Let me tell naked truth of the lap dancing trade

I'VE never forgotten a tale a male friend of mine once told me. The one about the time he went to a strip club in Aberdeen as a student and got more than he bargained for. It cost £10 for his lap dance but the grope and full-on kiss session was free. And, for him, priceless.

Enraged, I told my boyfriend who patted me on the head and told me I was cute. Cute that I didn't know that dancers stripped off to their birthday suits, writhed around on a punter's lap and, if they wanted to, allowed them to touch and kiss them. Cute that I never suspected such a dance was more than swaying their hips in pretty lingerie to the music.

When I realised just why my male friends were such fans of strip joints, I was shocked. To me, that wasn't female empowerment or even a dance form. It was seedy and quite sad. If a bloke who paid for such a "service" was single then fair game, but if he was in some loving relationship then the whole thing was nothing more than a betrayal of his partner.

Paying to have a naked girl gyrate on your lap and allow the odd kiss is not "entertainment". So, from that day on, let's say lap dancers were not on my Christmas card list. Then I met one last weekend.

Sitting alone in Starbucks, a 20-something blonde girl sat down beside me with her book. Ironically, I was flicking through OK! Magazine and getting the Cheryl Cole gossip, while she was deep into Ian Rankin's Doors Open. Then, as I took a call from a friend who was lamenting all the bad points of her partner, she stopped reading and started listening.

"Men," she eventually sighed. "There's just no pleasing them. And they're impossible to work out. I thought women were supposed to be difficult."

And so a conversation over hazelnut lattes began, which eventually led to an education into the reality of lap dancing.

First was the fact that Jane and her colleagues don't think about how hot a bloke is, nor do they really truly fancy him. Sorry boys. Most of the time they're thinking of the money they've made and mentally writing their grocery list as they gyrate to some Usher song. On a busy weekend night, they have pound signs in their eyes and want to hurry up and get on to the next punter. Time is money, after all.

Second, it's not all it's cracked up to be. She admitted that, yes, lap dancing is the ultimate tease and yes, the dancers can get as close as they want. It's empowering to have that control, too. But it's also an eye-opener – and often a relationship breaker. Strippers, according to Jane, see "what men are really like" and "how guys will tell you one minute they love their girlfriends and will be asking you out the next", and men, many of them have found out, are turned on by the unobtainable – no matter how false or set up it is.

And she admitted that they think, deep down, it's also a bit sad. "More fool the men who have to pay to have a girl dance for them – I mean, come on, it's a dance," she laughed. "I get paid to dance around and tease, while there's hordes of girls in George Street paying to dance in the clubs, before going home to sleep with different men."

In the three years since she began dancing, Jane had bought her own BMW, paid a hefty wad off her two-bedroom Bruntsfield flat and had a customer account at Harvey Nichols. I, on the other hand, boasted a broken down Clio, sky-high mortgage bills and was on first name terms with staff at TK Maxx. She was saving up to start up her own business, I was saving to pay off my student debts. "It also gets a bit boring too," she admitted. "There's only so many times you can dance for men."

When I told her about my friend's Aberdeen experience and my boyfriend's response, she laughed. "More fool them for allowing a stranger to do that – they're hardly boyfriend material, are they?"

With that, strippers were back on my list. As Jane finally left she said she'd add herself as my Facebook friend. Then, added: "Do you know who you should hate? Journalists. They've given us a bad name. I never asked, what is it you do?"

So, Jane, this one's for you.