Posted on 08/19/2002 9:57:24 PM PDT by Luis Gonzalez
LAS VEGAS -- Here in Sin City, a modern Gomorrah built on the notion that there's a little bit of naughtiness in all of us, erotic dancing is hardly excessive in a town that takes $10,000 blackjack wagers.
One type in particular, the lap dance, in which scantily clad women bump and grind on male customers in a sexually suggestive way, has been for years a staple in the ''gentlemen's clubs'' that prosper away from the glare of the Strip's mega-resorts and casinos.
Erotic entertainment is so much a part of the landscape that even people outside the industry were scratching their heads earlier this month after Clark County commissioners approved strict regulations on lap dancing. The rules would apply only to parts of the county and the Strip that are outside Las Vegas city limits.
Lawyers for some clubs threatened First Amendment lawsuits. Dancers, estimated at 5,000 or more, vowed to organize, register to vote and seek revenge at the polls. Newspaper editorials lambasted commissioners for wasting time on a trivial matter.
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, a former lawyer for the mob who never misses a chance to tweak his rivals in the county, joined in, too. ''If the commissioners want to put all of their adult cabarets on rollers, all they have to do is push them in my direction,'' the mayor says.
Commissioners considered banning any contact between dancers and customers but opted for less-stringent rules.
The rules that brought a snicker across this desert valley prohibit clubs that serve alcohol from employing anyone under 21, prohibit contact between a female dancer's breasts and any part of a customer's body and ban the practice of customers putting bills in dancers' G-strings. It also allows grinding against a customer's leg, but no contact with a customer's feet.
Two commissioners who voted for the law have had second thoughts, and it could be revised or repealed at the panel's meeting Tuesday. But some experts say the county is on solid legal ground.
Courts have ruled that, unlike topless or nude dancing, which has some protection under the First Amendment's free-speech clause, a lap dance with contact between dancer and patron is considered conduct, not expression.
''The argument is that this is not simply the communication of an idea, that it comes closer to an act, the sale of sexual services,'' says Jesse Choper, a constitutional law professor at the University of California-Berkeley. Andrea Hackett, a dancer at Deja vu Showgirls, is organizing the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance. ''You would just about need a manual to do a lap dance out here,'' she says. ''First you have to decide if you're in the city or the county. Then you need an anatomy book because apparently we need to stay away from customers' feet. It's pure madness.''
Dancers also say the law would unfairly deny dancers under 21 their jobs in topless clubs that serve alcohol and drive them to clubs featuring nude dancing because, by law, those establishments can't serve alcohol.
A lap dance in a club's public area costs $20, up to five times more in a ''private VIP room,'' although a bouncer is present. A dancer can gross $200 to $1,000 a night.
Club owners and dancers say there's little evidence to support charges that erotic dancing promotes prostitution. Solicitation is grounds for firing a dancer. A club risks losing its liquor license. Surveillance cameras and bouncers monitor customers and dancers.
Las Vegas won't follow the county's crackdown but might license dancers and collect fees, Goodman says. ''We are the adult entertainment capital of the world, and we'll do everything we can to promote anything that is legal.''
"Lawyers for some clubs threatened First Amendment lawsuits. Dancers, estimated at 5,000 or more, vowed to organize, register to vote and seek revenge at the polls."
Is it just me, or is that just plain funny?
NO FEET!?!?!? That does it! No more Vegas for me!
I'm talking about the fruit, mind you.
One wonders what prompted this. Did someone want a promotion to be "Inspector of Lap Dances"?
Regards, Ivan
You'll probably have to compete with Weird Bill for it. ;)
Regards, Ivan
Trust me on this one, kiddos.
How they were going to ban it in a state where prostitution is legal is beyond me. "I wasn't lap dancing with him officer, we were having sex", etc.
Regards, Ivan
The new rules are cheap publicity for the politicians in question; a cynical attempt to appear to be "tough on 'crime'." And as far as the new rules go, they're enforced only in the big resorts. The cabbies and the hotel doormen know the places where you can have lap dances (as well as other physical calisthenics otherwise illegal in Clark County) until judgement trump, and no one will say a word about it.
All it takes to find anything you want in Las Vegas is a few shekels in the right palms, and not all that many at that.
That can be said about almost anywhere, really.
As Shostakovich put into one of his operas: "Life's a smoothly moving groove if you have only got the right connections."
Regards, Ivan
The low level which commercial morality has reached in America is deplorable. We have humble God fearing Christian men among us who will stoop to do things for a million dollars that they ought not to be willing to do for less than 2 millions.
As by the fires of experience, so by commission of crime, you learn real morals. Commit all the crimes, familiarize yourself with all sins, take them in rotation (there are only two or three thousand of them), stick to it, commit two or three every day, and by-and-by you will be proof against them. When you are through you will be proof against all sins and morally perfect. You will be vaccinated against every possible commission of them. This is the only way.
Regards,
If they tried the tabloids (yes the ones with naked women) would accuse them of being drooling perverts and we'd leave the EU tomorrow. ;)
Regards, Ivan
More than thirty years ago "erotic" dancing and x-rated movies were common in my old hometown and I'm sure many others in the Midwest. Now they are almost totally absent in these parts. Let these stupid behaviors die a natural death by being ignored or segregated in obscurity rather working oneself up in a lather about them.
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