Hello, and welcome to Masterpiece Peeler.

Apparently, watching naked chicks gyrating on stage is now considered studying art.

A court in Oslo Norway has ruled that striptease lies in the same category as opera, live plays, and performance art.

How long, do you think, it'll be before universities everywhere are offering "introduction to Striptease" and "the Socioeconomics of Lap Dancing" courses, complete with field trips?

Don't get me wrong, I'm as much a fan of the female form as the next guy (and select few gals), but does anybody seriously think that someone going to a strip club is going there for its artistic merits?

Now, I don't spend a lot of time in strip clubs; partly because I have a girlfriend whom I love dearly, who I think would likely kick my ass if she found out about it. Two stag parties, and a birthday celebration that I couldn't get out of in Quebec (I would direct you downward a couple of postings where I discuss my view on birthdays), accounts for my entire experience with striptease. But I have no trouble admitting that I wasn't there to listen to the music. Although, I admit that at one of the aforementioned stag parties, I was seated in the front row next to the soon-to-be groom, while we were busily drinking ourselves into unconsciousness. Everybody else was driving, so I was elected to be the one who matched him drink for drink. Friends don't let friends get blasted alone. It's a guy thing. At any rate, the groom-to-be is actually something of a math buff, and we ended up having a rather intelligent conversation (or maybe it just seemed intelligent at the time.... we'd had a lot to drink) on which of the dancers' various curves we found to be most mathematically elegant. Actually, now that I think of it, we were doing that before we'd had much to drink; but those who know me have no-doubt realized that much of what I do is very strange. That which does not kill me makes me stranger.

It's also under those circumstances that I made one of the fundamental discoveries of the universe; something which I suspect women have known for a long time.

Men are stupid.

Seriously. You get a group of people where the number of X chromosomes exactly balances the number of Y chromosomes, and the average IQ in the room must plummet to somewhere in the vicinity of room temperature (if the room were really, really cold). The extent of our vocabulary consists of the phrase "more beer," and a select few grunts and whistles. I honestly have no clue how women put up with us. I mean, we're ugly, we're hairy, we smell bad; and let's be honest, guys; we're pigs. Frankly, I see it as a collosal cosmic joke that the women of this planet are forced to work with us to guarantee propagation of the species. In Darwinian terms, I'm at a complete loss to explain how the human race has possibly survived. How we managed to not kill ourselves when men have been largely the dominant gender for a fair chunk of our history is also something I'm at a complete loss to explain (see above, re: men are stupid). But, hell, if we can elect Bush as leader of the free world... Actually, come to think of it, the fact that Bush possesses a Y chromosome actually explains quite a lot.

Anyhow, coming back to my original point, the fact of the matter is that no male who goes to a strip club is there to judge the dancers upon their artistic merits. No male in a strip club has the cognitive ability to judge the dancers on their artisitic talents; simply because very little blood is flowing in the direction of their brain. It's like comparing a 1-900 line to a poetry recital.

That said, I truly believe that there is some artistic merit to striptease. A friend of mine dances at the French Maid to work her way through her undergraduate degree. She does some more (ahem) conventional dancing and I've seen her perform on a couple of occasions. I've never actually seen her at her, um, other job 'cause that would just freak the hell out of me; but if she dances half as well there as she did in the two shows I saw her in; then there's definitely an artisitic element to it. It just strikes me as odd to place a strip club on the same footing as an auditorium. Maybe I would feel differently about it if she were stripping in the Jubilee; I don't know.