Tom Wichelow | Photographer

On the look out for interesting pictures I noticed an article in the paper about a south London club owner named Fred Batt who claimed to be opening up the country's first male lap dancing event for female audiences. It offered the personal service of the 'lapdance' with full nudity. Something that male lap dance audiences have taken for granted for years. The event was called Lapattack and over the course of a week I photographed the proceedings.

There was something about photographing the role reversal that fascinated me. The male being the sexual object and the women displaying the debauched libertine values. Yet are these images evidence of healthy sensual indulgence or do they prove a Calvinist conviction of natural depravity? I think this depends on whether one can let go of ones moral preconditions.

Documentary photography has its fair share of pictures of female strippers in smoky clubs surrounded by male onlookers and it seemed a perfect opportunity to make photographs with the tables turned. The atmosphere in the club was highly charged. But the sexual energy that was filling the place was not of the dark and brooding character we see represented in male audience strip bars but a libidinous outpouring of desire and sexuality. Clapping and shouting, the women harangued the male specimens on show with fantastic primeval abandon. Maybe the women felt safe within an all female audience to express in public their desires that might otherwise be seen as unladylike. Whatever the reason, the audience had a fantastic time and the guys went home with a few notes stuffed into their thongs.

Lapattack

Untitled (Lapattack), Streatham. 2001.