Michaels: Are we watching the death of the nightclub?

Usually, when there’s news that Millennials have disrupted the status quo and put an end to a previously well-loved way of life, I shake my increasingly wrinkly fist in the air and curse the universe.

Word that they may have killed the nightclub, however, has left me with a surprisingly jubilant feeling.

Ryan Smith with the City of Kelowna pointed out that this city’s after-dark scene is in transition. Nightclubs, like Flashbacks, are going the way of the dodo, while breweries and restaurants take over. The same can be said in Penticton where The Mule recently closed — leaving the Barking Parrot as the only option.

One of the reasons, he said, comes down to the fact that young people no longer want to meet their potential (probably short-term) loved one at the club — they’re going online.

This theory hits the spot for someone like me, who is the right age to remember the unpleasantness of being a young woman at nightclubs and old enough to have a human of my own for whom a large cache of neuroses is building.

If a generation of online dating fans will save my human from getting in the crosshairs of a sweaty dude with a hankering for violence … well, that’s awesome. If it will save more women from the realization that the old adage my-body-is-nobody’s-body-but-mine applies everywhere but nightclubs, that’s great, too.

In case anyone disbelieves that latter idea, by the way, advertising agency Ogilvy offered an eye-opening study for Schweppes.

They created a touch-sensitive dress that tracked how often—and with what degree of intensity—women in Brazil were groped on an average night out. The goal was to highlight the issue to men.

For the project, titled “The Dress for Respect,” researchers built a dress embedded with sensor technology that tracked touch and pressure. The information was then transmitted to a visual system so that researchers could track touch in real time.

Researchers then sent three women to a party wearing the touchy-feely dress and watched while their screens lit up in all the areas women were grabbed and groped.

Any guesses about where they were hit up the most? Or where they were touched.

In under four hours, the women are touched a combined 157 times in their back area, arms and so on.

You might say that there’s a difference between gender relations in Brazil and Canada. Or you might realize that it’s not that different.

Now given the option to vet the creeps encountered with an app, why would you want to do it any other way?

It’s enough to make me throw two wrinkly hands in the air, and wave them around like I just don’t care.

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