No Such Thing As a Free Drink

“ Helloooooo tu veux venir ce soir au jangal? Infamous night we are backkk baby!” is the last of 177 (at a rough count) unanswered Whatsapp messages from my former club promoter. Clubbing, specifically at nightclubs such as L’ARC, Maison Blanche, Titty Twister and many others that require a cover charge, table booking or reservation, is a prevalent pastime for many AUP students, but one that is only accessible to most through the network of club promoters. These relationships can be mutually beneficial: you get a free night out and the promoter gets paid for bringing you. However, as some clubbers have experienced, the cost of this relationship can sometimes outweigh its benefits.

My current promoter, Louis Corvez, has been working for over two years in Paris, starting at L’Aquarium and then later picking up work at Mona Lisa and Titty Twister. Corvez, in his mid-twenties and a native Parisian, explains the two ways he makes his money: first, he’ll post on social media every week with the event information and will contact his more affluent customers to see if they want to reserve a table. At the end of the night, he takes home 10 percent of whatever they spend. He also has several girls, myself included, who go out with him frequently, and

he’ll be paid by the club for the number of girls he’s able to bring in. He cares more about the number of girls he can bring in, quantity being the priority, and once they’re inside he just wants them to have a good time.

What he enjoys the most about it, he says, is being able to spend fun evenings with his customers and to know that he’s given them a good evening. “I get paid to party, which is also pretty cool,” he adds. The relationship we have is a good one — friendly, fun and strictly business — but is by no means the universal experience.

“There’s no such thing as a free drink,” Beatrice Spencer, a junior at AUP and somewhat veteran of the club circuit, tells me. She started going out in much the same way and for much the same reasons as I did. Keeping up a social life in Paris, especially when new to the city is both difficult and expensive and the promise of a night of free drinking and dancing with new people is an attractive one. Her first night out occurred when the friend of a friend extended an invitation to come out with her promoter.

Following her launch into the world of Paris nightclubs, Spencer quickly became connected with more promoters, usually through her friends, "I wasn't thje one calling them," she tells me, "that's not who I wanted to be. You go through a bunch of terrible promoters who treat you like shit to try to find your prince charming promoter, and sometimes you don’t even find that.” When pressed to explain what makes a bad promoter, there is one theme in particular that stands out: “When they treat you like a whore.” The word, or a variant, is used another 14 times as she tells me about a particularly colorful night out.

“I was once pimped out in a way,” she begins. She and a group of friends were asked by a promoter to meet at a hotel, with the promise of partying with the rapper Tyga. They were told to “dress slutty,” she explains,which “makes me feel more like an object than I do a person.” Spencer recounts being moved from the hotel to a club 40 minutes outside of Paris, and finally back into the city center, all the while not being sure of where they were going. While uncomfortable, she remembers trying to build off the confidence of her friends and trying to reassure another girl who was visibly distressed. When they finally reached the last club, regardless of their entourage, they were turned brusquely away. At that point, it became clear to Spencer: “You’re expendable at any moment. With a promoter you’re not a special asset, you’re a way for him to make money.”

The crux of Spencer’s conflict with clubbing was being measured up at the door, and it took its toll on her. Her freshman year became one filled with insecurity, as her nights were dedicated to clubbing and what that entailed: a constant doubting game: “Was I skinny enough? Was I pretty enough? Was I enough?” It’s a question, she says, that every woman going out in Paris like this is forced to ask herself. For AUP senior Kayo Nakamura, getting turned away “used to be so hard, and so personal, and I used to get so hurt by it,” Nakamura tells me, “but now I don’t really care.”

“It built up,” Spencer continues, “I started feeling so self-conscious about how I looked because when you go out to a club you’re judging yourself against other girls, you’re judging yourself based on how you look, on a scale.” Carolina Galbiati, another AUP student, worked for two months at Hobo Club as a hostess, assistant and intern, and shares exactly who it is that determines this scale. The peoplewho make the decision at the door are the bouncers and the physio. “Every club has its own artistic direction and mood,” Galbiati explains, “so if the boss is walking around the club and sees a group of ‘ugly’ girls, he’ll get mad at the physio, the bouncers, and the promoter, so everyone is just looking out for their paychecks.” Galbiati says they use the term “baby prostitute” to describe the usual dress code: “If you don’t look like one or have the entire contents of your makeup bag on your skin, they’ll invent an excuse to turn you away.”

Dr. Ashley Mears, a professor of sociology at Boston University and a former fashion model, tackles the subject in Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent. Mears asserts the system of club promoting leads women to consent to their own appropriation and exploitation, “cemented by gifts and strategic intimacies.” Mears characterizes the work of these women as “unpaid aesthetic labor.”

Dr. Deniz Kandiyoti, a Turkish feminist theorist and professor at SOAS University London,

examines the underlying influences that can lead women to participate in their own exploitation in her revolutionary 1988 work Bargaining with Patriarchy. In it, Kandiyoti proposes the concept of the patriarchal bargain, in which a woman will participate in a patriarchal system inherently damaging to other women for the purposes of advancing within a patriarchal society. Kandiyoti looks especially at polygamy, and the means by which women are pitted against each other in competition for the highest power within the domestic sphere, but the theory supports Mears’ work as well, specifically in that the hierarchies established in these clubs do not simply put women at the bottom but establish a hierarchy with these women as well. Mears identifies the three categories of women in the American VIP clubs; the models (women models from reputable agencies), the “good civilians” (girls who look like they could be models for their height and build), and finally “civilians and pedestrians” (women with “low conformityto fashion standards,” short and heavy women being of the least value). The work these women do, Mears presses, is invaluable to the promoters, though they are the only staff never paid.

“These aren’t people who matter,” Spencer stresses. Nakamura mentions the two reasons she’s been given for being turned away at the door: being too short or looking too young. But, she adds, “They could be racist too.” She recounts being warned against certain clubs or certain bouncers who have a reputation for being more racist, and that, once inside, it doesn’t subside. “I know that in Paris I do stand out more just being Asian,” she says. “I’m exotic here. These men see me and relate me to Japanese pornography.”

Nakamura went on to discuss the difference between clubs in Paris and Taiwan, where she herself worked as a promoter for a time. “[In Taiwan] they knew what was fun and what wasn’t. That doesn’t seem like the case here. They don’t care if the girls are having fun or not, so long as we’re there,” she says. This attitude feeds into another trend she’s noticed in relationships between promoters and their regular clients, that going out can become an obligation. “When they do need a certain number of girls for the night, I know my friends feel forced to go out,” Nakamura says, and cites this as one of her reasons for retreating from the club scene: “It’s not my job to go clubbing and get drunk.”

but tend to stick with promoters they trust and are comfortable with. Spencer avoids the ones who, as she reiterates, make her feel like a prostitute. “They make you stay at the table, they’re very strict about where you can go, they’ll try to make you drink. They’re trying to get you drunk enough that you’ll make a dumb decision, or so you’ll go home with a man,” Spencer clarifies.

Nakamura mentions that promoters themselves can behave inappropriately: “They’ll usually be drinking too, and it’s hard to tell the line between a promoter being nice and being flirty. Some get touchier towards the end of the night, and it’s important to know when to leave.” She tells me that she knows some promoters who are known to drug girls, and one who sexually harassed a friend, and makes a point to stay away from them.

The promoters they do like? The ones who are either women, gay, or too pretty to sleep with the girls they bring. Spencer’s current promoter, she tells me, is always “super nice,” and going out with him never needs to entail more than having a great time with her girlfriends. “He’s pretty, too, so it feels good,” she elaborates. “You can think ‘I’m going out with a pretty man.’” Truly her “prince charming” promoter, and a best-case scenario. “Drinking for free is great,” she finishes, “but at what cost? At the cost of sacrificing your own dignity and self-confidence? Unless I’m inside with a group of girlfriends that I love, it’s not worth it to me.”

Clubbing with a promoter is economical, convenient and, generally, a very fun time, but the power dynamics can cause more harm than good to the young women who rely on it. Especially in the case of young, uncertain new arrivals to Paris, the club circuit can significantly alter their self-perception and sense of self-worth and foster a mentality of competition between them and their peers. This system, as much as it creates opportunities for students to connect and socialize, also exposes them to the machinations of those who intend to take advantage of them.

By Jane Addington-May

Photography By Mary Layman