Depressing Feminist Graph #1:

According to the Economist, safe abortions worldwide decreased markedly between 1995 and 2003. Unsafe abortions, though—holding strong as ever! The good—and totally obvious—news is that banning and restricting abortion does not decrease abortions, so you might as well just make them legal and safe. In fact, in places where abortions are legal and safe, women have fewer safe abortions, too, probably because the contraception is flowin’ freely there as well. [Depressing Feminist Graph hat tip to Pukeimmediately].

Depressing Feminist Graph #2:

Unfortunately, when that contraception flows all the way into the strip club, it can have some negative economic effects for exotic dancers. The second depressing feminist graph comes courtesy of Julie Sunday, who notes a recent study which found that “women on the pill are attracted to more ‘boyish’ features in men.” The feminist blogs are all over the study’s more widely reported findings. But Sunday read, like, the whole fucking thing, and mined this interesting economic tidbit:

Strippers who are not taking the pill report an increase in lapdance revenue around ovulation whereas pill-taking strippers (who are thus not ovulating) do not see a spike in their revenue and earn less throughout the cycle. No, really.

Dotted line: strippers on the pill; solid line: strippers not on the pill.

Damn, girl. That’s a 50-dollar-per-shift difference during the menstrual cycle, and a full 200-dollar-per-shift-difference at the stripper’s most fertile. Somebody should do this study on women in other professions and see what they can shell up. Julie Sunday suggests that strippers looking for safety in the bedroom and success in the workplace ought to just go hormone-free, but not every type of contraception works for every woman. Would you change your method of contraception to get more tips?

 Whatever the reason, my $5.99 New York strip steak dinner appeared in short order. Sure, I did have to ask the waitress to break my $10 bill, so I could have a steady supply of singles. CCR has a rather aggressive dancer schedule. No stripper shakes it longer than the length of a single jukebox song. That means they get up there, quickly strip down to pasties and a G-string, perform a number of limber exercises designed to expose the naughty parts of their anatomy, and get the hell off the stage.

And then they come right to your table, where protocol says  you give them at least a buck for wiggling their butt cheeks in rhythm. I felt obligated to pass out dollars even as I was stuffing my face with beef. I felt like Dad at the dinner table passing out money to his daughters.

OK, the food: The plate arrived looking like a snapshot from my own private eating hell as a child. I grew up in Omaha, beef capital of America, and yet my family couldn’t cook a steak to save their souls. I remember chewing and chewing and chewing at some overcooked, underseasoned piece of meat — until I would give up and just spit the nasty wad out in my napkin. Or just hold it in my cheek, like a chipmunk, until I could spit it out in the toilet.

CCR’s gray slab of beef brought back all those memories. It didn’t help that the New York strip was about as thick as a book of poetry. Its sides didn’t inspire much hope either: a stack of extra-wide steak fries that looked barely cooked and a bowl of sliced green beans, previously frozen or canned if I were a betting man.

The meat’s thinness, in fact, reminded me more of skirt steak than strip, even though it clearly was the latter. There also wasn’t a char mark within a mile of that steak, which means the protein likely never came in contact with a grill. I was not looking forward to my first bite.

Now, I don’t want to oversell this, but let me say this about the first bite: It was far better than anything I could have imagined, particularly at that price, particularly  with its underwhelming appearance. The steak was well-seasoned, the salt and pepper bringing out the meager flavor of that thin cut. The seasoning, in fact, was the make-or-break element of the meat. Those bites not sprinkled with enough S&P were lifeless.

I have absolutely nothing kind to say about the sides, other than the fact they were less embarrassing to stare at than the women on stage.

Crystal City Restaurant

The place looks rather harmless from the street. It features a brick-and-tile facade that gives little indication, save for the silhouette of two mammothly endowed women, of the nude acrobatics going on inside. Unlike at Camelot Show Bar, where I ate lunch today, you have to seat yourself, which is sort of a pyschological test to measure your perv and shame levels.

I decided that if I’m going to do this thing right, I’m going to sit right up front, by God. I claimed a four-top booth near the stage and plopped myself down. I promptly ignored the dancer about eight feet away and checked my e-mail accounts, typed out an e-mail to a source, checked facebook,  looked for comments on my previous postings, logged on to Twitter, and generally acted like I was at the office for about 10 minutes.

I clearly need work on my strip-club etiquette.

The waitress here wasn’t required to perform her job wearing lacy underwear. She wore a short skirt and a casual top, looking no different than, say, someone working the tables at an Eastern Shore crab shack or a sports bar in Bethesda. She handed me a menu and left me alone to review its many choices. 

I opted for the most dangerous entree: the New York strip steak dinner special, available on Wednesdays. The six-ounce strip (ugh!) comes (double ugh!) with your choice of potato, and a vegetable side. All this for the low, low price of $5.99.

I felt like I was in Las Vegas, back before all the celebrity chefs arrived and the only gustatory attractions were the all-you-can-eat buffets for $5.99 a head. The lines for those buffets could be longer than the queue to ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland. 

My memories of those buffets are not too kind — slices of roast beef that had been sitting under a heat lamp for hours, a broad and lifeless array of vegetables, and a chocolate cream pie for dessert. The shit was designed, I figured, to get you back to the gaming tables pronto.

I wasn’t sure what the $5.99 New York strip steak dinner was designed to do, given the attraction of Crystal City, one presumes, has nothing to do with what’s on the plate. But nonetheless, the management has one stipulation for its ultra-cheapo steak special:

Dine-in only.

But I have an overly developed sense of shame. I can’t look at naked women and drink. So I tell the waitress that I want water.

“Sure, one bottled water,” she says and immediately walks away before I can correct her. Still, sparkling, or tap are apparently not options offered at Camelot. It’s bottled or nothing.

The bikini waitress drops off the smallest bottle of Evian I’ve ever seen, along with a tiny wine glass filled with ice and two straws. I can’t tell exactly from the scribbles on my final bill how much I paid for the water, but it appears to be somewhere in the $6 to $7 neighborhood.

It’s going to be a long lunch.

I’ve ordered the jerk chicken “chef’s special” with the idea that, if I’m really going to judge a dish coming out of the Camelot kitchen, it might as well be something that the head cook at least claims to have developed himself. As a lark, I ordered a side of onion rings, fairly certain that they would be Sysco’s finest.

My lunch took forever to reach me. I had sit through one stripper after another after another while the kitchen pretended they were busier than Ray’s Hell Burgers on a Saturday night. This tactic, of course, has its desired effect: You feel compelled to do something while you sit there watching naked women climbing brass poles for your enjoyment. You either give them a buck here and there or wait for the dude sporting the oversized Polo shirt and nasty grimace to shake that fucking cash out of you himself.

I almost breathe a sigh of relief when the bikini girl brings my lunch. She tries to place the plates on the table without her boobs falling out of her skimpy green bra. Her technique has all the grace of a construction worker with a jackhammer.

The chicken is surrounded with sides: mashed potatoes (one step up from the boxed variety), wilted greens (bitter, a little spicy, and passable), and a large chunk of a hard, pasty baguette. The thick breast meat (of course!) is surprisingly juicy. I was expecting a hard, dry brick of overcooked chicken, but this breast is moist, even at its thickest sections. It also packs spice and heat, more than I thought the kitchen would serve the typically middle-aged clientele that waddles into the Camelot. The meat wasn’t grilled, like genuine jerk chicken should be, but baked instead. No matter, I was pleased to savor something without feeling guilty.

Oh, and those rings? Totally from Sysco, or some other food-service giant.

Well, I was wrong. The hardest part came when the dancer bounded off the stage and launched into that standard social protocol of all strip clubs: hitting up the patrons for cash while pretending to give a shit about them. The stripper approached my table. I had already placed my order.

“Hi, how are you?” she asked.

The interior of the club was dark, illuminated only by the sickly yellow glow of these backlit transparent panels, designed faintly in the style of a family coat of arms. Despite the poor light, I could tell this dancer was very tan. She was also young, although she was trying hard to act more mature than someone who shows her crotch for a living.

“You having a little lunch?” she inquired.

“Yes, just stopped by for a bite,” I lied.

“What are you having?” she wanted to know.

I started to fidget, wondering if the meter was running in this young woman’s mind and what the charge would be for me.

“I got the jerk chicken.” This was true. After carefully and deliberately scanning the menu (while a completely naked woman danced on stage, mind you, and other women wearing sexy underwear paraded around the narrow room), I decided that the only true test of the kitchen would be to order one of their specials, not a burger or a sandwich. Hence, the jerk chicken.

The dancer looked at me blankly for a second, then said, “Oh, that must be a special.”

“It is a special,” I reassured her.

“The chef is good here,” she countered. “You wouldn’t think so at a place like this, but the chef is really good.”

“What do you usually get?” I asked.

“I usually get the burger,” she responded.

I looked at her in her bikini underwear, guessing that she couldn’t be 100 pounds, tops.

“But you’re so skinny,” I protested. “You must not eat that many burgers.”

“I have a very high metabolism,” she said. She went on to describe how much she sweats and how people worried that she couldn’t put on any weight, which then lead to various medical tests.

“They tested me for tapeworms,  too” she noted. 

The next image that flashed in my mind was enough to ruin my appetite — and any sort of side dish of arousal that might come from eating lunch around women without a stitch of clothes on.

When I first compiled my top-ten sexual euphemisms from rap songs, a few listeners weren’t convinced that all these mainstream rap ditties had such dirty double-meanings. “This is terribly researched,” wrote commenter Hocus Focus, who took umbrage at my suggestion that there may be an underlying ejaculation message in the popular strip-club refrain “make it rain.”

“‘Make it Rain” is not a sexual euphemism,” wrote Hocus Focus. No, no—it’s just a stripping euphemism. The manufactured wetness, some argue, is nothing more than the innocent pasttime of “showering” strippers with cash—and certainly has nothing to do with semen.

Finally, I’ve found the missing link that will prove “make it rain” is as much about genital-fluid showers as it is lucrative pole-dancing: “Wetter,” the hit summer single by Twista (and featuring Erika Shevon).

Follow the “Wetter” video along with me, and watch how “make it rain” transforms from its (still pretty sleazy!) cash-money context and into its (definitively sleazy!) cum-shower meaning.

First, “making it rain” can be interpreted as throwing cash:

0:15 — Thunderstorm sound effects
0:24 — Shevon asks Twista to come “make it rain” on her
0:25 — Twista mines “making it rain” with his fingers
1:09 — Twista informs Shevon that “when it come to makin’ it rain,” Twista could “get it wet”
1:14 — Twista tells Shevon that he will be her “weatherman”
1:18 — Twista hints that he sees “rain in the forecast”
1:25 — Twista details how much cash he’s got (whew).
1:36 — Shevon again asks Twista to “come and make it rain down on” her
1:52 — and again.

But then, Twista begins to deviate from the cash-money context:

2:18 — Twista asks Shevon if she “want[s] me to get it wet in other ways.”
2:29 — Twista clarifies that this time when he “makes it rain,” he “ain’t stoppin ’til you wet up the covers.”
2:30 — But why, Twista? “Because I gotta keep on fuckin ’til I see a lot of white stuff.”

Oh, God, he’s talking about semen!:

2:49 — Twista creepily mines “making it rain” over Shevon’s body.
3:34 — Buhhhhhh, again with the thunderstorm effects!

But no, “make it rain” is not a sexual euphemism. It’s far too explicit to qualify as one of those.

Boy, is it hard to get a stripper to take your phone call. I’ve called a lot of strip clubs in my day, and it’s always the same: You call. You get a grainy message listing off the names of the strippers you can see that evening. You’re told to call another number to get actual information on the club. That number is a fax machine.

But it doesn’t matter. Those grainy strip club messages, man—those are the whooooole reason I’m calling.

I’m sure a lot of guys dial those numbers and wait anxiously on the line to hear their favorite girl’s name, to decide if the bodies present are compelling enough to make them slip out of the house. Not me. I don’t have a favorite girl—I just like listening to somebody record a long and glorious list of ridiculous stripper names into the telephone, every day of the week.

I encourage everybody to call the clubs themselves—that way you get the extras, like the speaker pausing for a second as she turns the page on her stripper list, or the list of specials, like “prime rib, filet mignon, sandwiches.” But for those who don’t want the numbers saved in their cell phone histories, I give you: Tonight’s entertainment!

—

Good Guys
2311 Wisconsin Ave NW
(202) 333-8128

Nearly completely incomprehensible today—yes!

Sandra
May
Ellen
Sexy
Russia
Patty
Desire
Saphire
Mya

—

Camelot
1823 M Street NW
(202) 887-5966

Day:

Amanda
Ashley
Ceci
Dakota
Jasmine
Jennifer
Kristin
Lindsey
Lura
Mia
Nadia
Natasha
Toni

Night:

“Amanda 2″
Audrey
Carli
Carmella
Felicia
Jasmine
Katia
Lynette
Marilyn
Sheena
Skyler
Stephanie
Tina Marie
Tanya
Vita

—

Archibald’s
1520 K St NW
(202) 737-2662

Fuck, all they say is they have “75 beautiful women” on staff. The daily schedule’s at the Web site:

Chase
Georgia
Hazel
Kitty
Layla
Lisa
Masumi
Natalie
Nature
Versai

—

The House
3530 Georgia Ave. NW
(202) 882-2014

Shit, a guy actually picks up the phone here. I panic and tell him I have the wrong number.

Photo by Alexander O’Neill.

The District’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs has consented to a raze order filed in October by the owners of Glover Park’s gentlemen’s dance venue, J.P.’s Night Club. In their 20 plus years in business, the long-running, family-owned business had continually faced critiques from neighbors in the upscale community over matters of crime, alcohol licensing and, well, that other thing.

Local adversaries finally got their wish in January 2008, when a conflagration led to a dramatic fire-and-rescue operation, when eager firemen rescued a (fully clad) employee from the roof as J.P.’s went up in flames. The building was soon boarded up (not hard, it had no windows) and has remained so ever since, even as new businesses have moved into adjoining storefronts.

According to an anonymous commenter, though, Glover Park’s strip club strip may yet emerge from the ashes like a glorious, full-nude Phoenix. “Anonymous” writes, “A little birdie told me that a shiny new club will open on the JP’s site in a new building in the not so distant future.” Those Glover Park residents who like their strip clubs plagued by fire can still head to Good Guys, site of the fall 2007 arson that critically injured a bouncer and left many unclothed employees out in the cold.