You may remember, earlier this week, Dan Savage asked Mercury readers for advice in answering a reader question about choosing an ethical strip club. My wife hates this shit. I mean, she really went ballistic in the comments. And I think I tend to agree with her. But here’s the question:

I have heard that women who have been trafficked are sometimes forced to dance in clubs to drum up business for the prostitution side of the operation and neither my boyfriend or I would want to patronize clubs where the women are badly treated. My question is then, how can you tell from the outside that a strip club is an OK place for the women on the inside?

Well, thankfully, Portland Vice Officer Laura Wiley returned my call this morning, and had this to say:

“A lot of times it’s not the strip club itself that’s making money off the girls, although if you go to a so-called lingerie club, then it is. But the problem is that a lot of the girls in strip clubs have pimps. There’s guys in there, obviously watching their girls to make sure they’re making money, but at the same time, having the minimal amount of contact necessary. A lot of the strip clubs have policies against that but there is no way of enforcing that arrangement.”

Wiley suggests punters use their intuition to decide whether a strip club is on the level, but adds:

”It’s illegal versus legal, but any person that is going to give money to this kind of establishment is contributing to the exploitation of women. And it leads to other things.”

Other things like meat-eating? My god. To think, I’d be inadvertently contributing to the exploitation of animals, too? Cripes. Thanks, Officer Wiley. I appreciate your perspective.