Are men ready for a Female bouncer?

[Kungfoolss]

She can take you out

Just ignore the gender and give her some respect, buddy Welcome to the world of the female bouncer,

by Melissa Leong

Jun. 1, 2003





LUCAS OLENIUK/TORONTO STAR
"It doesn't come down to male or female," says Christine Li, of Therapy Lounge. "Just good or bad security."


If you know you can, you don't have to.

Unless you want to.

Christine Li is confident she can take you if you step up. She just won't let it get to that point. Sarah Slater's another story. If you want it, she'll bring it. Both became bouncers to make extra cash while they were in university. Both have escorted countless people out of Toronto clubs, had their lives threatened, been beaten on. Security is a male-dominated industry but more clubs are looking to hire female bouncers, treating them as assets to the team. "The clubs are getting bigger and half the population is female. Now that most clubs have added searching at the door, it's a lot more proper having a woman searching a woman," says Alan Mizrachi, director of operations of Metropolitan Investigations and Security Services. "Women have a lower boiling point. They're a lot calmer ... They tend to talk." Oh, Slater and Li talk — they just say very different things. But anything to get it done.

Li cruises the crowd at Therapy Lounge on Richmond St.

She's in a black, draped-neck, sleeveless tank top. She wears rimless Gucci glasses. Silver hearts dangle from her hoop earrings (she wears them because they'll fall out easily if someone grabs them). She looks taller than 5'9''. She walks with shoulders back, her hand on her headset — "We like to accessorize," she says. The Saturday revellers are laid-back, trendy. Guys in leather jackets and women in tube tops, sipping martinis at candlelit tables and bobbing to a house remix of "Pump Up The Jam." To move people aside, she gently puts a hand on their backs. "Basically, I can talk someone out of doing something silly or something they're not supposed to do," the 28-year-old Li says. Her voice is low and soothing. "You don't want to go in there, guns blazing. "If I need somebody to move, I'd go over there and say, `Sorry to interrupt your conversation but people are trying to get by and I don't want you to get bumped.'"

Slater, 23, talks people out of doing things, too: "You can walk out like a man or you can show your friends that you can get the s--- kicked out of you by a girl." She says she's used that line, "oh God, probably 500 times," in the past four years. Everyone has walked out. She got her start four years ago at a bar in Windsor, a city where she was studying criminology. The owner took one look at her — blonde hair, blue eyes, 5'10'' and 130 pounds — and hired her as a waitress. One night, a guy grabbed her around the waist and wouldn't let go. "I had a full tray of drinks. His friends were doing the, `Hey baby, come sit here. Sit in my lap.' I said, `I have work to do. I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me go.' "Then he went to grab my butt and I was like, `Don't even think about it.' "I set the drinks on a table, turned around and belted him with the tray. I dragged the guy out the emergency exit." The owner ordered her into his office. "Totally thought I was being canned," she says. He asked her to switch to security. "It was good for him. I wasn't a great waitress."

Her specialty is pressure points. She wanted to be a police officer when she was young. In her off-time, she shops, "wears heels and dresses." At work at a Toronto bar, she clomps around in Magnums, police tactical boots, because they're comfortable. People call her the girl next door who could kick your ass. Guys slip her their numbers. "You're the sexiest door person I've ever seen," they'll say. Slater isn't flattered. "You're comparing me to the 6'6', bald guy at the door?" Li says a lot of doormen and bartenders don't know how to take her. "They can't imagine that somebody who has that kind of physicality to them can also be attractive and can think and have something interesting to say. "There was a bartender. He was fine when he thought I was a fellow bartender or a hostess." When he found out that she was security, he started acting differently. He'd greet the other women with flirty kisses on the cheeks. "To me, it was just, `Hey.' The nod of acknowledgement," she says. "It's their problem, not mine.

"Either they think it's really cool — like it's a novelty. Or it's, `Geez, do girls do this sort of thing? What kind of girl does this?'" Li sits in the Lettieri Espresso Bar Café on Queen St. and Spadina Rd. She's reading Beyond Fate by Margaret Visser, part of the Massey Lecture series. The Ontario College of Art & Design graduate is a sculpture/installation artist who started studying hapkido, a Korean martial art, seven years ago because she wasn't allowed to as a kid — "Little girls don't take martial arts. They take piano," she was told. She bounces at Therapy to pay her bills. She sips a coffee — one sugar, one cream — but is reluctant to talk about her experiences at other places she has worked, other bars, after-hours clubs. She doesn't want to highlight the debauchery. Like the time a drunk woman kneed Li in the groin, thinking she was a man. Or the time Li was doing bathroom checks and found a woman passed out with her pants around her ankles. Her pants were so tight, Li couldn't get them back up — "I have no idea how she even got into them in the first place" — so she covered her in paper towel and carried her outside.

Or the time she had to calm a woman down who had just been raped in a utility closet. "If I had been male, I think it would've been more threatening to her, especially after what happened," she says. "In that situation, it takes somebody empathetic to calm her down."

Slater says there are more advantages to being a woman bouncer.

"With dealing with female customers, there's never an issue that `a doorman grabbed me or groped me.' "If there are two guys who are about to fight and I walk in between them, they get this moment of, `My mom taught me not to hit girls.' "And it doesn't make me any less of a doorperson if I smile at a guy and ask him to step outside with me for a moment." Tell that to some doormen, the ones who think female bouncers are glorified hostesses. Li and Slater are not there to look pretty. They won't take orders. Not even when a guy gets into Slater's face and demands that she give him back his marijuana. "I grabbed him and gave him a good, hard shove out the door," Slater says. "He kind of fell through the rope. I looked at the doorman and said, `That guy can never come back again.' And I walked back inside.'' One of the doormen followed her back inside, a big, tough guy, bald with a goatee and earrings. She thought he was going to ream her out. "He looked at me and said, `We're so proud of you,' and he gave me this big hug."

Li says there's no shame in calling for back-up. "I do know that I can handle it myself if there is nobody else around but why let it get to that point? "When you think of a bouncer, you think of some meathead who's cruising for a fight and this job gives them a reason to be a certain way ... "The function of security is to make sure that people are having a good time and nobody is getting hurt. I have nothing to prove ... It doesn't come down to male or female. There's just good or bad security." But security is still mainly a man's game; so, what kind of girl does this?

Li: "A girl who's patient, humble."

Slater: "A girl who never flinches at the word `bitch.'"

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Edited by - kungfoolss on June 01 2003 16:43:05

[Fatality Dragon]

Hmm... I would like to see how she can handle me when someone slip a PCP in my drink lol.

"Most likely to get hit by a meteor shower: Ballonknot" By PizDoff

The closest fight you can do that will look like any movie is scene from Harrison Ford movies

[elipson]

Happened before FD?

"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind"
-Ghandi

"I have found the essence of Bushido: to die!"

[Kuroneko]

"Women have a lower boiling point. They're a lot calmer ... They tend to talk."

Doesn't a lower boiling point make you steam faster? lol




_________________________________
NO SOUP FOR YOU!!!

[Sensei Mak]

why is this even an issue? WHO CARES

[Oldschool]

Fauk both of them. I live near Toronto and once I get a mask to protect my a$$ from SARS I will most certainly go and get my a$$ beat by these two...and hopefully it doesn't stop there :)

[Fatality Dragon]

Yes Elipsion. It give me unbelievable strenght. It took 6 people to wrestle me down and get me in control and one guy who was really huge got knock out and other guy faint for some reason.

"Most likely to get hit by a meteor shower: Ballonknot" By PizDoff

The closest fight you can do that will look like any movie is scene from Harrison Ford movies

[Deadpan Scientist]

I'd hit it!

[Greese]

You know, I have never seen a bouncer fight one on one, so I don't see why this would matter.

[deus ex machina]

~
danny

"All this talk about 'newbies' is making me a little nervous. You guys don't have any sort of secret hazing initiation involving wooden paddles and me screaming 'Thank you sir, may I have another?!' do you?"