On the quiet intersection of County N and County V in North Bristol, a seemingly innocuous building sits across the street from a local bar. But ever since this past summer, the discreet looking Club Bristol has taken on a radically different internal persona as Dane County’s newest strip club. And now residents are making nearly as much noise as a bunch of drunks cheering on a pole dancer, pushing the county toward limiting the future development of such clubs to M-1 Industrial areas, where local citizens won’t have to worry about inebriated midnight ruckuses pouring outside.

But while the fight to regulate the ugly side effects of adult entertainment is nothing new to the area, county lawmakers should be careful not to pass an overly general or assumptive ordinance that would work to potentially stifle legitimate businesses willing to take necessary precautions.

Madison residents are no strangers to the adult entertainment business, as the Visions burlesque sits on the east side of town, not far from the Red Letter News adult bookstore, while Bennett’s Smut-N-Eggs — a diner known for serving up adult films with breakfast — sits in the vicinity of downtown student housing and Adult Arcade lies within a short stroll of the Capitol. Arguably most notable of the city’s adult attractions, Red Letter News has garnered negative ink over the past couple of years for allegations of sexual activity taking place within the store’s video booths, while neighborhood residents have complained of drug dealers and prostitutes finding business in the store’s vicinity during the night.

But with the management of adult entertainment parlors rarely implicated in such illegal activities, the criminal problems seem largely rectifiable through the sorts of surveillance Red Letter News has employed of late and perimeter patrols that would work to deter johns and drug buyers alike. Such measures, if taken effectively and financed by the business in question, leave only a question of moral turpitude to concern residents, and such queries appear to be answered by the First Amendment.

Should Dane County require such security measures for adult entertainment businesses opening in residential areas, the increased cost of operation might well drive porn peddlers to M-1 Industrial areas anyway. But to not at least provide legal businesses with a viable option for development in strategically targeted areas — rather than limiting them to the approximately 15 M-1 Industrial areas throughout the county — would be to excessively regulate an otherwise legitimate industry.

Indeed, the only true ill voluntarily perpetrated by the ownership and management of such establishes is one of morality. While it may seem ludicrous to have Red Letter News operating in the near vicinity of multiple churches and a school, the reality is that so long as adult parlors — like Club Bristol — can successfully mimic the Las Vegas motto of making sure that what happen inside stays inside, the long arm of the Bill of Rights appears to cover such forms of “speech.”

The objections to this theory of operation were well noted in the 1980s as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon paraded through Minneapolis, Indianapolis and other cities, attempting to stifle the adult industry through an elaborate critique premised on an inherent notion of gender discrimination. But with each failure of the feminist legal duo, the protections afforded such parlors became increasingly clear. And while the parallel certainly isn’t exact here — the urban versus rural dichotomy seems to be fueling the objections in North Bristol — the definition ultimately granted to free speech in the 1980s appears to be sufficient to cover this scenario, again provided that such clubs are able and willing to successfully police their own patrons within a reasonable vicinity.

The true problem in North Bristol is not what is going on inside the strip club, but rather what is happening in its neighborhood. This was the same issue manifested with Red Letter News not too long ago. And, as the East Washington establishments have begun to show, this is a problem that can be cleaned up. To limit an entire industry based on such anecdotal ills with seemingly apparent solutions would be simply unjust.

Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in rhetoric.