Club promoters are the ugly face of 21st century sexism

They don’t like fat girls

| UPDATED

What would you say if I said you could go on a night out in London to an exclusive Mayfair club, with guest list entrance, a VIP table and free drinks all night? “What’s the catch?” you ask. Well, you just have to be young, pretty and female.

DSTRKT, Libertine, Cirque le soir and Café de Paris are among the wave of London’s finest clubs which offer these services. These exclusive nightspots open their doors on different nights throughout the week and receive an influx of the rich and famous.

Promoters offer a way into this glamorous lifestyle for a fraction of the cost. It’s usually foreign businessmen who are the ones flashing the big cash in London clubs and they want clubs filled with girls that fit to their shallow idea of beauty.

Creeps

Going on a promoter-sponsored night out is a truly grating experience. Firstly, they’ll almost definitely send you a creepy text firstly asking for photos or links to the Facebook profiles of all the girls attending, so they can see what you look like and if you have the correct “look” for the club, then they will tell you to make sure you “look sexy” on the night, “wear heels and have your make up on fleek” and most importantly they will tell you to “not bring any big/fat girls/guys with you” as it looks bad for them, all the while judging and deciding whether you’re fit enough for the shallow men in the club.

But it’s not just London, up and down the country nights are being marketed to men by men. Whilst they’re not all as exclusive as London, it pretty much the same everywhere. From door policies that charge guys but not girls, to juvenile names like “F*** me I’m fresh”, everything about uni nightlife is designed to objectify and demean women.

Once you get to the club you become nothing but a trophy, there to look good and create a façade of a glamorous, trendy, young club. The bouncers make you queue in the ridiculously long line outside usually for over 45 minutes, even though the club is not full, it’s just to make it look busy and popular for passers-by. Too many times I’ve seen girls getting turned away because they don’t have the right ‘look’ for these scummy door staff and promoters. Girls are judged as sex objects in seconds, with one look from a bouncer determining how their night will go.

You may get a VIP table but you’ll have to share it with strange, creepy men and bottles of Belvedere. The men are a lot older and they’re the sleazy “I’ll flash my cash and you can sit on my lap” type. Just like the promoters and the club staff, they’re only interested in you for one reason.The staff are always rude to your boy mates or ignore them unless they give them a heavy tip and all of the other made in Chelsea type revellers are just stuck up. So getting all dressed up to fit the club’s criteria, to just be asked by the house photographer for a few photos to make the website look better, it’s just not worth it.

You’re surrounded by wankers like this

Imagine doing this for your birthday. You get all dolled up with your friends, maybe one of them is a little curvier than the rest of you or has a disability or isn’t the preferred height, you get to the club only to be turned away by the bouncer due to a rehearsed made up excuse such as: “sorry girls, we’re full tonight, you should have come earlier”,even though you have arrived at the exact time your promoter told you to. You then embarrassingly have to exit the queue with everyone watching, whilst the model-like group of girls behind you get a nod from the bouncer as the red rope generously opens for them to enter.

Clubs will always plead ignorance, pretend that the reason they’ve turned you away is capacity rather that what you look like. But it’s bullshit, and everyone knows it. Vile club owners and promoters want to fill their clubs with this superficial image of youth, beauty, but it doing so, they take away the whole point of going out, having fun.