The Yelp Strip Club Review Spectacular

It takes a special sort of person to write a Yelp review. They must be intrepid, loyal to their fellow consumers and display a steely insouciance against the haters and trolls. Alternatively, they can just be Wale. More than that, they have to have a lot of fucking free time on their hands. It always weirded me out in college to look up one of the, like, 12 restaurants in town and see that some rando I'd seen around campus was reviewing every single restaurant in our small college town as if they were Pete Wells and Yelp was their own personal New York Times. Because of this, Yelp didn't really work for me back then since it was dominated by an oligarchy of iron-fisted totalitarians, divvying out three-star ratings with no remorse.

But if it takes a special sort of person to write a Yelp review, it takes a really special sort of person to write a strip club review on Yelp. After reading pretty much every review of pretty much every strip club in New York City, I can vouch for this as 100% incontrovertible fact. Despite the fact that strip clubs are still a relatively taboo subject in mainstream America, there exist a host of intrepid souls letting you know which strips clubs are tight and which strip clubs are not that tight. The psyche of a strip club reviewer is often weirdly defensive, as if they're somehow atoning for, or even justifying, doing a thing they're not supposed to do (i.e. pay money to see live boobs) by writing about the quality of the lighting/buffet/staff/drinks/etc.

Within the first two sentences of their review, they generally mention something to the effect of: "OH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE I WENT TO A STRIP CLUB I'M NOT THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO NORMALLY DOES THAT BUT HERE ARE X Y AND Z MINUTE DETAILS I NOTICED WITH MY HAWK-LIKE EYES." Another common, and unfortunate, element of strip club Yelp reviews is when the reviewer gets defensive and complains about how the strippers at their neighborhood joint aren't hot enough (only ugly people make this complaint FYI), or how they're somehow better than the strippers themselves (they're not), or how the strip club they're reviewing is too expensive (it's a strip club, not a thrift store, of course it's gonna be expensive). But through the flotsam and jetsam, some truly bright diamonds do shine through. Some are weird, some are gross, some are intimate and confessional and some defy description. Click through and discover the wild wonders of strip club reviews on Yelp.

Drew Millard wrote this while fully naked. You can read more of his work on Noisey and follow him on Twitter here.

And this concludes another episode of Real Talk with Eric E.