"They've taken a very beautiful town and made a mockery of it. Give me back my charisma, which is Dallas, Texas." --Shirley, waitress at the Cottage Lounge and "the oracle of Northwest Highway" since 1971.

Twenty years ago Morganna the Kissing Bandit--a voluptuous chick who made herself famous by running onto baseball diamonds and smooching the players--was arrested at a topless bar in the fabled "Hooter Heaven" area of Bachman Lake when she attacked a customer with her Blouse Bunnies, apparently boxing his ears while smothering his face deep down in the valley from which few men have emerged alive. Fortunately she didn't poke an eye out, and after pleading no contest, she said she'd learned her lesson: don't point those things unless you intend to use them. I still receive an annual Christmas card from Morganna, who remembers my broad in-depth newspaper coverage of her case, and the event lives on in the collective memory of those of us who believe a little harmless hell-raising in close proximity to nekkid bazoomas never hurt anybody and possibly contributes to the overall sanity of the city.

I'm recalling the story now because those days are not only gone, they're now regarded as a dark age of civic lawlessness. Nobody got all THAT upset about Morganna flouncing her flopdoodles in public. But if she showed up today and battered a bald pate with her Bouncing Betties, she would be handcuffed, booked, fined and probably jailed for a considerable length of time. The club owner would be in danger of losing his liquor license. And the whole incident would be trumpeted seriously as evidence of the depravity of the Dallas underclass.

Yes, the New Puritans are in the ascendant. They're taking away our fun. I'm here to tell em to go to hell.

Perhaps a little history is in order.

In the beginning there were titty bars, skanky roadhouses, biker dives, clip joints, and all kinds of prefab shacks with "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS" on the blinking neon signs. If you ventured inside--we're going back to the prehistoric SEVENTIES now--you could be fleeced by the strippers, short-changed by the bartender, served a cocktail full of seltzer water and rotgut, and, if you got rowdy, pitched out into the alley by a bouncer named Hawg.

And then Dallas made the world safe for exotic dancing. I know this because I'm sitting in the Men's Club, having a sirloin steak, chatting up a half-nekkid psychology grad student from Cocoa Beach, Florida. (Yes, they tell you stuff like that now.) It's a little too nippy today for lounging by the pool, where girls in imaginative thong swimwear have been known to do parodies of synchronized swimming that is eminently more watchable than the Olympics version. Last night, at The Lodge, I discussed the ski slopes of Interlaken (well, actually above Interlaken, she corrected me on that) with a Swiss girl in a string bikini who apparently had to choose between being a supermodel or a stripper. (In case you haven't been out lately, The Lodge has fantasy women normally not seen this side of Maxim magazine.) Later on I might mosey down to the raucous King's Cabaret, formerly the King's Lounge, on South Industrial, where working class girls entertain guys who just came from the auto body repair shop, often still wearing their grease-spattered overalls with "Buster" stitched over the tool pocket. Even in this most famously blue-collar of all blue-collar topless bars, they've given in to the Dallas trend and added a "VIP Room" (actually a raised square at the back with couches outfitted for lapdance efficiency). When the King's Lounge starts trying to get classy, you KNOW something major has changed in Boob Land. (For those topless history completists, I should add that the King's Cabaret, formerly the King's Lounge, is the descendant of the Busy Bee, the last true burlesque house in Texas, where a stripper whose name I've forgotten was still working with a giant anaconda as late as 1982, and another was famous for those whirlybird thingies on her nipples that she could rotate in OPPOSITE directions. I can only hope someone has it on videotape, for proper preservation in the Smithsonian Institution.)

Yes, Dallas is still the capital of exotic dancing, but just barely. Of course, they don't even call it exotic dancing anymore. "Exotic" was a Bourbon Street word, something invented to replace "burlesque artist," which in turn replaced "stripper." They're not strippers or exotic dancers or ecdysiasts anymore-- they're just dancers, and they work in a place called a gentleman's club. The purveyors of nekkid booty manipulation have always sought euphemisms for their business, trying to scrape the sleaze off the nature of the beast, but in Dallas, as nowhere else in the world, the experiment actually worked. The gentleman's club was born here. The Million Dollar Saloon, the first "gentleman's club" in the world, wasn't much by today's standards, but the fact that it had a dress code, a deejay, multiple stages, a "VIP room" (it cost $3 to be a VIP), and other amenities, created something new in the world of erotic dancing. (Some will claim that Rick's Cabaret in Houston was the first gentleman's club, but the Million Dollar invented the MARKETING CONCEPT, not just the bells and whistles.) The Million Dollar had another advantage as well: you could walk in there without feeling like you had a bull's-eye painted on your forehead. (Speaking of foreheads, I once spent an exhilarating evening with three professional wrestlers who amused the dancers by headbutting each other whenever they thought the girl was especially fetching. The pro rasslers wore ties, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, I said TIES.)

"People didn't know what 'gentleman's club' meant," says Steve Craft, a droll good-natured fellow who runs 17 topless clubs for Duncan Burch's Burch Management Company. "They would say, 'Is it a gay club?' We were just beginning to educate them."

I met Steve Craft on a recent twilit morning in the calm of a conference room at Cabaret Royale, which ten years ago was the most famous gentleman's club in the world, and still probably ranks in the top ten. (To give you some idea of what Cabaret was like in its heyday, there were dancers based as far away as London who would routinely fly to Dallas on Thursday afternoon to work three nights at Cabaret before flying home. Those days are all but gone, thanks to copycat clubs in Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York and, yes, even London, but there are still girls from Miami and New York who surf in regularly.) Seated at the table this morning were three owners and managers representing 41 topless bars, including Nick Mehmeti, a suave Greek with a sort of Old World charm reminiscent of the German actor Curt Jurgens in "And God Created Woman"; Steve Craft, whose bookish countenance can suddenly become animated as he reels off an amazing array of detailed legal and statistical information; and an owner who wants to remain anonymous but who would be recognized by anyone in the business. Elsewhere in the country these guys would be regarded as visionaries, similar to casino executives like Steve Wynn who cleaned up Las Vegas and turned it into a safe, well- run, Wall Street-acceptable business. Their designs and management techniques have been copied in clubs as far away as Moscow and Buenos Aires. Some of their clubs are now publicly traded.

In Dallas, however, they're regarded as public enemies number one through three. The fourth ace on Laura Miller's hit list would be Duncan Burch himself, but he's not around this morning. These guys have been through the wars, the targets of every legal brickbat the city could throw at them for the past 18 years. They thought that was all over a few months ago when they agreed to everything the city said it wanted, but now they're gathering their armies of lawyers for yet another round with the Morality Corps. The city pulled a bait-and-switch on them, told them for two decades that all they wanted was for them to move away from churches, schools and residences. When they had all done it, they got zapped again. Now we don't like what goes on INSIDE your club, the city was saying.

"Do you know how much this is going to cost the city?" said Craft, referring to the upcoming titanic legal battle over the "six-foot rule."

"We don't have any choice," said Nick Mehmeti. "We have to either fight or just close up. But the city doesn't have to do that. We've tried meeting with them. We've even offered to buy clubs and shut them down, so that the city will have less of them. Nothing works."

What's going on here, circa A.D. 2003, in the city of gilded lilies? First we get the smoking ordinance, one of the most anti- business measures passed in years, something that you might expect in Aspen, or Berkeley, or Madison . . . but Dallas? (The city of Austin, truer to its "live and let live" Texas roots, recently repealed its smoking ordinance, returning to the common- sense rules of the early nineties which said, "Keep em separate but let em smoke.") Then there's the ongoing attack on after- hours clubs in Deep Ellum. (Said one councilman, "I just can't imagine a reason anyone would need to be out after 2 a.m." Shades of "Footloose"?) And now there's the six-foot rule, requiring topless dancers to remain isolated from their customers, making the lapdance obsolete--hell, making the table dance obsolete--and threatening to return the industry to the standards of Jack Ruby, circa 1962. For some reason the topless bars have become the focus of everything that's considered depraved about the city, even though it's a perfectly legal business, while escort services--which provide actual sex with virtual impunity--are not even on the political radar.

"When I bought PT's in 1983," says Nick Mehmeti, referring to the White Rock Lake club that for years was the primary locals joint and a staple of breathy late-night TV commercials, "it was a biker bar. That's who went to these clubs. Two thousand square feet and a jukebox. Low ceilings. Cheap furniture. The dancers would select their music and feed quarters to the jukebox. We were just then starting to use deejays--that was an innovation! Slowly we added amenities. Lunch buffets. Facilities upgrades. And the clientele slowly started to change."

Today, much to the horror of the mayor and the morality legions, a gentleman's club is considered suitable for a business meeting, and the "average customer" (they have demographic profiles) is most likely wearing a jacket, if not a tie. A customer in biker attire would be denied admission to any upscale club in Dallas, including PT's. (Not that our Harley-riding friends couldn't find entertainment. They'd be more than welcome at Lipstick on Harry Hines or the King's Cabaret on Industrial Boule . . . whoops! excuse me . . . Market Center Boulevard, or the dank smoky Club Dallas on Northwest Highway, a sort of antediluvian holdover from the era of scuzz. In the Metroplex there are topless bars and dance halls for every demographic group, including an all-Hispanic gentleman's club in Arlington called Chicas Locas that was the first of its kind and is so lucrative that it's now being copied in other cities. "There was always a taboo against Mexican girls working in these clubs," says Steve Swander, a Fort Worth attorney who frequently represents them, "because of the Catholic influence, but apparently that's not true with a younger generation. East Dallas is full of old-style taxi-dancer places as well--basically girls who dance with lonely guys from Mexico who miss their families and their hometowns." Of the top 25 topless bars in Texas, ranked by alcohol receipts, 13 are in the Metroplex.)

Sometime in the future, when a pop-culture historian turns his attention to erotic dancing, it will go something like this:

1880: Taxi-dancing invented in the Bowery of New York and exported to the rest of the country.

1900: Burlesque, an offshoot of vaudeville, is exported from New York.

1950: Bourbon Street in New Orleans becomes the prototype for "combat zone" topless-dance districts in major American cities, including Commerce Street in Dallas, where Abe Weinstein's Colony Club flourishes.

1960: With burlesque all but dead, the business is turned over to wise guys and flim flam men like Jack Ruby, whose Carousel Club at Lemmon and Oak Lawn exudes the kind of vaguely dangerous sleaze, always coupled with drug use and gunplay, that would dominate the business for the next twenty years.

1980: Dallas invents the modern gentleman's club and exports it worldwide.

2003: Moralist zealots reminiscent of Anthony Comstock a hundred years earlier declare war and vow a scorched-earth policy, not resting until nude dancing is wiped off the planet.

Originally I was going to list here all the legal arguments and counter-arguments made for and against topless dancing over the past thirty years--I've read the cases, done the homework-- but the fact is, concentrating on why and how the clubs have had to defend themselves is beside the point. The legal reasons are always changing, but the goal remains the same. There's a consistent pattern of lying and subterfuge and legal fictions practiced by a host of Dallas office holders and bureaucrats that add up to one conclusion: they've always been trying to drive these men out of business.

They've never actually SAID they want to drive them out of business. That would have made for an interesting debate on morality, individual freedom and all the other ACLU-type issues that these cases should turn on. Instead, they've said that the operators are entitled to run their businesses without interference so long as they're not close to a school or a church or a residence. Of course, once the clubs found locations that complied, the city added other things they didn't want them to be close to--a hospital, a historic district (!), and even another topless club. The justification for these laws is always horse- hockey. I have yet to find a civic official--and I've been writing on this topic for two decades--who can point to an actual crime that occurred because a topless bar was too close to any of these places. In Canada, in fact, the topless bars can be located almost anywhere, and the expected social chaos has failed to occur. The legal record is there for anyone to examine, and the amazing thing about it is that: city officials always lie about their intentions, and topless bar owners almost always tell the truth. They've asked repeatedly for a coherent and permanent set of rules--so they can OBEY THE RULES. They've repeatedly sought private meetings with city officials so that they could institute MORE than is required by law, so they can run their businesses in peace without running up millions in legal bills every year. They've been better citizens than the elected officials.

What's more illuminating than the legal fictions, I think, is the way they've been treated by the press. Whenever this subject is discussed in Dallas, the writer takes one of three tacks:

1) "Well, I personally wouldn't go into those places, but I will defend their right to exist." (This is the "We can tolerate a little sleaze for the sake of free speech" argument.) If you wouldn't go into those places, then shut up. I personally would go into those places. Thousands of Dallasites would go into these places. The fact that they've thrived in spite of constant attempts to suppress them indicates that the market has spoken and the market wants them.

2) "They're bad for the image of Dallas." It would be more accurate to say that Dallas--suffering its second serious recession in 15 years--is always struggling for an image, and the topless bars are one of the few things the city is known for nationwide. For most of the nineties the bars made 60 percent of their income from conventioneers, and there was a direct connection between the quality of the clubs and the decisions of convention organizers. "New Orleans? Bourbon Street is nasty. Las Vegas? The clubs there are sinister. Hey, what about Dallas? They've got the nightlife, and it's SAFE."

Las Vegas eventually recognized that it was losing business to Dallas, and over the past three years there's been a boom in gentleman's clubs there. Several of the major casinos have come to the Dallas club operators for consulting on the feasibility of placing clubs inside the casinos, because too many gamblers are being lost to the outsized topless palaces located off the strip. Atlanta copied Dallas, on a much smaller scale, and developed a reputation for safe gentleman's clubs, with a boom in convention business as a result. New Orleans, on the other hand, has yet to learn its lesson. Bourbon Street is still nasty. And the rest of the country is still in the dark ages.

3) "A topless bar is a magnet for crime. It's not the nude dancing, it's what happens before and after."

This is the argument, in fact, that's been used to justify almost every anti-strip-club ordinance for the past 30 years-- that the places are hotbeds of prostitution, drug sales and gunplay. In fact, there's no study that bears this out--it seems to be rather some kind of ingrained assumptive attitude among law enforcement types.

First of all, if somebody wants a hooker, what he does is . . . call up a hooker! Picked up the Dallas Observer lately? They're NOT hard to find.

Secondly, anyone who has been to a topless bar in Dallas knows that every parking lot around these places is illuminated like Texas Stadium. At 2 a.m. you can literally read a book in any place in a gentleman's club parking lot. There couldn't be a WORSE place to contemplate any crime.

Third, a dancer who leaves the club with a customer is subject to instant termination--even if she leaves with her boyfriend.

And finally, the hiring of dancers has become a finely honed process specifically designed to get rid of drug users--or "coke whores," as the insiders daintily put it.

"The dancer they want today," said Steve Swander, "is, number one, a single mom. The single moms are the best employees. They never get in trouble. And number two, college students. They rarely get in trouble. The third category, the type of girl who's trying to get something out of the customer--that's exactly the kind they fire and weed out. Twenty years ago you didn't have this advantage. The single moms and the college girls didn't work at these places. Today they're our chief protection against violations."

The whole "topless bar as a hotbed of crime" argument could be dealt with easily. The topless bar owners have offered to pay top price to City of Dallas off-duty cops to provide 24-hour security both inside and outside the club. This would be the easiest way to make sure nothing happens, to make sure everybody gets arrested if it does happen, and it costs the city nothing. Instead the city has a policy FORBIDDING officers from working at sexually-oriented businesses in their off hours.

When Dallas passed its first comprehensive zoning ordinance for SOBs in 1986, the targets were Greenville Avenue and Bachman Lake. Greenville Avenue was still winding down from the post- disco era, when clubs like Confetti's and Packard's and Cafe Dallas and elan all thrived there, and the idea was that topless bars were driving out the upscale businesses. The same argument was made by Bachman Lake supporters, who argued that a once vibrant restaurant and shopping area was being ruined by Baby Doll's, Caligula XXI and The Fare, not to mention the massage parlors on Harry Hines and the world famous Geno's Topless. (Okay, it wasn't world famous, but it was a Dallas institution.)

What was really happening is that Greenville Avenue was declining because it was glutted with cheap aging "singles" apartments that couldn't compete with better places north of LBJ. When the yuppies moved north, the restaurants and bars went with them. The Bachman Lake area had always thrived off of Love Field, and when all the airlines moved to the new DFW Airport in the early seventies, a slow decline set in as the restaurants and trendy clubs (remember Bob Lilly's place? Craig Morton's bar? Kosta's Greek restaurant?) had no more flight attendants and airline employees and transit hotels to feed off of. The one large-scale effort to revitalize the area--the European Crossroads shopping center--was such a colossal failure that it became a symbol of foolhardiness. The topless bars didn't move into the Bachman area until it was already a carcass, and once there, they improved the economy of the place, not to mention the safety. Crime is up since they left earlier this year, and the whole area now looks like a slum. Even the gas stations are going out of business. "It's a ghost town with those topless bars gone," says Mary McKnight, owner of the Cottage Lounge, a neighborhood bar which is fighting its own battle with the city as a "non-complying business" under the new Communist Morals Crusade that allows them to issue citations to businesses that have been there for four decades. "We've had more breakins since they've been gone than in years and years. They even broke into my car and stole my school bag." (Mary is a fifth-grade math teacher, just the kind of undesireable we should be leaning on.)

The concept that no one can seem to wrap their minds around is that topless bars, especially the upscale ones, just might be good for the city. At the very least they're inocuous. Judging by the names and alliances of the attackers, the war against dancing is part and parcel of the whole paranoid conservative backlash of the past few years, based on the idea that the country went to hell in the sixties and must be forcibly hoisted out of its decadence. In 1999 social historian Gertrude Himmelfarb argued that America has become "One Nation, Two Cultures"--and nowhere is that better illustrated than here. One culture is religious, family-oriented, conservative and white. The other culture is tolerant, secular, mostly single and multicultural. The hardcore members of each culture represent only 20 percent of the population--10 percent on the religious side, 10 percent on the "anything goes" side. The 80 percent in the middle believe in "live and let live." If there weren't pressure groups, the topless bars, and the smoking sections, and the after-hours clubs, would simply co-exist with the American Legion halls, and the non-smoking restaurants, and the supervised cotillions. Instead we've got a group of divisive flame throwers who make up the rules as they go along.

"There's no doubt it's a cultural war," says Steve Swander. "The city is basically trying to eliminate them. Interestingly, it doesn't break down on liberal/conservative lines, though. The women's movement, for example, is divided on it. Half think it's horrible. Half think it's economic freedom for women. It's actually an ALTERNATIVE to prostitution. This business is just selling a fantasy. Make the dancing illegal and some of these girls might just try prostitution."

But if it truly is a cultural war, why is it being decided in back rooms with all kinds of ex parte conversations? If the outraged moralists really want to bring it down, why not openly list the reasons it's bad for the city and debate it on its merits? I can think of arguments they MIGHT make--that it's dehumanizing to women, that it's anti-family, that it's a breach of community standards.

Why don't they make any of these arguments in court?

Because they're all losers.

It's difficult to prove the dehumanization of women if you have an army of single moms and single girls putting themselves through college, all trooping forward to say it's their preferred livelihood.

It's difficult to say it's anti-family when you have family men spending their Sunday afternoons there watching the Cowboys game.

And it's difficult to make the community standards argument when the community has made these places among the most lucrative liquor establishments in the nation. The numbers don't lie.

The fact is that Dallas, even in the year 2003, does NOT subscribe to the agenda of the Goody Two Shoes zealots, despite their claim to represent the aggregate community. The average guy in a topless club is the same guy with season tickets to the Mavericks and Cowboys games--hence the profusion of big-screen TVs turned to sports channels in all the clubs. The average guy in a topless club does NOT want a prostitute. He wants a spectacle. (A stripper at the Platinum club, not one of the best looking girls in the business, told me she moved from Tampa to Dallas because the guys here talk more and grope less. They're basically looking for a party, not a sexual encounter.)

Since all these arguments are legal non-starters, the opponents of sexually-oriented businesses are thrown back on the shaky premise of "secondary effects." And just like "secondhand smoke," the unscientific chimera that all smoking bans are based on, the secondary-effects case has yet to be proven. There hasn't been a single study that shows SOB's to be surrounded by any more crime than any other late-night establishment serving alcohol. (There have been many studies, but they all amount to polling, not scientific data.) Moreover, there's evidence that non-sexual dancehalls, like Cowboys, have a much higher incidence of brawling, drunkenness and quality-of-life offenses like noise. (There IS no noise outside a topless bar.) The false premise of SOB regulation goes back to a 1962 ordinance in Detroit that was intended to get rid of "skid rows." Eventually that city decided that adult movie theaters were a big part of the problem, so they zoned them away from churches, schools, residences and each other in an attempt to isolate them and cut down on the sidewalk shenanigans. Most cities copied this ordinance after it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1976--but today the original premise makes no sense. Far from engendering skid rows, the upscale topless clubs thrive in strip shopping centers, industrial-district hideaways and, in the case of The Lodge, a little cluster next to Sam's Wholesale and Mercado Juarez. It doesn't seem to hurt either business.

The "secondary effects" argument for the ban on lapdancing is even more specious. Supposedly a ban on lapdancing will cut down on "drug transfers" (how do you hide drugs when you're naked?), prostitution (in a room full of hundreds of people and numerous security guards?), and "touch violations." (The city already has a no-touch ordinance, and this is their way of enforcing it. It would save the embarrassment of undercover cops constantly testifying that they spent three hours and hundreds of city dollars getting lapdances, and then--OH MY GOD, I WAS SHOCKED--a dancer put her hands where they shouldn't have been. Juries have been laughing these cases out of court.)

The case that sums up what's going on here is revealed in the short troubled history of Baby Doll's, a unique institution that opened in an all but derelict Bachman Lake shopping center in the early eighties and quickly became one of the most popular clubs in the country. Baby Doll's was not the prettiest or most lavish club, but it was the Billy Bob's of topless: larger, rowdier, with dozens of girls on the floor at all times, most of them hometown Texas babes instead of the exotic Swedish model types you might find at Cabaret Royale. When the SOB ordinance was passed in 1986, the existing clubs were given three years to comply with the new regulations and then they had to move. (This in itself is a strange stipulation. Normally, if a new zoning ordinance is passed, existing businesses are grandfathered.) The only way you could avoid moving is to argue once a year before the authorities that you would lose your investment if forced to move--and, in fact, many of the clubs won this argument from year to year, seeking annual exemptions, many of which will extend into 2004, when all of them expire in accordance with the final settlement with the city.

Baby Doll's didn't like the uncertainty of the exemption process, though, so they decided they would just stay where they were and cease being a sexually-oriented business. They ordered the dancers to cover up, bringing back the era of "pasties," rarely seen since the heyday of Candy Barr. Once Baby Doll's became a bikini bar, it technically became a dancehall, not an SOB, and so the issue should have been over--but apparently this didn't satisfy the city. There ensued a series of arguments about the precise definition of nudity and the actual FORM a pastie could take.

The first Baby Doll's pastie was clear Latex. The city called that "simulated nudity" and ruled it illegal. Then Baby Doll's put food coloring in the Latex, but still non-opaque. The city wasn't satisfied. There were arguments about the percentage of the breast exposed--difficult to enforce, since you can see greater percentages in a Victoria's Secret ad. There was, in fact, a more or less constant amendment of the definition of the word "topless" from 1989 to 2003, when Baby Doll's, seeking peace, moved to its new legal location in a warehouse district a few blocks away.

When the new Baby Doll's was built, the question for the owners was, "Do we maintain the redneck aura of the old low- ceilinged facility, or do we make it into another upscale club?" What they did is compromise, with blond woods and Texas themes and more bright lighting than you would have in a place like, say, the Penthouse Key Club, but with no cover charge and beers at the cowboy level. It's huge, it has all the amenities, but it still feels more accessible than the coat-and-tie places. "Baby Doll's is a strange animal," says Steve Craft. "You really can't compare it to any other club. It's both upscale and downscale. It's just . . . Baby Doll's."

The real question we should be asking is: Who are the hooter-haters trying to protect? The dancer? The six-foot rule would put her out of business. The customer? I doubt that anyone really buys the argument that the customer needs to be shielded from a drug transaction. The public? Where are the crimes? Aside from violations of the "touch ordinance," many of which get thrown out of court or successfully defended, there's a lot less crime at these places than your typical Texas beer tavern or roadhouse.

During the February 2000 Bachman Initiative, which went after clubs for violations of the touch and drink-solicitation ordinances, Chief Bolton sent 27 armed officers in ski masks to arrest almost everyone in Baby Doll's. No one was allowed to leave as they checked every ID and ran them for warrants.

No convictions.

No drug dealers.

No prostitutes.

Just a lot of scared cowboys trying to call their wives and say they'd be home REAL late.

Is this really what Dallas is all about? I don't think so.

The claim has been made lately that the advertising for the topless bars, especially their billboards, is itself offensive to community standards. But if you check into any hotel, you'll find two publications for visitors--the "Dallas!" official visitors guide, and the "After Hours" adult entertainment guide (because the other guides often won't accept topless bar advertising). On the back of "After Hours" is the standard ad for The Men's Club-- the face of a pretty dark-haired girl with bare shoulders. No use of the word "topless." No use of the word "girl." The only words that MIGHT be occasionally used in Men's Club advertising are "Free Lunch Buffet." On the back cover of "Dallas!," on the other hand, is a picture of a sultry blonde from the bust up with a plunging neckline and a come-hither frankly sexual expression. It's an add for Northpark Mall.

Somebody needs to stand up to this pack of wild dogs. They're making us all look like small-town idiots.