—wait a second, are we talking strippers? Shake it! Sh-sh-sh-shake it! To hear WaPo's Paul Schwartzman tell Thompson's tale, the real news here is that exotic dancers exist, and it is super easy to make jokes about them. Let's start with the lede:

To hear Quansa Thompson talk of her life as an exotic dancer, to listen to her describe how men offer cash as she sashays, gyrates and jiggles the night away, is to evoke a thousand titillating thoughts, not a single one having anything to do with the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Paul Schwartzman, you are speaking my language. Because I'm the kind of guy who likes to scan the Washington Post for a little bit of jiggly-jiggly, you know what I'm saying? Hey, you know what really gets me off? A bunch of dudes crowding around a lady and throwing some cash at her while she "jiggles." But you already knew that, since you've decided to frame stripping as a universally titllating experience, sure to overload the brain of any reader who might happen to pick up this newspaper. Man, woman, child—we all believe this to be sexy. But less talk more jiggling:

That is, until Thompson brings up the Depression-era law, which she discovered last summer after being fired by her then-employer, the House, a den of prurient entertainment on Georgia Avenue NW. Thompson is suing the House in U.S. District Court, alleging that the club pays dancers no wages, but ought to under the law. The club has denied the charge.

All this legal speak is harshing my boner. This stripper wants a fair wage, you say? I'll show her a fair wage . . . if she shows me her jiggly, am I right? High five!

By her own account, Thompson — or "Love" as she calls herself onstage — had to overcome a good deal of self-doubt six years ago, when she started dancing alongside a veritable conga line of statuesque beauties with show biz names such as "Wild Cherry," "French Kiss" and "Wet."

She learned to feel the music, to move her hips just so, to smile with enough mystery that men in her audience leaned forward, hands extended, fingers offering up $20 bills, fifties, hundreds. The high-rollers, the "ballers," as she called them, "would make it rain," literally showering her with fistfuls of dollars.

Fact-check time: One has to wonder how much time Schwartzmen spent observing the House technique. I understand it involves more than smiling. But I digress:

Yet Thompson said that aspects of the stripping life bothered her. The House paid her and the other dancers $20 for showing up each day, with the understanding that they could keep their tips after they paid the management a couple of fees: $20 to the DJ, $20 to the bartender. If a dancer was late to the stage, Thompson said, the club charged a $10 penalty. The fine for missing a shift was $80, even if it was because of an illness, which is what Thompson claimed when she didn't show up for work one night last year.

And here we have the Obligatory Discussion Of Issues Not Directly Related To Jiggling. You know what this story needs? More stripper jokes.

Thompson found a lawyer, Philip Zipin, who, after some research, concluded that the House, like a preponderance of strip clubs nationwide, classified their dancers as "independent contractors," as if they were plumbers, only without the tool belt (not to mention the shirt, pants and underwear).

Yeah! Stripper joke!

Yet there are strippers who don't want full-time gigs, who prefer the freedom of floating from club to club. "There are advantages — the write-offs, for one," said Lia Scholl, founder of the now-defunct Star Light Ministries, which counseled exotic dancers. "You can write off breast augmentation. You can write off mileage. They can determine their own schedules and be their own bosses."

The disadvantages of being an independent contractor include being responsible for one's own Social Security taxes and not being entitled to workman's compensation. "If you fall off the pole," Scholl said, "there's no safety net."

Wooooo stripper joke!

She'd be more than willing to return to the stage full time, if she were treated like a full-fledged member of the labor force, albeit one who awakes each day to get undressed for work. "It would be the best job," she said. "People would have more respect for it."

. . . aaaaaand really terrible stripper joke ("what's the difference between a real worker and a stripper? Strippers get undressed for work!") . . . followed the inevitable "But Seriously, Folks" moment. Even though it's obvious from the entire tenor of this piece that the writer does not respect women who are employed in the sex industry, why not finish with a plea for everyone else to get serious about this issue? Because when it comes down to it, strippers are people, too, and—ooooh. Jiggly.

The Washington Post has apparently ended its internal ban on using a colloquial term for Georgetown's most notorious sexual assailant: The "Cuddler." Over the past two years, Georgetown University students and the campus press have invoked the "Cuddler" nickname to refer to a string of odd sexual assaults that have occurred in and around the university. Since 2008, the unidentified assailant has been accused of everything from sneaking into women's beds, covering them with blankets, and even placing his penis on a woman's thigh.

Today, in an item entitled "'Cuddler' reported," Washington Post reporter Matt Zapotosky submitted his own contribution to "Cuddler" lore. Early Sunday morning, Zapotosky reported, a woman awoke to find a man "cuddling in her bed" next to her.

Previously, the Post had avoided using the term "Cuddler" to refer to the dozen-or-so assaults that have plagued the Georgetown area. In a story on the phenomenon from Sept. 2009, Paul Duggan confined his "cuddler" references to direct quotations from Georgetown students, but never invoked the nickname himself. Over the past two years, the Post has only published the word "cuddler" three times: in Zapatosky's story, Duggan's direct quotes, and a "Date Lab" feature in which one blind-dater claimed that he had been told he's "a good cuddler."

There are a couple of good reasons for a crime reporter to avoid "Cuddler":

(1) Placing your penis on a stranger's body is far from cuddly;

(2) It's possible that we're not dealing with a "Cuddler" here, but rather "Cuddlers." As the Post reported back in September, police don't know whether or not the dozen-or-so assaults reported over the past two years were even committed by the same perpetrator. Witness descriptions have yielded a range of heights, ages, and ethnicities, and attacks attributed to a "Cuddler" have been reported as far away as College Park, Md.

The "Cuddler" nickname occupies the space between fact and mythology. He is both a flesh-and-blood crime suspect and an archetype—a convenient shorthand for a pattern of crimes that the cops are unable to pin on one guy. The most recent assault failed to reign in the Cuddler's steadily expanding resume. The victim, Zapotosky reports, was "not able to give officers a good description of the man." And the woman's bed is located almost a mile north of the upper reaches of Georgetown University, on the 3800 block of Calvert Street NW (pictured)—hardly a campus attack.

Zapotosky's item awkwardly attempts to bridge the gap between "Cuddler" legend and reality. "Looks like the District has another 'cuddler' on the loose," he wrote. "His latest victim: a Northwest Washington woman who woke up just before 6:30 a.m. Sunday to find him cuddling her in her bed, police said." Zapotosky's "Cuddler" is both a new suspect ("another 'Cuddler'") and a serial criminal (his victim is merely "his latest").

Of course, there's one good reason to invoke "Cuddler"—since the assaults gained mainstream attention last year, D.C. residents have been fascinated with all things cuddly, and invoking the nickname helps interested parties know that they should listen up. But the Post is less interested in the nickname than readers. When asked about the more liberal use of "cuddler" in official Post copy, criminal justice editor Mike Semel responded, "You're reading more into it than there is. There's nothing going on" in terms of policy.

Additional reporting by Erik Wemple; photo by Darrow Montgomery

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a story about two shoplifting suspects who were shot over the weekend by a Prince George's County police officer. The suspects were shot after they attempted to drive away with the officer's arm lodged in the door of their getaway car. But the Post story was not concerned with the facts of this botched escape—the newspaper had already covered the particulars of the incident a day earlier. The follow-up amounted to a lengthy correction of one fact: the gender of the wounded suspects.

In its first story on the suspects, the Post wrote that "an off-duty county officer shot and wounded two women." In the second story, the Post corrected the record: the suspects "turned out to be men rather than women," Staff Writer Martin Weil wrote. Weil explains:

It was believed at first that the two who were shot were women. But they "turned out to be males dressed in female clothing," Officer Henry Tippett, a county police spokesman, said early Sunday.

That finding was apparently made when medical personnel began treating the two for gunshot wounds, Tippett said.

The headline of the story reads "Two Men Shot by Pr. George's Officer Were Dressed as Women." A link to the story goes further to label the pair: "Cross-Dressing Men Shot By Police."

There are two possibilities here:

(a) The suspects were cross-dressing men who had disguised themselves in dresses, wigs, and make-up in order to lift merchandise from a store. Any man can be a cross-dresser—all you gotta do is put on a dress. Or:

(b) The suspects were transgender women who were born with male sex characteristics, but live their lives as women. Transgender women are not guys in dresses—-they're women whose gender expression differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. They should be identified as women, not men.

For the Post, the distinction between "cross-dressing men" and "transgender women" is an important one. According to the Associated Press Stylebook, transgender subjects are to be identified by their gender identity, not their sex at birth. Media outlets are to employ "the pronoun preferred by the individuals who . . . present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth," the guide reads. "If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly."

Additionally, the GLAA media guide cautions against using the term "cross-dresser" to describe a transgender person. Cross-dressers, the guide notes, are people who "occasionally wear clothes traditionally associated with people of the other sex." The term should be employed to describe someone who is "comfortable with the sex they were assigned at birth and do not wish to change it," not "someone who has transitioned to live full-time as the other sex, or who intends to do so in the future."

It's not possible, at this point, for the Post to definitively identify the subjects as either "cross-dressers" or "transgender women." One sure-fire way to confirm a person's gender identity is simply to ask them, but the names of the suspects, both 23, have not yet been released by police.

Still, a couple of facts in the story suggest that the suspects in question presented consistently as female, and didn't just dress up "in female clothing" for their little crime spree. Initially, everyone—from the police officer who chased and shot them to the police spokespeople who announced the incident—had no doubt that the suspects were women. The suspects were only identified as biologically male following a medical examination. In short, the Post modified the gender of the suspects solely on the basis of a genital check.

If you're under the impression that a person's genitals should determine the gender used to describe them in print, consider this: Under what other circumstances would the Washington Post force its subjects to drop their pants in order to prove their gender? Let's run that test on some other stories which appeared in yesterday's Metro section. Was Noah Robbins, a 19-year-old local actor headed for Broadway, forced to display his genitals in order to be referred to throughout the piece as "he" and "him"? How about Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell—did the Post ensure that the candidates have penises before calling them "men"? Was Debra Rowe, former HIV/AIDS housing chief, only granted a "she" following a medical examination?

In every other instance, a Post subject is considered a woman if she presents as a woman and says she's a woman. A couple of shoplifting suspects, however, appear to have been denied that courtesy. There are several reasons for the Post not to write this story. The suspects' identities are still unknown. The gender identification in the story is contrary to style guidelines. The Post has reason to believe that the gender terminology employed by the police requires fact-checking. Further information in the case could require yet another gender correction here.

There's one reason why the Post would go ahead with this story: "cross-dressing" shoplifters make for more sensational crime suspects than do a couple of women. The story has already generated such helpful online comments as "Was dey pretty? Does dey gets to wear the dresses in prison? Big dummies," and "One can only hope that their shoes matched their dresses." Perhaps the Post received positive feedback for its previous dubious "cross-dressing shoplifter" work, published back in August. The Post is clearly capitalizing upon a "man in a dress" punchline to this modest little crime story. But obviously, the potential for some sophomoric joking is no reason to sacrifice accuracy in reporting. The true gender identities of the suspects in the case are still unclear. When you're writing a story that is exclusively centered on the gender of your suspects, shouldn't you wait until you can get it right?

Illustration by Bonnie Kennedy

Rosen, who came to Washington in 2006 and worked at the Washington Blade, a weekly LGBT newspaper, said his editors weren't always game for his story pitches about indie music or gay cartoon characters — stories he said would appeal to his age group. He checked out J.R.'s. and Cobalt, well known D.C. gay clubs, but felt the atmosphere centered on hooking up. So he started TheNewGay.net, where he and others write about music, television and politics, and promote parties including Homo/Sonic at the Black Cat, a gay-friendly straight bar on 14th Street NW.

Their quest to alter Washington's gay landscape also reveals the tensions between Millennials and Generation Y-ers in their 20s, and Generation X-ers in their mid- to upper 30s and 40s. Some establishment Washingtonians view Rosen's efforts as cliche, a cycle that every so often churns out a batch of strivers who feel entitled to a brand.

"I think every young person thinks they're the new gay," said Kevin Naff, 38, editor of the Blade, where Rosen worked until he was laid off last year. "When I was that age, I thought I listened to all the cool music and knew all the cool places to go—that's what your 20s are for. I think every new generation wants to have their own music, their own language."

Oooooh, them's fightin' words! Is it just me, or does the mainstream media sound a little bit scared that these youngin's might just be the successors to the gay media throne?