AS the only male in a small audience for Gregory Jacobs’ sequel to a 2012 film about male strippers, I kept wondering why and for what target audience?

One woman said she was surprised to see me among an otherwise totally female audience. It’s my job. And she thought the film demeaning to women. This I was inclined to dispute.

Retired stripper Mike (Channing Tatum) gets persuaded to join four former buddies to travel to a strippers’ convention for a final big blast. So it’s a road movie. But when Tobias writes the van off in the scrub, it diverts to family-grade erotica as the guys visit skin joints where screaming women shower male strippers with banknotes (Monopoly money?).

The screamers are mostly women for whom a romantic, emotionally-fulfilling, sexually-satisfying life is no more than wistful ambition. Their looks will never turn male heads. Their yearnings and their behaviour match male slavering over women since humans began walking upright. Listen up, guys. Acknowledge and respect that women too have erotic appetites needing satisfaction. That’s the film’s real message.

Women’s rights include a complete vocabulary. The dialogue is peppered with varied uses – noun, verb, adjective, participle, expletive, gerund, praise, condemnation, pleading, curse – of that word that family newspapers remain reluctant to use (many years ago I was the first person to get away with it in “The Canberra Times”). In school playgrounds, kids of both sexes now use it freely. “Magic Mike XXL” extends its once predominantly male use to women playing major characters.

Fellatio and cunnilingus while wearing pants are not possible. Feature movies dealing full-on with those behaviours would incur the wrath of the Grundies. “Magic Mike XXL” takes them to the brink in an adaptation of the famous vaudeville act known as the Lupino mirror. But to this straight male, the film offered no erotic beckoning.

At all cinemas