Up From Bondage or, Let Us Now Praise a Rare Instance of (Fiscal) Restraint on The Part of Oversexed Pols…
Novelist Tracy Quan (her Diary of a Jet-Setting Call Girl, the third book in the Nancy Chan series, is now out) has the last—and quite possibly first good—word to say about the big Republican National Committee bondage-themed strip club fooferaw (by the way, a fooferaw at West Hollywood's Voyeur costs extra). Writing in the Daily Beast, Quan notes that the nearly $2,000 spent at the club is a cheap date when it comes to dealing with political sexcesses:
$2,000 for strippers? It's mere pocket change rattling around between $9,099 for hotel rooms, $17,514 for private planes, and over $12,000 for limos, all within a single month….
You don't have to be a Republican to feel the partisan energy fueling this week's scandal. Compared to the $700,000 Bunny Mellon is alleged to have given the John Edwards machine for Rielle Hunter's upkeep, a few thousand spent watching half-naked working women looks less like decadence and more like old-fashioned middle-class thrift.
The expenses associated with scandal have not always been so immediate or nakedly monetary. The late Wilbur Mills could have told us that. The legendary House Ways and Means chairman (like Bill Clinton, an Arkansas Democrat) was handily re-elected to Congress after making headlines in the company of Fanne Foxe, who stripped at The Silver Slipper in Washington in the mid-1970s. Yvonne Dunleavy, who co-authored Fanne Foxe: The Real Story Behind the Headlines with Fanne herself, says, "It was a different climate of judgment. The scandal wasn't quantified in terms of money." Going to a strip club, in and of itself, wouldn't even have been scandalous for Mills or most men at the time; you had to be a lot more outrageous to turn that into professional and public failure.
Quan talked to Reason in 2005 about prostitution, human trafficking, and more.