Judging by the long streak of one-star ratings on Caddy’s now inactive reviews page, its glory days were long gone by the time the classic car was taken down for good—and it wasn’t the only strip club to have suffered such a fate. By 2017 only twelve clubs were still operating out of the nearly fifty joints that had been dotted around Toronto at the turn of the century. Strip clubs have always been controversial, criticized for monetizing the objectification of women in a way many find too crude.
Yet the stripper—at once desired and despised, exploited yet feared for her power to corrupt the good man—has not vanished. She permeates popular culture, from blockbusters and music videos to fitness crazes. Why, then, have strip clubs been shutting down?
The reason was clear to Canadian stripper and activist Valerie Scott. As fate would have it, Caddy’s made a cameo appearance in the story of how adult entertainment moved online. A little over a decade before the club played its last song it hired a man named Kurtis Potec, a former welder who’d just traded his tools for the DJ booth.
When he spotted a newspaper ad for a desk job at an online start-up not far from Caddy’s he figured he’d try his luck in the emerging virtual world. After a cursory skim of the twenty-something’s CV, the interviewer began to spout some “pretty vulgar, sexual-related terms” to check whether Kurtis was prepared for the world of online pornography. On the internet, there were no gatekeepers to control what people said, “so I guess they wanted to prepare me for the worst.” He got the job.
Kurtis’s new employer was Xtube, the first tube site targeted at gay men. The start-up’s first office was housed in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, piled up to the ceiling and wall to wall with boxes, leaving only a two-foot-wide passage for Kurtis and his handful of co-workers to reach their desks. Inside the perilously stacked towers were countless pornographic DVDs awaiting digitization and to be uploaded online, along with merchandise like mouse pads and socks emblazoned with the company logo.
Other than the three founders and the main financier—a Chinese man whom the others referred to as Mr X—the only other employee was a video encoder who at times appeared to live in the back room, where he worked and chain-smoked in solitude. Kurtis, by contrast, was drawn into a far more public role. When one of the co-founders left, spooked by the threats that started rolling in from porn producers angry at finding their films on Xtube, Kurtis essentially picked up the day-to-day running of the site.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
