OMG! Oh my god! I’m having one of those moments when I’m really not sure that what I am seeing is real. There’s a man on stage in front of me, taking a shower, fully nude, and erect. I’m surrounded by a hundred or so screaming Argentine women.
The dude is pretty hot: tall, brunette with sexy bangs over his forehead and certainly not lacking in any department physically. We can all be absolutely sure of that. He’s been lathering himself up around the abdominal groin regions, using something like shaving cream, and now the suds are coming off, sliding down his legs as we all shout and laugh and clap, fuelled by sparking rosé. All class.
This was something I definitely hadn’t anticipated, even though I’d already been to male strip shows both in New Zealand and in Brazil. In Rio, the dancers clearly physically enjoyed the attention they received and some of the women in the audience got their jollies groping the bailarines, but there was no full-scale nudity like here in Argentina’s capital.
I’d seen the ad for the club, Golden, in a small listings type pamphlet in the San Telmo hostel where I was staying. The show is exclusively for women, though men enter later in the evening when the venue becomes a regular disco. Now I could see why they insisted that you were over 18 – and it had nothing to do with beverages.
Like most strip shows for women, most of the ladies in the audience were there with packs of friends, either on hen night expeditions or conversely celebrating their divorces. We were treated to costumes of all different perversions.
There was a group of salseros (though frankly their Carmen Miranda-style frilly shirts didn’t do much for me), staunch navy/Top-Gun themed guys, the Middle Eastern men with Laurence of Arabia type headscarves, the SWAT team, some Godfather mafia dude, and a kind of Jean-Claude Van Damme character.
Apparently Argentine women like it rough. By that stage I’d seen all the ‘pistols’ I could handle.
Being in Buenos Aires, tango wasn’t neglected and a group of dancers took me though a routine that was way, way raunchier than anything I would ever see in any nearby milonga.
I was perplexed by the erection thing and the practicalities behind it. Was it viagra? Porn videos on a loop backstage? While I was desperate to take photos and post them on facebook, that wasn’t to be. Burly security guards strictly enforced the ‘no photography’ rule.
It didn’t matter in the end – I didn’t need pixels to jog my memory. My night at Golden won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
Golden: a strip show exclusively for women. Esmeralda 1040, tel 11 4313 4323 or 11 4313 8643. Fridays and Saturdays from 10pm. www.golden.com.ar. Entrance ranges from $45 to $65 depending on seat location.
