The Lusty Lady in San Francisco, California: A Review

The old fashioned live "peep show", wherein you enter a booth and a performer dances on one side while you do what you feel like you need to on the other, seems to be a dying breed of adult entertainment. I'm not familiar with the industry so I don't know the full reasons for certain, but my guess would be extremely high liability (and low customer return) due to the odds of catching some sort of venereal disease in booths that have all manner of bodily fluids all over them.

Communities who wish to discourage this sort of thing often adopt "open booth" laws which require the booths either have no doors or be made out of clear plastic, such as the ones at the Lusty Lady. This does nothing to discourage the hardcore perv population, however, and actually probably increases their ranks as now in addition to the peep show they paid for, they can watch all their neighbors as well. And you can watch them too! Joy.

So now you have some idea of what the scene here is. Grody booths, and many a creepy old man (some of whom look to be part of the local hardcore homeless population) await inside this particular den of iniquity in North Beach.

Much is made of the fact that this place is unionized and owned by the ladies who perform there. That's great for them, but uh ... they're on the clean side of the glass and I'm not. They have a guy on hand at all times who is supposed to go around and "freshen up" the booths, plus moist towelette dispensers everywhere, but neither of these factors catches all the stuff that's apparently getting spewed around.

The ladies who work here run the gamut of looks and body types, although the ages seemed to be constrained from about 20 to 40. They apparently let pretty much anybody in that age bracket work here. Now, before you start in with all this "Male Chauvinist Pig How Dare You Women Aren't Barbie Dolls" and etc. etc., first of all I enjoy "real" women, but that doesn't mean I have to be forced into liking everything I see. I'll tell you a few things I don't personally find attractive, which are predilections that are not all that uncommon - cottage cheese thighs, armpit hair and the look of having been up on methamphetamine for the last 24 hours. All of these things are present in some of the ladies at the club here. I'm sure there's other people who get into that stuff, great for them, I personally don't much care for it. Your mileage may vary.

There were some pretty, sweet and talented girls too. Thing is, I just can't get past the skeeve of a place like this. I went with a group and went into a booth to watch for awhile just to be a sport, but I spent more time focusing on not touching anything and not stepping in anything than paying attention to the lovely performer. I can't even begin to imagine "getting down to business" in one of these booths, in any way, shape or form. Between that and the fact that everyone can pretty much see each other in every booth, and most of the skeevy old scraggly man population seems to consider leering at other visitors while "enjoying themselves" a prime point of their visit, there's just absolutely no way, man. Not happening.

I've managed to come this far in life without catching a "gift that keeps on giving", and there's no way I'm breaking that streak with accidental contact with someone's leftover funk in some nasty peep booth. Nor am I particularly inclined to be part of the evening's entertainment (and potential future "spank bank" material) for gents who look like they either have been or will be on To Catch A Predator at some point. One dollar per minute also gets pretty expensive pretty fast even though it doesn't sound like it might.