Magic Mike is a 2012 film about male strippers, based on the early life of its star Channing Tatum. It is a tale of loss, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and now, as if to entirely miss the point of itself, it is a live strip show in Las Vegas and London. There is nothing about loss here. I waited for it, but it didn’t come. Perhaps stripping, by itself, is the wrong form to describe loss of soul?

There is opportunity here for women and they know it. Groups of women, some old but mostly young, sit waiting with cocktails the size of cauldrons. Their screams are barely suppressed. Because it’s their turn now – this is a form of revenge. There is opportunity too for men, but of a different kind. Tickets are selling on resale websites for £675, but I don’t know what the dancers are paid. You’re worth what you can prise out of their purses, Tatum is told in the film by Matthew McConaughey.

Tatum opens the show, for he invented it. He doesn’t take his clothes off. Not for an audience this small. He’s too rich. Instead he sits on the edge of the stage and says: “You can touch the men. Use your hands.” The men are figures of lust, but cartoonish. They are very young and lovely and better dancers than we deserve. They are also figures of fun. A male standup comes on, styled like Buddy Holly. He says none of the dancers have GCSEs.

It begins, knowingly, with pastiche. We have a member of the Village People, a fireman, a cop, a navy pilot and a cowboy. But Magic Mike is too smart for this; we are to have an avatar, so we are not afraid. A woman is pulled from the audience. She is Sophie (played by actor Samantha Baines), and is the show’s compere. She doesn’t like the strippers that we have. She speaks to her spirit animal, which is a unicorn with Tatum’s voice. “I didn’t want,” she says, “a bunch of sexist archetypes slapping their dicks in my face. I want to feel.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Channing Tatum, centre, in the 2012 film Magic Mike. Photograph: Warner Bros/Everett/ Rex Features

The Magic Mike punter, then, wants to have an authentic emotional experience with a male stripper in front of her friends. And if she isn’t happy with it, she may argue she is being oppressed. This is consumer feminism of the purest form. Sophie wants, she says, “a sexy CEO who pays women as much as men”. He appears in a spotlight – like magic. “A bad boy who actually responds to texts.” This gets a big laugh. Then comes a vet, a teacher and a man holding a fake baby.

The dream is that men – beautiful, young men – are affable and loving and available. The dancers pass through the auditorium wearing the benevolent, condescending look you would give a dog. I wouldn’t call it erotic; how can it be when women are not here for men (if they were, they would be on Tinder) but for women. This is women revelling in their power; the men are incidental.

The male star Michelangelo (Sebastián Melo Taveira) is dressed, initially, as a waiter. Sophie holds him to her crotch and teaches him to strip. He thanks an audience member, “for just being you”.

Money falls on us from the sky. It’s pink. It says: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ♥.” It is to “pay” the strippers when they lap dance. “Before you enter a lady’s space,” Sophie counsels, “you need to know that you’re welcome. The safe word is unicorn.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sebastián Melo Taveira and Sophie Linder-Lee in Magic Mike Live. Photograph: Trevor Leighton

The most beautiful of the dancers (Harry Carter) comes over. His eyes are blank. He smells wonderful. “Unicorn,” I say, and he strokes my arm and moves on to the next. It is the weirdest, most monetised, almost sexual experience of my life. My head is in my hands.

The climactic line of Magic Mike is when Sophie screams: “Tell her how much you appreciate her!” Michelangelo says, obediently: “I appreciate her very much.”

It turns, inevitably, into a self-help rally. After we watch a couple writhing under fake rain, Sophie shouts: “I want that for me. I want that for every one of you!” The women scream, not with lust, but with power, and fear – for this is new – and the ecstasy of transgression.

What kind of a strip club has a programme anyway – and one that says, in big letters on the back: “You are enough”? This is the worst form of emancipation. Selfish, I call it.