWE version of ECW.
- After WWE went PG in 2008, that period until roughly 2013 had them attempting to still have Fanservice-themed Diva segments...just with a whole lot more modesty. Swimsuit matches saw them in one-pieces rather than bikinis, evening gown matches became simply wrestling in the dresses rather than ripping the clothes off, and an infamous pyjama pillow fight where the women were wearing rather modest outfits. Halloween costume contests still happened with a Sexy Whatever Outfit until about 2015.
Roleplay
Video Games
- The title character of Bayonetta is a witch whose 'clothes' are actually her Prehensile Hair wrapped around her body. When she attacks, her hair moves around, giving the appearance that she is stripping. This was fine for her M-Rated home series, but when she was announced as a Guest Fighter for the E10+ rated Super Smash Bros., she had to be toned down. While she still strips to some degree, she always has at least the bare minimum of Modesty Shorts and a tube top. In her home series, some attacks left her completely naked.
- The 'strip club' you visit in the Undercover section of Crime Patrol. A 'stripper' writhes on a platform, but never even looks like she is about to remove an item of clothing.
- Fallout: New Vegas has three main casinos, each of which focuses on a particular sin of excess. While the Tops loves money and the Ultraluxe food, Gomorrah's gimmick is sex. Various rooms in Gomorrah feature male and female prostitutes (as in, NPCs literally named "Prostitute") dancing seductively in suggestive outfits. That said, it's not actually possible for someone to be naked in the (unmodded) game; ironically, the default T-shirt and underpants displayed when no clothing is equipped is less revealing than the prostitute outfit.
- The Grand Theft Auto series tended to feature this prior to Grand Theft Auto V, which had the dancers actually take their tops off.
- In the Like a Dragon series, strip clubs can be visited. They do not remove their clothes and characters refer to such places as 'bikini bars' which makes a lot more sense.
- Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 both have nightclubs with asari dancers on stages, but none of them ever take their outfits off. Still, the presence of strip clubs in space is lampshaded by Ashley:
"Here we are, millions of light years from where humanity first began, and we're in a club full of men watching women shake their asses onstage. I don't know if that's hilarious or sad."
- Saints Row 2 allows stripper poles to be installed in the Third Street Saints' safe houses, but the strippers wear bikinis or lingerie.
- Scarlet Blade has the Delilah Nightclub, which has plenty of girls dancing in very little clothing, from Barely-There Swimwear, to super revealing lingerie. Plus the players character can also dance in club with little clothing, and all but one of the playable classes are female.
Western Animation
- Bojack Horseman has Whale World, a bizarre Sea World/strip club hybrid for the Funny Animal world of the setting. The place features (anthropomorphic) scantily-clad female orcas dancing provocatively, but is actively marketed to families.
- The Simpsons:
- At the time of the episode "Homer's Night Out" aired on FOX, the animators couldn't get away with showing an actual stripper. So, they made "Princess Kashmir" a Sultry Belly Dancer instead.
- Also the Maison Derriere in "Bart After Dark", which offers burlesque and even a fan dancer.
- Parodied when Mr. Burns tries to organise a basketball halftime show. He has a troupe of girls called the "Basket Belles" dressed in 1910s dresses. They only give the crowd a glimpse at their ankles.
Real Life
- In many jurisdictions, a strip club that serves alcohol won't be allowed to have full nudity, presumably to protect the dancers from drunk patrons. However, the law only forbids showing nipple and genitals; dancers will often make use of g-strings and pasties to be as nude as possible while technically being in full compliance. On the other hand, strip clubs that don't serve alcohol are usually allowed to have full nudity in performances.
- There are events in Taiwan
and occasionally Mainland China that hosts professional pole dancers who aren't wearing much without ever going full nude. These events are public and children can be seen in attendance.
