"Stripper" is the styling-of-choice for so many non-stripping ladies these days. So what's the difference between an actual pole-dancer and, say, classily "branding" yourself as a young, sex-positive lass? (Heck, even the housewives of New Jersey have stripper-pole workout sessions in their own homes.) Can anybody tell the different between a strip club and the basement of Happy Ending on Tuesday nights anymore? This weekend, I went deep into Brooklyn to a neighborhood strip bar to find out if it felt just like the playgrounds of Manhattan. It didn't!

Whenever two adults in New York exchange sex for money, each commits a Class B misdemeanor. So one might think it would be difficult to procure a sex worker. It takes about three minutes. The website of one local spot is your basic HTML slapdash job. It says that "they" would like to be with you very much and uses lots of exclamation points. There's a gallery of women, young and mostly blond and carelessly dressed. Most of the women look like they could be in The Bangles, a bit more on the side of Debbi Peterson than Susanna Hoffs.

Exhibit 23 for our prosecution's theory that there's a rise of dirty in New York City: Last night's screening of "Caligula" on the site of one of the city's oldest gay sex clubs. The inaugural weekly Sunday salon series, hosted by Daniel Nardicio, had more than just the flick giving it filthy cred. Nude life-drawing of porn star and escort Dimitri Santiago [NSFW!], booths available for the sex, and a crowd that included Shortbus' P J Deboy did their part. Daniel and some of the event's other guests took some time in the bathroom with me and videoboy Alex Goldberg to assess the ups and downs of the last 20 years of sleeeeze.