Why the Strip Club Industry Is Collapsing

Dearborn — Strip clubs have died a slow death in Wayne County. The sight of the boarded-up, windowless buildings mark the silent decline. 

Nobody talks about it, but the departure of such a shady and exploitative industry illuminates a cultural shift. Younger Americans are frowning on the libertine behaviors of their parents and grandparents.

I'm not ignorant to the pernicious effects of free online pornography. The OnlyFans industry has turned suburban moms into paid performance artists. Internet influencing using e-girl sex appeal and nudity has become so annoyingly ubiquitous and damaging to young people that an industry of experts has sprouted to warn parents of its effects.

But other phenomena have hastened the strip club industry’s decline over the last decade.

Working-class Baby Boomers sustained this industry. The rise of social conservatism and the moral majority from the late 1970s through the 2000s obscured the high divorce rates and perception of women as sexual objects that would elicit frowns today. A friend working in the investment industry jokes: “When the Boomers check out, they’re taking the Harley Davidson, muscle car, casino, and strip club industries with them.”

While the Boomer generation has declined, Gen Xers and Millennials have reached middle age, and with it has brought a shift in acceptable behaviors for normies. Some of that, I suppose, is partly due to the feminization of society. College-educated women will not put up with their husbands hanging out with the boys in strip clubs. More specifically, men with daughters, myself included, found the notion of such activities vulgar in ways the Boomers apparently didn’t.

The argument has been made that family men today aren’t allowed to have fun in the ways their parents did as a consequence of our HR-driven social fabric. But most Gen X and Millennial fathers are also far more involved in their children’s lives then previous generations, so scummier pastimes have lost their luster.

While porn-brain and the sex industry have become easier to access, men aged 50 and under have become more culturally conservative in lifestyle and behavior. When those age cohorts socialize, hitting the strip club never comes up.

But the true death knell of the strip club industry is the instability economy. In the last 20 years we’ve had a financial crisis, a Great Recession, Covid-19 followed by years of hyper-inflation, a second unofficial recession, and now the affordability crisis that appears targeted directly at the working class and the emergent underclass, the two demographics the industry needs to survive.

These days, it seems like the height of insanity to throw hundreds of dollars down the tube for bad food, aggressively overpriced drinks, and performative sexual attention that leads nowhere. Americans writ-large have apparently figured that out.

How the very few clubs that exist today are surviving is a mystery. How are they able to find talent when anyone with webcam can start an OnlyFans, work in a safer setting, and avoid the public completely?

More ironic is that two of the most prominent strip clubs in Metro Detroit—BT’s and The Pantheon Club—are located deep in the heart of Muslim-dominated Dearborn, a city that banned strip clubs several years ago but was forced to grandfather in these clubs. Even more interesting is the fact that most of the cliental in those clubs are ostensibly Muslim men, even though what happens at these joints is considered haram under Islamic law.

The most famous strip club in Metro Detroit, The Flight Club in Inkster, is still in operation and using various enticements to keep their doors open, but the longtime owner, Alan Markovitz, has struggled with declining revenue year-to-year.

Markovitz, a controversial figure who was both under investigation by the FBI and outed as a federal informant, finally cashed in his chips in 2025, selling the club to a publicly traded corporation with several restaurant and entertainment venues operating under the banner of RCI Hospitality Holdings Inc. for $11 million. But that actually appears to be $6 million on paper and $5 million of complete bullshit.

The decline won't stop. Young men aren’t going out to bars, never mind strip clubs. Indeed, statistics overwhelmingly indicate a crisis of men lacking social willpower and an avoidance of social lubricants as alcohol sales decline, the restaurant industry slowly collapses, and young men prefer to stay home and log in.

Young men wince at the notion of hanging at a strip club lest they suffer accusations of being a simp and are too cynical for the performative hustle one endures paying for attention.

They realize that if they have to swipe their card for attention, they’re losers with no game.