To all the ladies and gents who read last week’s Tropical Lei article and responded to the TSL,

You’re right. There was no objectivity in that article, and outside the context of April Fools’, it looked like a complete anti-feminist rant that a part-time Randian who had no tongue to plant in her cheek would write. Judging by the response to my article, I’m pretty sure that’s how I came off. The easy answer to my critics is that I wrote an April Fools’ review in no seriousness that ran as a normal piece, and didn’t mean to offend.

The backstory is a little more complicated than that.

I spent the summer working as a journalist in DC, and, lately, wanting to write more creatively, I started writing restaurant reviews for The Student Life. Normally they run without controversy, and if you turn to page five in this issue, there’s an article about a Japanese restaurant I recently went to in Hollywood. For the April Fools’ issue, however, I decided to break the mold a little by doing a review of the Tropical Lei, and do it as a complete satire. (To emphasize that I sincerely tried to write it as a joke, I tried to work in a Gonzo-esque hallucination where bats started flying out of a pole dancer’s mouth, flew around my head and whispered secrets into my ears.) I went into this thinking it was a joke. My editors ran the article thinking it was a joke.

If I had tried to objectively interview the workers at the Lei, I never could have even walked past the front entrance: I am a woman. I was by myself. Even if I had paid (and I gladly would have, out of my own pocket*), I still couldn’t enter the Tropical Lei. The most they’d let me do, after some negotiating, was a quick peek inside. “You get one minute,” the bouncers told me. “No talking to the women. No pictures. Then get out.”

The resulting article came from this one-minute glimpse into a seedy nightclub, and I wrote my impressions based on that, filling in the blanks with a few fictional assumptions. The line between truth and fiction began to blur substantially, and frankly, it wasn’t something I was looking out for. It is, however, something I normally pay attention to: I once entered a teenage beauty pageant in order to write an article on the economics of the pageant world (and I’m the first to admit I’m not an American beauty.)

And then the joke got out of hand. I attribute that to three things: first, the article couldn’t run in the normal joke issue and got pushed to the regular issue, lending it more journalistic credence than such a piece would normally ever get. Second, I had no access to any of the workers at the Tropical Lei, and couldn’t get any of their stories. Frankly, I find that true stories can be more compelling than fiction sometimes, and would have loved the chance to talk to them. Not only would I have gotten a more journalistic piece, it might even be a more interesting one than the hallucination I whipped up for the lols.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I hit a huge nerve concerning feminism on campus. Let me be clear in saying that, while I may not have meant to hit this nerve in such an illegitimate (and unserious) way, I’m sort of glad that I did, in a way. Stripping is such a multi-faceted issue, and depending on how you approach it, can either be female denigration, empowerment, someone else’s entertainment, or just a way to pay the bills. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that this means I’m standing on top of a building with a sign that says “I LOVE STRIPPERS,” because that lacks the nuance this debate needs.

I acknowledge this: in a serious discussion about stripping, where do you start? Do you start from opposite ends—perhaps a socially conservative side opposing a more progressive position—and work inwards? Do you point to the barrier that the managers of the Tropical Lei placed in front of me, further objectifying their workers (“Look, but don’t touch”), or do you demand that a journalist do more to smash the barrier in a pursuit of objective truth? Do you ever make jokes about strippers, the same way you make jokes about plumbers and tax accountants, or is there a taboo when you talk about it?What do you think? And why?

*As much as The Student Life promotes the pursuit of journalism, I doubt that they would let me charge them for a lap dance.