Michigan Says Scantily Clad Women Cannot Advertise Scantily Clad Women

A new law will force Michigan strip clubs to clean up their act. Publicly, anyway.

The furor seems to have been caused by one particularly immodest young lady, whose poster prompted protests.

It’s an eyesore,” said Mary Little, 86, a member of the Evergreen-Lahser Seven-Eight Mile Community Council and who lives about five blocks away. “It gives us a bad reputation. People look at our neighborhood like we are Las Vegas.

We’re sure Ms. Little is gratified by the ban, but as columnist Darrell Dawsey points out, this is a slippery slope — and perhaps won’t hold up, since it applies only to adult businesses. And, as that writer points out, this makes no sense: in a country where objectifying women is rife, “the reality is, strip clubs might be the only place where such imagery can actually be called ‘truth in advertising.'” That said, we’d much rather people didn’t have women being objectified everywhere they look, accurate or not. But banning anything on moral grounds — especially when it only deals with the superficials — becomes problematic very quickly.