Talk:Taxi dancer

Original entry from 2005

This was posted here to start and has been left dangling:

Is the film Sweet Charity relevant here? -- Anon.

I have moved it into the body. -- Beardo (talk) 16:47, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

2007-05-11 Automated pywikipediabot message

--CopyToWiktionaryBot 05:42, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Not a stub

I removed the note that this was a stub. It seems quite a complete little article. Earthlyreason (talk) 17:47, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

FYI

Noticed that the australian-born British actress Zoe Caldwell's mother was a taxi-dancer in Australia. The current history seems totally Amero-centric. Manytexts (talk) 10:35, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Male Taxi Dancers?

This article suggests that there were only female taxi dancers, but I got to this page from that on Valentino, who, according to the article, worked as a male taxi dancer for a time. It seems to me that this aspect should be included as well. I assume the male dancers danced with women, but this might not even be the case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.91.100.20 (talk) 23:03, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Valentino did indeed work as a taxi dancer, and the Billy Wilder article (citing two evidently reliable sources) says that he probably did as well before he left Berlin. The fact that two WP editors have within just a few months stumbled by accident across two articles that directly contradict this article's women-only slant makes a pretty strong case that there are probably many more examples on WP and that this article must change. If I had any outside sources I could cite, I would do it myself, but I don't.

Of course there were men who were paid dance partners; it is absurd to assume that only women did it. Although taxi dancers were not the same as prostitutes, saying that only women did it is as absurd as saying that only women ever sold sex. And a woman who wanted to dance but had no partner to dance with would have been much more likely to pay a man to dance with her than to have sex with her.

Male taxi dancers almost surely danced most often with women (rich widows are an obvious possibility, but by no means the only possibility), but regardless of who their partners were, pretending that they did not exist is ridiculous. The blanket gender bias of this article is inexcusable.--Jim10701 (talk) 01:24, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I calmed down some, reread the article, and discovered that there are a few mentions of male taxi dancers in it. The following sentence in the lead section is what outraged me before, so I think I will just change it:

Taxi dancers are young women who are hired by male patrons to dance with them on a dance-by-dance basis.

I am going to change it to read:

Taxi dancers are hired to dance with their customers on a dance-by-dance basis.

That change - and changing "she" to "he or she" and "patron" to "customer" in the last sentence in the lead section ("[...] the dancer's pay is proportional to the time she spends with the patron.") - is sufficient to mitigate my strong objection to this article--Jim10701 (talk) 02:49, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like the changes you've made were appropriate, though how you managed to become "outraged" and have a "strong objection" to such a mundane, obscure article is beyond me. Don't take things so personally, my man.--172.190.47.67 (talk) 01:05, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Merger proposal

The articles Taxi dancer and Taxi dance hall overlap too much for separate articles to be useful or necessary. To avoid repetition (or, worse, contradiction) they should be merged. Since taxi dancers can exist without taxi dance halls, but not conversely, I suggest "Taxi dancer" is the primary term and the other term should redirect to it (even though "Taxi dance hall" is currently the more comprehensive article). A taxi dance hall is simply a dance hall that provides taxi dancers. jnestorius^(talk) 21:30, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

A Ceroc taxi dancer doesn't necessarily danec in a dance hall. I agree that removing duplidated material is a good idea, however. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:48, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, as I said, "taxi dancers can exist without taxi dance halls"; but there is nothing to be said about taxi dance halls that cannot as easily be said in a merged article. jnestorius^(talk) 17:34, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

It is not appropriate to merge the Taxi-Dance Hall article with the Taxi Dancer article. The Taxi-Dance Hall really documents the History of Taxi Dancing. As a historic piece it examines a now extinct form of mass entertainment of the United States, which at one time drew tens of thousands of patrons. It is a vivid snapshot in time of America's history which was also picked up by the Free Dictionary’s the Article of the Day. I'm afraid if it get bundled up with the often edited and hacked Taxi Dancer article, it will become fragmented and loose its historic and geographic focus (America). However the Taxi Dancer article is not about a distinct point in time and geography, but draws readers and contributors from different countries as well. Apparently taxi dancing is still used in Argentina, Mexico, England and upon cruise ships, but its modern expression seems very different from its original form which first occurred in San Francisco. The Taxi Dancer article is a good place to draw facts about current and international trends in taxi dancing, as well as documenting taxi dancing's references in film, song, and novels. When we look at the topic "Baseball", we see a brief paragraph about baseball parks which is then hyper-linked to another main article called "Baseball Park" via the Main Article Command. In the same way that Baseball Park has it's own main article tethered to the central article Baseball, so should Taxi-Dance Hall be an independent satellite article which is tethered to the Taxi Dancer article. IMO, many of our articles have become too long as a result of excessive MERGE commands, and defeat the clarity and navigation advantage which modular structure can offer via the Main Article Command, and thus reduce the length of the articles while still giving access to all information by use of the Main Article Command's linking. By use of the Main Article Command, the Taxi-Dance Hall article is tethered to the Taxi Dancer article's History Section via the Main Article Command, and similarly the Taxi Dancer article is tethered to the Taxi-Dance Hall article's Dancers Section via the Main Article Command. As a main contributor to both articles, I have made an effort to not allow much duplicated information. And as the creator of the much researched Taxi-Dance Hall article, I would please like to hear someone with substantial experience at Wikipedia contradict my views here, before a merge is approved and/or executed. Thanks.James Carroll (talk) 16:43, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

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Sources

• A Sociological Analysis of the California Taxi Dancer: The Hidden Halls, Mary V. Meckel, PhD., The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995

Narrow focus

The focus is so narrowly on the US night-club scene that some obvious rebalancing is needed, or another article. For most of the 20th century in Europe and North America from about 1910 to about 1970 or 80, the most popular dancing was ballroom dancing, in its many varieties. Almost always, more women would turn up to these events than men. The system of a booklet of tickets being purchased for dances with the "house" men was quite common, and solved what was otherwise quite a tricky problem. Also, in dance schools the imbalance is still a problem! Macdonald-ross (talk) 10:14, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

• This article is about Taxi Dancing. If you want to write about ballroom dancing, there already exists an article Ballroom dance for that, where you could add researched and sourced facts. During the first part of the 20th century, public ballrooms of America actually had much trouble in attracting female participants -- there were too many men -- and that is why on pg 189 Cressey (The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life) says that Taxi dance Halls enjoyed so much more popularity that the public ballrooms. Good luck finding sources for taxi dancing in Europe, I did a lot of research on this topic and could not find much on Europe. James Carroll (talk) 22:17, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

See also -- Taxi dancing was a Parent Phenomenon to Lap Dancing

The see also section includes Strippers - isn't that a remote connection ? -- Beardo (talk) 16:21, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

NO, there is a distinct connection between the two. Modern strippers offer lap dancing, and lap dancing holds many similarities to taxi dancing. In fact at one time, Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre strip club where the lap dance was invented, even offered taxi dancing (David McCumber). Like a taxi dancer, a lap dancer provides her service only for the length of a single song, and in both situations much conversation is exchanged. And both activities have received similar complaints from communities — bringing up the same controversies concerning morality, touching, and government regulation.

If you read sociologist Paul Cressey's landmark book The Taxi-Dance Hall:A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life (of which this article is largely derived), it becomes evident that during early 20th Century America the tens of thousands of unattached men that went to Taxi dance halls, went there not so much for dancing as they did in search of female companionship and an illusion of romance.

And also within Internet forums where patrons of strip clubs discuss lap dancing experiences [ https://web.archive.org/web/20071114131452/http://forum.myredbook.com/cgi-bin/dcforum2/dcboard.pl?az=list&forum=DCForumID11&conf=rb ], it also becomes apparent that within a lap dance, conversation can again create an illusion of romance and bonds can grow as patrons spend more and more time with individual lap dancers.

Sociologist Judith Hanna also noted the similarities of taxi dancing and lap dancing within her book, Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, and a Christian Right [ https://books.google.com/books?id=Q1sEza-K-A8C&lpg=PP1&pg=PT148#v=onepage&q&f=false ].

Additionally, modern day taxi dance halls, now called Hostess Clubs, are often discussed and advertised within the same websites that also cover strip clubs. An interesting read, which gives insight into the psychological effect of modern taxi dancing at hostess clubs, is an article by Evan Wright called "Dance With A Stranger." [ http://www.laweekly.com/news/dance-with-a-stranger-2130263 ] James Carroll (talk) 19:48, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for that detailed response. Interesting. I see the point - but lap dance and strippers are not always the same. I think a link to the former makes more sense. -- Beardo (talk) 03:24, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

I also felt that the 'Lap Dance' article would be a better choice, although that article really needs a lot of work. 'Host and hostess clubs' might also be a possible addition to the See Also section. James Carroll (talk) 16:19, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Thousands of Taxi Drivers in Philadelphia?

During or after a US census (1980?), it was reported that some place like Philadelphia reported an unusually high number of taxi drivers. But, it was because prostitutes listed their occupation as "taxi dancer", and the census folks misread it. Urban legend? [Duck duck go and google show nothing.] 47.14.77.193 (talk) 12:29, 13 December 2023 (UTC)