Sapphire Las Vegas strip club wanted to do something creative while the Consumer Electronics Show was in town, so they flew robot strippers from London to Vegas. The robots had CCTV cameras for heads and pole-danced to Justin Timberlake at a CES-related party. Sapphire Las Vegas strip club Managing Partner Peter Feinstein told The Daily Beast that “it’s all in a bid to attract more women.” Feinstein said that he has noticed the demographics of CES have changed over the year and that “the typical hot women” just don’t lure the same type of crowd as before.
“We’re appealing to a mass audience who looks on the internet, which we don’t normally do just as a gentlemen’s club,” he said to Daily Beast. He also said that most strip clubs are not appealing to people attending CES, so he wanted to offer them another place to go. However, the event was attended by about 80 percent men and almost all of them were in town for CES. The robots danced alone for a while before several female strippers took to the stage to “compete” with the robots. The men seemed to like human strippers better, reports The Daily Beast and complained that the female robots weren’t “complex or lifelike.” Well, you can’t get everything you want.
CES has been criticized for not being more inclusive of women. This year, event organizers promised to “redouble” efforts to promote gender equality. They failed to include one female keynote speaker for the second year in a row. Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of sextech startup MakeLoveNotPorn, told The Daily Beast that events like robot strippers contribute to the sexist environment that can feel exclusionary to females.
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