“Making it Rain” explained to cultural ignoramuses
The New York Times explains “making it rain.”
I guess they didn’t cover this when the NBA All-Star game was in Vegas? Great explanation of making it rain for, well, old white people, I guess.
Silly Media Coverage
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Going Negative In The Champagne Room: California Edition
Are California Republicans around just to make us appreciate how classy Philadelphia Republican strip club-themed ads are? Maybe! This little piece of work must be a parody, because there’s no way something like this gets taken seriously for a second. They’ve edited the face of LA city council member/congressional candidate Janice Hahn onto the body of a stripper surrounded by Black men who are holding guns and singing “Give me your cash, bitch/So we can shoot up the street/Give me your cash, bitch/So we can buy some more heat.” This is apparently based on her support for a Scared Straight-style program that worked with former gang members.
Sex Work in the Strangest Places: Detroit’s Booty Lounge Seized
Detroit’s entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well in the Booty Lounge, a mobile strip club. The Lounge, despite tailgating Lions games since 2005, recently became a target for the Motor City’s anti-stripper brigade when local news station WDIV sent its “Defenders” into the Booty Bus with hidden cameras (jerks!).
The bus was seized last Monday during the Lions game, apparently for being parked in a no parking zone. It remains to be seen if this will be the end of the Booty Lounge. Objections included the suggestion that it would attract the wrong element to Lions games, a laughable concept for anyone who’s ever been to an actual NFL game.
A bus is not the only creative strip club venue in Detroit. Read this great 2010 story about a guy who started a strip club in his rec room.
More things that Portland did first *
Have you heard about this supposed “hipster strip joint,” the Westway, in New York? Stories about it usually are sprinkled with HI-larious commentary about how funny it is to mix hot nightlife spots with tits. SORRY NEW YORK, Portland, OR has been doing this for years. Mary’s Club, Union Jacks, and Devils Point are all strip clubs that draw crowds heavier on leather jackets than raincoats. This results in varying levels of profitability for the strippers (needless to say, Portland hipsters are not necessarily a cash-laden customer base). They might stare for free, or they might give you fifty bucks to play “Roadrunner.”
Will the Westway actually operate like a strip club, though? From the coverage, it seems like it might just have topless go-go dancers—on one night a week, at that—and people got hyperbolic in calling it a strip joint. Can you get a lapdance? Is there going to be a DJ announcing the names of the dancers? Will the dancers be paid or will they be paying the club to work there? And most importantly, who wants to go with me the first Monday in April?
Oh, New York, I hope you get some real hipster strip club fun, like maybe a chef brawl over local pork.
* (in addition to Stumptown, competitive facial hair growth, and urban farming)
What’s Trafficking Got To Do With It: The Media and the Cleveland Kidnappings
Last week in Cleveland, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and Amanda Berry escaped from Ariel Castro’s “house of horrors” where he imprisoned the women in a nightmare of rape and torture for almost a decade. Castro has been arraigned on four charges of kidnapping and three charges of rape. The courageous women escaped with the help of Charles Ramsey, a neighbor who broke into the home after hearing Berry’s screams. A charismatic man, Ramsey became an instant celebrity after declaring he knew “something was wrong” when he saw that a “pretty little white girl ran into the arms of a black man.”
Everything about the Cleveland kidnapping case—from Ramsey’s critique of race to the captive women’s histories of abuse—has stirred important conversations about domestic abuse, sexual abuse, police incompetence, and race. Unsurprisingly, for those of us who follow trafficking hysteria, it’s also inspired a lot of talk about sex trafficking.