I didn’t know stripping was such a sore spot in rural Minnesota, until I nearly hung for it. Since my move two years ago from East Los Angeles to my boyfriend’s hometown of Cannon Falls, I had little to talk about with all the country wives. I had no recipes to exchange when we sat around the kitchen while the men played foosball in the rec room downstairs. I was the only one drinking the men’s beer, while they preferred wine coolers or hard lemonades. I was the only one who dyed my hair darker than my natural color, the only non-Lutheran. But it wasn’t until my boyfriend hosted a bachelor party that the subtle differences came into high contrast, and things got ugly.
I had cloistered myself inside as the men commandeered their fun outside. They’d golfed, jet-skied, played volleyball until pregnant storm clouds swelled over the lake, forcing them back to the house with lightning flashes snapshotting their way. I watched from the window as our lawn became a mudslide they’d careen down, attacking each other with high-school wrestling moves. I watched them laugh and stumble and slap arms around each others’ shoulders as the beers and the Jägermeister and the nostalgia slid back. Watching out the window, my disdain for the brutish ritual softened as they became a pack of muddy drunk boys celebrating the time when they were a team, and girls didn’t matter. When the best man slopped in and handed me a smeared business card for exotic dancers, I agreed to call without much thought. It seemed like ordering a clown or an inflatable trampoline. A party favor. Lame, perhaps, but inoffensive. In my book, ordering a stripper at a bachelor party was no crime other than the transgression of predictability.
I requested the strippers for a 10 p.m. arrival and quickly called a few of my boyfriend’s sisters for what I hoped could be theatrical remedy. The plan was, after the strippers performed, we’d enter dancing in full regalia: Slouching padded bellies, blackened teeth, curlers, signs around our necks that read “After.” If they were going to pleasurably mourn the disappearance of eroticism in marriage in a staged send-off seduction, then we would complete the dubious morality play with a tragic 10-years-later conclusion. We giggled on the phone, scripting our theater of de-seduction, a flurry of whips, torn fishnets, and banging cookware and party favors of aspirin, fake Viagra and Rogaine.
I was pulling costumes from my closet when the bride-to-be called, tipsy with her lady crew, but voice hawk-like to hear how her fiancée was ferreting. “It’s so cool,” I reported, an aide-de-camp giddy with our plan. “We’ve got your back. After the strippers come, then Bob’s sisters and I are…” But the phone quaked with a scream: “Whoooooo called strippers?!” California fault number two: Addictive straightforwardness. “I did,” I admitted.
The phone muffled for a moment and another woman was on. “Listen, Miss footloose and fancy-free Californian,” she hissed, accent strong. “These are our husbands you got there. And my Jason isn’t even allowed to have a Playboy in our house. You call yourself a feminist, well I’d just beg to differ. You couldn’t give a nickel for women nor for our men, who have evidently fallen into your godforsaken hands! I pray for you. I just do.”
The phone is passed around for more berating until the bride gets back on and demands to speak to her groom. I tell her he has nothing to do with it and apologize for not knowing their feelings. I lean out the door, calling, and a couple perk up as if I’m now the Bachelor-Cruise-Director and will announce strippers on the main deck at 10, but it’s my emergency voice.
The recess bell has toned. Muddy men pause mid-wrestle, brake a mudslide, squelch a Jäger slug. They file in as the phone is passed around from man to man in a chain of reproach. A best friend of the groom gathers his things to go home, sheepish in his goodbyes. Another urges me to cancel the strippers immediately. The men barnyard the floor as they pace with the phone, attempting damage control.
“No,” one pleads, “I knew nothing about it. I swear. I wouldn’t have stayed.” I’m at the kitchen table, rubbing the question place on my forehead. “I just don’t get why you asked me to call strippers,” I say, “and didn’t tell me that your wives were so opposed.”
Eyebrows go up, shoulders shrug. “Well,” someone says, “we thought you knew.”
Turns out I didn’t know that Minnesota is having an identity crisis when it comes to erotic dance. Of the 44 adult entertainment clubs statewide, only two have escaped litigation, and only one has gone without painstaking challenges from its city council. In the last year, Minnesota country strip clubs made exotic national news: Elko, population 472, an 82-year-old Ojibwe man declared his strip club a sovereign nation; Nicollet, population 800, a 20-year-old co-owner opened his club to the local high school in protest of city ordinances requiring dancers to be scantily clad; Litchfield, population 6,577, required their only strip club to operate on Main Street downtown in full view as a tactic to strip customers of their anonymity and thus shame them; and in Cosmos, population 267, prostitution charges are pending. Other cities currently involved in litigation with respect to adult entertainment are Monticello, Little Falls, Hopkins, St. Louis Park, Crystal, Apple Valley, Mankato, Winona, Hermantown, Arlington, Forest Lake, Elko, Coates, and Eveleth.
Clearly the skin war in Minnesota has high stakes for both sides—good old Christian morality versus First Amendment rights. And while Minneapolis experiences a degree of peace hosting Rick’s Cabaret, the only publicly traded gentleman’s club in the nation, the Twin Cities are hardly a no-fly zone: As the ruralization of strip clubs continues, a backlash has developed that may help explain how a proponent of conservative values ended up in the governor’s office. Just as a bachelor party broke down in apologies and bitterness, the body politic of Minnesota is still plenty confused about how to let its people undress.
The first thing I learn is that it’s hard to square Minnesota’s conflict with the sexual state of the union. Despite our puritanical roots, America has a lascivious appetite: The $4 billion that Americans spend on pornography is larger than the annual revenue of the NFL, the NBA, or Major League Baseball. Americans pay more for sexually explicit material than for movies, more than for all the performing arts combined. Sexually oriented web businesses, which account for only one-fifth of the porn industry, are the only dot-coms that have managed to expand after the collapse. It’s difficult to identify the 700 million porn-video rentals with 700 million perverts nationwide. It gets even more confused when you consider that two of porn’s most prominent vendors, the Marriott (through in-room X-rated movies) and General Motors (who recently sold satellite DirecTV to Rupert Murdoch) were also principal sponsors of the Bush-Cheney Inaugural. With about 3,000 strip clubs nationwide—doubled since the 80s—strip clubs carve out a billion-dollar business, constitute a quarter of total porn consumption coast to coast, provide substantial local and state taxes, and employ more than 200,000 wage-earners.
And yet, even though we are all naked under our clothes, many believe the skin trade is not what Minnesota is about. The League of Minnesota Cities, which provides city members with sample ordinances to restrict adult-oriented businesses and insures against their litigation fees, has received 314 requests for adult ordinance packets since 1998. Tom Grundhoefer, general council for the league, says, “The issue of how to deal with adult-oriented businesses is significant for cities and is shown by the number of cities trying to get prepared.” The porn industry is not us, say many religious groups that operate in Minnesota, such as the American Decency Association, the Community Defense Council, Focus on the Family, and numerous local churches of a conservative stripe. Turn your head the other way, and you’ll hear a different tune: The First Amendment Lawyers’ Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, Feminists for Free Expression, and local liberal churches believe the progression of sexually accepted norms is us. The only thing we agree on seems to be that the issue of sex is causing a persistent burn in the chest of the heartland. It’s the word of God against the letter of the law. I set out to hear both.