Why Does Portland Have So Many Strip Clubs?

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May 16, 2013

What's got two thumbs and 93 unregulated strip clubs? This state! — What’s got two thumbs and 93 unregulated strip clubs? This state!

You can’t just take at face value the unofficial slogans of the Portland Chamber of Commerce. “There are more strip clubs per capita than any other city in the country,” “You’re never more than fifteen minutes by foot from a microbrewery,” and “We do too have a professional sports team in one of the major leagues!” That first statement, especially, is one that gets thrown around a lot. A lot a lot, by people who’ve never set foot in a club and yet find it one of the charming defining characteristics of the Rose City. Portland has a strip club culture like nowhere else, complete with its own magazine, celebrities, and scandals.

This week, a curious reader wrote into the city’s Pulitzer-winning alternative paper, Willamette Week, to ask if this is actually true. It is. If, like me, you took issue last summer with Tampa’s claim to this title in every article about the RNC, you’ll be please to see that the WW writer calculated a 1:9,578 ratio for Portland and 1:10,813 for Tampa. That’s a close enough margin to where the two cities could probably trade places on the list depending on the fortunes of a few clubs. It’s unquestionable, though, that Portland is the single easiest place in the U.S. to open a strip club, and that’s what lies at the bottom (lol) of its saturated nudie-bar market.

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License to Pimp: A Conversation with Filmmaker Hima B.

By

Rachel Aimee

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July 6, 2012

What would you do if the strip club you worked at became a brothel? That’s the question Hima B. asks in License to Pimp, the feature documentary she is currently raising funds to complete. The controversial premise is that, by charging house fees, strip club are essentially pimping out the dancers, leaving them little choice but to become prostitutes in order to pay the house and make some money for themselves. License to Pimp follows the stories of three San Francisco dancers as they negotiate the changes in their workplaces and respond in three very different ways.

I was excited to hear about Hima’s film, but I also had some tough questions for her. Although she and I have many things in common—we’re both former strippers who share a hatred of house fees, and we’ve both been fired from clubs for trying to fight labor violations—we haven’t always seen eye to eye. So I figured it was time we sat down and had a proper conversation.

I agree with you that house fees add a huge economic incentive for dancers to turn to prostitution, but there has always been an overlap between stripping and prostitution. The premise that house fees “turned strip clubs into brothels” doesn’t take into account the dancers who would be working as prostitutes anyway. I also think the idea that dancers shouldn’t be “doing extras” in strip clubs is unrealistic, and it prioritizes the needs of the more privileged women in the industry—those who can afford not to turn to prostitution.

I think we disagree on that matter. I started working in 1992, and for the first three years you’d hear about dancers who were prostitutes, but they would leave with the customers instead of having sex in the club. Then the stage fees started going up. At first it was pretty gradual—the fees went from $5 to $25 over about five months. It went from being fully clothed lap dancing where they can’t touch your boobs to, OK, they can touch your boobs, to, now you can get fully naked. And then the stage fees spiked. I distinctly remember it went from $25 to $200 in one day at the Market Street Cinema, and when that happened it was no longer about lap dances. It became survival of the fittest.

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You’re Not Not Funny: The Onion’s Ten Funniest Stripper Stories

By

Bubbles

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April 15, 2013

The Onion posted a story last Wednesday headlined “Stripper Thinks Customer Flirting With Her.” You can get the gist of it from the headline; it is funny for the first, most obvious reason, but also because it’s a little true and sometimes strippers do think customers see them as human. While increasingly vicious as its satire becomes reality at a depressing pace, The Onion is more often than not gentle towards strippers. While we normally have more unfunny shit anti-stripper humor to rant about than not, we also enjoy pointing out examples of stripper and strip club-based humor that don’t rely completely on dehumanizing or mocking us. I’m sorry to kill all the funny by talking about it, but to crib from a Flann O’Brien quote I just read in a discussion of satire, we’ll chance it. For once, it’s nice to read humor about strippers that doesn’t joke about us as dead bodies, talk about our deadbeat boyfriends, or play on our assumed lack of parental supervision.

The main trick The Onion utilizes is taking an accepted stripper artifice and running with it to an absurd literal conclusion. This contrasts with their mode of treating a non-event as a news story; for instance, Stripper In Dressing Room Ignores Girl Crying On Cell Phone or Stripper Who Said “No, I Don’t Have Any Body Spray” Was Lying would fit the format of their office stories, but they’re too strip club-specific to work for a broader audience as workplace jokes. The writers instead must deal with stereotypes in the same way they deal with those of athletes (“Pro Athlete Lauded For Being Decent Human Being”). As I looked through their stripper story archives, I was pleasantly surprised to realize their stripper jokes relied more on absurd literalism than mockery.* Here are the ten best of the bunch.

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The Week In Links: May 6

By

suzyhooker

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May 6, 2011

Stephen Soderbergh, director of The Girlfriend Experience, is coming out of early retirement to make a movie about a male stripper. Mr. Soderbergh, meet Ms. Fey: you two are both certifiably Obsessed With Sex Workers! Welcome to the club.

Kansas is (unsurprisingly) using trafficking rhetoric to push its (otherwise failed) attempts at restricting adult-oriented businesses.

Colorado is reconsidering its john schools bill.

Breaking news: pole dancers can be pretty amazing dancers.

India’s Supreme Court cites literature while affirming that prostitutes can be “women of very high character.”

Rwandan outreach workers explain “It was not an easy task to convince [sex workers] to abandon what they were doing and start this activity of collecting garbage from homes.”

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The Sixth Annual Vagina Beauty Pageant: A Judge’s Notes

By

Elle

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August 10, 2015

vagpag2015_fiinal_0025_web — (All photos are courtesy of Hypnox Productions)

NSFW PHOTOS AFTER THE JUMP

It began with a long drive out to Hillsboro, Oregon, also known as BFO, or Butt Fuck Oregon. The spacious parking lot of the Runway Club was already almost full, and I motored past the flashing lights of the #VaginaMobile, to squeeze my tiny car next to a trailer. The sun was setting, and the excited energy was palpable.

It was 9 PM on a recent Thursday, and the stage was set for the world infamous Vagina Beauty Pageant. Runway is a newer club, about a year old, and I was pleased to see that their shift dancers varied in body shape from XXXtina Aguilera-thin to Taystee OITNB thick. Generally, Portland city dancers tend to be slender, white, and tattooed.

Much like all clubs though, the crowd was an even mix of single guys tipping, creepy guys leering, throw in a couple of jealous girlfriends sneering, and plenty of dancers hustling and heel-clacking.

The pageant’s creator, Dick Hennessy, took the stage and announced the rules. As usual, there would be no photography or touching allowed by the audience. Event photographer Hypnox handed a video camera to fellow judge Reed McClintock, at my left, and Vice contributor Susan Shepard readied her cell camera, as did I.

In contrast to last year’s scoring, contestants would be judged in two different ways. Performance scorecards would be held up after each competitor’s performance, visible to all. Privately, we passed index cards marking our score of the performers’ aesthetics. Hennessey devised this method specifically to avoid hurt feelings.

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