The real cost of ‘free entry’ to London clubs
Photography by Ethan Hu
Alina Martin questions the double standard for people of different genders in the London club scene.
It was a picture-perfect October night in. My flat smelled of freshly baked banana bread, raindrops tapped lightly against my bedroom window, and I was taking a last scroll around social media platforms before bed. Just as I had convinced myself that I was, in fact, not missing out on anything and was ready to set my phone aside, a message popped up. A kind stranger and fellow UCL student, we’ll call him Mark, stumbled across my Instagram profile and, since my friends and I “look like such fun”, wished to invite us to a Halloween party at the club where he works as a promoter.
Despite my preference for staying in, I enjoy a night out as much as the next person once I’m out of the house. So after double-checking with Mark that “guestlist” is synonymous with “free entry” for me and a few friends of my choice, I gracefully accepted his offer and sent over our names. He got back to me almost instantly: “one of them is a guy?!” “Yes,” I replied, “two girls and one guy. Is that okay?” “Yeah, just make sure you guys look good and are there on time.”
We were in the process of following that last instruction when he messaged me again; he hoped we were excited and could I send him the names again. I complied. “So there’s a guy?” he asked again. The assumption that I should only have female friends because I’m female irritated me, but we were now in the queue – the only people there – so I chose not to get political for the sake of the fun night ahead. This was a useless compromise, as I was about to find out. A quick glance at us over her clipboard was enough for the hostess to decide that my female friend and I looked “nice” enough to be let in as promised. Our male companion, however, would have to part with £20 if he wanted to join us.
Like most women, I’m no stranger to gender-based price discrimination. I am reminded of it every time I pay five times more than a man does for a haircut. The practice is not at all illegal – on the contrary, from a strictly economic point of view, it’s common sense: a service provider will charge as much as the target consumer is willing to pay. It follows, based on traditional gender stereotypes, that since women care about their clothes and hair more than men do, they can be made to pay more. But in this situation, when I finally benefitted from such discrimination, when I was technically in “for free”, I felt that somehow I was paying in a currency that I hadn’t agreed to use.
Another student promoter, let’s call him Mark II, had no problem in spelling out the unspoken transactions that govern the arbitrary club fees for men and women. “Bring in the girls and the boys will follow,” he said. Just like the promise of having nice hair is supposed to lure in the female demographic, the general consensus is that nothing brings in a crowd of men like the prospect, however unlikely, of sex. And what clearer symbol is there than groups of university girls who “look nice”? When I told him about Mark’s promise of free entry for a guy, Mark II laughed. “I think he was just trying to impress you. Girls will get in if they’re hot ‘cause everybody wants to be where the hot girls are. But it usually takes 4 or 5 girls in a group to get a guy in for free. Guys don’t mind paying if there’s girls. Everybody knows that.”
There’s no denying that this business model is effective. However, it is based entirely on the assumption that all people interested in a night out will conform to a binary definition of gender and the stereotypes it entails. On the one hand, it expects that women have predominantly female friends, and that they all adopt the feminine aesthetic that appeals to a heterosexual male demographic. On the other hand, it assumes that all men going to clubs are heterosexual and are only interested in a night out if it will lead to sex. It just so happened that our male friend was neither of those things, so we turned around and continued our search for fun elsewhere. We ended up spending much more than we would have originally, but we did so as equals, in a place where our bodies and sexuality weren’t taken advantage of. Not without our consent anyway.
Pi Opinion content does not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial team, Pi Media society, Students’ Union UCL or University College London. We aim to publish opinions from across the student body - if you read anything you would like to respond to, get in touch via email.