So Parade, the irrelevant magazine for old people that’s tucked inside every Sunday Oregonian, published this infographic last week, mentioning that Springfield, Oregon has the most strip clubs per capita nationwide.

Cue local news shitstorm! From the Eugene Register-Guard:

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Niel Laudati, community relations manager for Springfield, is tired of trying to stamp out the strip-club rumor. Every few years it bubbles up — the notion that the blue-collar city tucked between two rivers has the nation’s highest per-capita number of “gentlemen’s clubs.” …

But that’s flat wrong, Laudati said, and even the most cursory Internet search would prove the figure untrue. The trouble is, you have to go to a pretty offensive website to find a list of the nation’s strip clubs. (Laudati gave the city’s IT guys a heads-up before visiting the website himself. We would publish the name of the site, except that you’d never forgive us.)…

The strip club website showed that Springfield, with a population of 58,000 has just three, which extrapolates to a paltry rate of 5.1 strip clubs per 100,000 residents.

Not to pick on Florida, but The Register-Guard checked the website (the squeamish reporter made a colleague look it up) and found another city, Tampa, with 335,000 people, 33 strip clubs and a rate of 9.8 strips clubs per 100,000 people.

Parade magazine spokeswoman Alexis Collado said researchers at the magazine relied on a 2009 blog from the weekly Portland Mercury citing numbers compiled by Exotic magazine.

Gah! Things that are wrong with this situation:
1. The name of the website is StripClubList.com. You can’t be forgiven for saying “strip club list” these days?
2. That stupid Parade article got the strip club fact wrong and is now attributing it to the Mercury! The original blog post from 2009 was about how Springfield surpassed Portland with its number of strip clubs per capita. Nowhere in there did I write that Springfield had the most strip clubs per capita nationwide, just that it has more than Portland.
3. Niel Laudati called me yesterday and says he has people calling him in tears that Springfield has a reputation as America’s strip club capital. You’re being silly, people! Knock it off. Niel’s got work to do, your fair city isn’t going to manage to relate to communities by itself!

But anyway, since I had to double check all this by looking up all the strip clubs in Oregon on the offensive website that shall not be named, I put together this very official poll:

Sarah Shay Mirk reported on transportation, sex and gender issues, and politics at the Mercury from 2008-2013. They have gone on to make many things, including countless comics and several books.

18 replies on “Attention! Springfield, Oregon is a Nice Place to Raise a Family and NOT the National Strip Club Capital”

  1. (the squeamish reporter made a colleague look it up)

    Wait til this pussy has to cover a fatal car wreck!

  4. Can’t believe you’re just typing s**********t.com like it’s no big deal.

    You people make me want to puke.

  7. I lived in Springfield in the 90’s. The town fights strip clubs in the stupidest ways. For example they decided to in act a law that set the capacity of a club/bar/restaurant to the number of chairs it contained, in hopes that it would limit the number of patrons to the (then) only strip club in town. Instead the club just pulled out its stage, making every dancer walk from table to table for tips. Which pretty much made every girl’s “stage time” into a cheap lap dance.

    Also your survey missed the best strip club name of all “The Original Taco House”!

  8. I thought I posted this, but it’s not showing up. So forgive me if it is a double post.

    I lived in Springfield in the 90’s. The town fights strip clubs in the stupidest ways. For example they decided to in act a law that set the capacity of a club/bar/restaurant to the number of chairs it contained, in hopes that it would limit the number of patrons to the (then) only strip club in town. Instead the club just pulled out its stage, making every dancer walk from table to table for tips. Which pretty much made every girl’s “stage time” into a cheap lap dance.

    Also your survey missed the best strip club name of all “The Original Taco House”!

  9. I will never forgive the Mercury for posting the lurid, disgusting name of that website, and I will never forgive MonkeyBeat for double posting.

    That said, can we also have a poll of most unappetizing strib club food specials? The DV8 in my neighborhood advertises a $1 dinner buffett…

  10. @MonkeyBeat: we never forgive double posts here. Comments sometimes take a minute or two to post because Humphrey’s porn video streaming is overloading the server. As the nurse said to the well-hung dwarf, be a little fucking patient!

  16. @ebag: that thought always crosses my mind, like hippie strippers or something? Girls with dreads and unshaven legs? And then there’s Giant Paul Bunyan across the street, and I’m like GET THE DANCING BARE, PAUL, and then a Max car runs me over.

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