Fiona, 29, is a peroxide blonde mother of two, who juggles a job selling media space with lap dancing two nights a week. She loves the money that she can make through her night job, but is starting to tire of the occupational hazards. “The thing that I hate most - it sounds really trivial - is when a customer's breath smells, that's gross. Or when they try to touch you or push you for more, which happens a lot.”

Lap dancing is the ultimate tease. Men who agree to a dance are told how to sit (legs spread, hands placed safely on the velour banquette), as their dancer runs through the house rules. Only the punters are bound by the “no touching” rule. Dancers can get as close as they want, grinding into a man's lap and simulating sex. A girl will suck her own nipples, pushing them tantalisingly close to the punter's mouth. In full strip clubs she will remove her thong for the final part of the dance. The whole thing lasts little more than two minutes. In a busy club, the dancer will then tuck the proffered notes into her garter and move on to the next slavering male.

Fiona, who works in one of the smartest suburbs of Manchester, says: “When you're dancing you are always thinking, right I've made a tenner now, how much has she made? Especially on a busy night, you're not even thinking about the punter. You're wanting to finish that one and think who you can go to next.”

The money is good but never guaranteed. Dancers pay the club a fee to use their premises. After that, essentially, they are self-employed and can earn anything from £20 to £400 in a night. Girls say that the financial security counters any feminist argument against stripping. They resent moves by politicians to classify the clubs as “sex encounter establishments”, alongside porn cinemas and sex shops. This would make it easier for local authorities to refuse licences, but dancers fear that it would put them on a par with prostitutes. Some girls, though not many, are paying their way through university. Others are single mothers, supplementing a wage. Younger girls do it for the extra cash and party lifestyle.

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Zoe, 22, has been dancing for five years. Her dream is to be spotted in the club and whisked into a career in contemporary dance. Failing that, she is pursuing a job in the media and has just completed a degree in film and media technology. “I have never had a job where I've felt so empowered,” she says. “I've just got myself through university, I've got my own car, my own house. It really makes me laugh because the girls who object to what I do are the ones going out on a Friday and Saturday night, sleeping with a different bloke. Whereas I'm here on a Friday and Saturday night earning X amount of money to pay towards my education.”

Fiona, meanwhile, has created a very comfortable life, spending her earnings on a Mercedes, doing her house up and a string of holidays. If anything, the girls feel that they are exploiting the punters. “I just think more fool the man because he's paying me to flippin' dance in front of him,” laughs Fiona. She and the girls clearly enjoy each other's company. “It's fun being a girl in this job,” says Zoe. “We get to go to events. We get to go to clubs for free, we have our nails done. It's very girlie, and it is all about the female bonding.”

These are the tales you hear of lap dancing, but it is not the whole story. Drugs are rife, particularly cocaine, which customers share with the girls. Then there are the extras, where the line between dancers and prostitutes starts to blur. “I worked in a club where all the girls were giving extras,” says Fiona. “You'd go into the VIP room and the girls were giving blow-jobs or having sex.” She has been trying to quit since November. “I'm still here,” she shrugs. “It's just the money basically, I'm just greedy. And you come here when your friends are working. So I either stay in at home with the kids or I go out, make a bit of money, and have a right laugh with my friends. It's very addictive. It's an adrenaline rush, when you're dancing and it's busy. Getting the money you feel high.”

But she would never let her daughters do the job that she seems to love and hate in equal measure. “If they're doing it young, it's going to really f*** them up. You see what men are like. You see a lot of deviousness; guys who one minute will be telling you they've got a girlfriend and the next minute will be asking you out.”

She is also fed up of being judged for what she does by the other mums at her children's Church of England village school. “There were rumours going round at school that I was picking the children up in my dancing outfit,” she says, looking down at her skimpy black string number and thigh-high PVC boots. “As if I would pick my kids up at 3.30pm in this get-up. As if.”

On a more mundane note, Fiona admits that after two and a half years she is simply bored of the job. “Half the time I can't be bothered with the same conversation. One guy out of every group will always say, ‘How about I dance for you?', and think that they're the first person to say it. You just get sick of it. And then they'll always go, ‘Oh I'm with my dad. We're with our dad, aren't we?' And you're like, yeah funny, he's not your dad at all, shut up.”

There are exceptions, she says, but most of the girls who end up lap dancing have complicated pasts. “Out of all the girls I've met, definitely more have come from a bad background. Most girls that come in have got a drama behind them.” As if on cue, Rio, 22, rushes home early because her ex has phoned to say that he is going round her house to kick the door down. “So yeah,” sighs Fiona. “There's always dramas.” These troubled souls are naturally drawn to a job where they are worshipped, she says. “I do think a lot of the girls are doing it to be loved. They're crying out for attention. I'd say I am a bit. I want people to think I'm sexy.” Motives are similarly complicated on the other side of the equation. There are plenty of stag dos and birthdays where bravado comes into play, and men who are simply turned on by the unattainable. One 48-year-old mechanic says: “It's very, very nice for a man of my age. It's something that I'd love to have that I can't have. I look at these young girls and I can be quite happy with what I've got and what I can't have.” A 29-year-old soldier says he sees it as a confidence boost, taking it as a compliment when a girl comes up to talk to him.

Other punters try to distance themselves from their fellow customers. This is a one-off, they say, or they are there to chat to the bar staff. “Lap dancing is for lonely people,” says a 42-year-old property developer, propping up the bar with a bottle of champagne that he is keen to share. “It's hard for them to talk to women, here it's easier.”

Danielle, a 20-year-old dancer in pretty pink underwear, nods. “There are a lot of guys who are genuinely lonely. You get some people who are disabled. It's nice to give them a bit of female company. It makes you feel good about yourself, doing something like that.”

Another punter, who claims he is a hitman, only ever gets a dance “to make them go away”. “It doesn't do nowt for me,” he says. “I think it's over, lap dancing. Everyone's going to Thailand nowadays.”

The recent explosion of strip clubs would suggest otherwise. Business is certainly booming in Long Legs, a full-strip club in central Manchester. Girls barely pause for a drink between dances as the bar fills up with testosterone-pumped males flashing £20 notes.

But for Fiona the novelty has worn off. She agrees that the trade might be fizzling out. “One girl summed it all up for me,” she says. “Her grandma was a dancer in the Army in the war and she said she used to get up on the stage and just take one glove off and the crowd went absolutely wild. Now with most of the clubs full strip, there's girls doing everything. You'll be having full sex in front of them soon and they won't even bat an eyelid.”