Obviously, getting in free anywhere is fundamentally brilliant. The amount of times I've swanned into an AA, Narcotics Anonymous, PTSD groups and 'Preparing for your natural birth' sessions for a free luke-warm coffee and Jaffa cake is uncountable.
However unlike those family days out, the scheme of clubs allowing women to get in free, and men having to pay, is successfully sexist towards both genders. The whole idea of this is that the club is air tight with women, thus aiming to entice men to surround the building like a scene out of Shaun of the Dead (I've not seen the original), monotonously shuffling towards the door, eager to get inside and stand near a woman, which for some reason is much more desirable when given the treat of paying to make small talk over a scorchingly loud thumpy song in which a man describes how expensive his watch and / or shoes are. (They always seem to be REALLY expensive)
I'm not someone that regularly goes clubbing myself, unless the club is a bar (and in that case I'll probably drink in a phone box) so there is a chance i'm missing something key here. I can't really go anywhere that you can't bring a rucksack with water bottles in, as I devour a huge amount of water in a day. I imagine, like sneaky airports, the water taps in clubs are only hot so you can't even get a chilled drink of water without buying a bottle at a price which means having to re-mortgage the house. Also the floors are always overwhelmingly sticky, I assume the ones I've been too hosted Torture Garden the night before and the cleaning staff clocked of early.
Anyway, what I'm saying is for men to fork out X amount of £$¥ to partake in this abuse, and women getting in gratis is something much more sinister than water and loosing a shoe, and has a negative effect on everyone involved, apart from the owners.
This clever concept is one that I am seeing more and more in London, where the clubs' owners are clearly hoping that if they just get enough women to passively wander in, the men will follow, pay their over-priced entrance fee and then proudly make the most of their gender pay gap to buy an abundance of drinks at the bar. In other words, the venues are shamelessly using women as man-bait, rather than investing any of their energy in trying to make it a place that would attract a mix of paying customers without the need to bribe a select group of them.
The one strip club I've ever been too I got in free, because the bouncer thought that I was a woman (I'd done the old tuck-trick) and it was great to be able to wander in without spending a penny. However I knew that I was only able to get in free so the promoter outside could point at us and say "See, loads of girls in here!" with the assumed response being "What, you mean the one with the stubble?"
Relative to the asteroids coming / Freddo bars now costing 15p, it seems like quite a minor thing to be concerned (and writing) about. However it still stands to reason that these places should be aiming to offer another intensive to get customers in, rather than actively and shamelessly promoting a scheme to widen the gender gap and keep us from moving one step forward (those damn sticky floors).