On Strip Measure, the Sides Are Four Feet Apart

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 7, 2006

SEATTLE -- Voters here Tuesday have an opportunity rare in a democratic society:

To decide in a referendum whether lonely guys can continue to stuff $20 bills in the G-strings of hot young women.

One such woman, whose nom de lap dance is Asia, performs six nights a week at Déjà Vu, a downtown club across the street from the city's famous Pike Place Market, where during daylight hours burly men in rubber pants toss around salmon to entertain tourists.

Asia comes to work after the salmon have been packed away and entertains without benefit of pants. She is 22 years old, with eight-inch stiletto heels, sparkly false eyelashes and a tanning-parlor tan (it being cold, dark and wet this time of year in Seattle).

She makes about $48,000 a year, performing 20 or so lap dances a night for software writers, college kids and the occasional fisherman. It is a good living, she says, for a single mom with a 4-year-old daughter.

Like many of her fellow dancers, though, Asia is planning to leave town, if voters endorse a city ordinance that would bleach much of the lust and most of the lucre out of lap dancing.

Its provisions include:

· The four-foot rule. A performer and her patron must stay at least four feet apart.

· The library rule. Lights must be turned up to the brightness of a typical office.

· The cash-in-a-cup rule. A patron cannot give money directly to a dancer or wiggle it into her underwear.

These rules, if approved by voters, come on top of a daunting matrix of strip-club regulations. Among other things, they forbid the drinking of alcohol and the smoking of tobacco and allow strippers to be nude only when they are on a stage that is six feet away from patrons and 18 inches high.

"We already have enough rules," said Asia, her sparkly eyelashes flaring in the club's black light. "The four-foot rule will mean I can't make a living. Who is going to pay $20 to stand four feet away and watch me dance? No one."

That, of course, is the point.

With the enthusiastic approval of Mayor Greg Nickels, the ordinance was approved last year on a 5 to 4 vote of the City Council. The vote came after a federal court tossed out the city's moratorium on new strip clubs -- a rule that had been in effect for 17 years and had limited the number of strip clubs here to just four.

By comparison, nearby Portland, Ore., which is slightly smaller than Seattle and much less fretful about lap dancing, has more than 50 strip clubs.

Nickels has said that strip clubs here have links to organized crime. As evidence, he has cited a single 2003 incident when club owners were accused of illegally trying to influence the City Council to get permission to build a parking lot. A judge later dismissed the charges.

The four-foot rule is on the books in a number of suburbs around Seattle and has been effective in closing down their strip clubs.

Although studies in several major cities have linked strip-club zones with increased crime rates, there is little evidence in Seattle to suggest its four scattered clubs are connected in any significant way to neighborhood crime.

The four-foot rule has won support from the Seattle Times, the largest newspaper in Washington. In an editorial, it endorsed the ordinance, saying that "grinding away on customers in the dark for tips" is not lawful expression of free speech.

Not everyone in Seattle is so sure. The four-foot rule has triggered what appears to be a growing populist backlash, as prosperous, liberal, highly educated, environmentally correct Seattle worries that its goody-goody tendencies are running amok.

Dan Savage, editor of the Stranger, an alternative weekly, said in his blog that city leaders should turn their attention to the problems of public schools and mass transit and leave alone the "the hard-up guys . . . tossing twenties at pretty girls."

The Seattle Weekly, another alternative newspaper, ran a cover story with this headline: "Big Nanny Is Watching You." A letter this week in that newspaper laments that Seattle, as it obsessively listens to National Public Radio and drinks too much all-organic coffee, is becoming "uptight and self-righteous."

Owners of strip clubs couldn't agree more . They managed to place a referendum on the ballot that allows voters to approve or veto the lap-dance ordinance the city council passed last year. Enforcement has been delayed, pending the vote. Club owners have spent $850,000 on ads urging voters to say no to the "morality police."

"This ordinance sends the wrong message about the open-minded, progressive city we want Seattle to be," said Tim Killian, manager of the referendum.

The backlash is even finding legs in the city's establishment. City Council member Richard McIver, who last year proposed the four-foot rule, says he now wonders if its enforcement could hurt Seattle's reputation as a desirable destination for young people.

The "nanny state" image issue is upsetting city residents, McIver said, and he predicted that the four-foot rule could be voted down.

At Déjà Vu, the lap dancers are pessimistic. A 19-year-old blonde who calls herself Cali said she is making contingency plans. A college sophomore studying communications, she said she pays the $25,000-a-year tuition at Seattle University with earnings from the club.

"If they pass the four-foot rule," she said, "I'll probably just have to go to community college."