'Our business is men, and men are not toxic': Colorado strip club sign raises ire

Article here. Excerpt:

'Deborah Dunafon knew that a big sign outside her strip club that read “Toxic Masculinity Welcome Here” could land her in trouble. But she thought it needed to be said on behalf of her clientele and men everywhere, who she says have been given a bad rap in the news lately.

“I think it’s horrible to accuse men of being toxic, because they’re not,” said Dunafon, owner of the 35-year-old Shotgun Willie’s strip club, which is also a marijuana dispensary, in Glendale, Colorado. “Our business is men, and men are not toxic.

“How many men are we gonna pick on until finally there’s no men standing? How would you like a society with men meekly running around with little bonnets on their head?”

Shotgun Willie’s is located in Glendale (whose mayor is Dunafon’s husband, Mike), a hamlet surrounded on all sides by Denver – the city where a coffee shop recently found itself in hot water over a sandwich board sign that read: “Happily Gentrifying the Neighborhood since 2014.”
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A photo of the sign was taken by Bonnie AD, a Denver activist for “conscious sexuality”, who posted the image on her Instagram account, @eroticselflove. It duly made the rounds on social media.

“I had a visceral reaction of disgust when I saw the sign, because toxic masculinity is not a joke,” AD said. “I wanted to share the image because I think that community accountability is vital for social change. Largely, the response on social media has been one of disgust.

“This message is approving of toxic masculinity, which is socially irresponsible and culturally poisonous. Anyone on the feminine spectrum, especially sex workers, already have to deal with the covert problems of toxic masculinity and rape culture, so when an establishment publicly makes this kind of commentary, they are adding unnecessary weight to an issue that is already a burden, and a danger, to many people.”
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Deborah Dunafon resented the idea that any of her dancers were exploited in the course of their work, and said her entire team stood behind the statement about “male toxicity”.

“We believe that men in society today are totally being picked on,” she said. “Shotgun has a lot of different guys come in – blue-collar guys, white-collar guys –and I’d say 98.99% of them are good guys. And they don’t want to be accused of being monsters, because really they’re not. They come in for fun.

“Every once in a while one of them is unruly and we kick them out, but the entertainers are in total control of them.”'

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I've been to Shotgun Willie's but not recently, so I haven't seen the sign.

At least this business knows which side its bread is buttered on.

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The owner is a woman who is often in the company of men for long periods and has learned what so many in the company of men for long periods learn: unless said men are psychopaths, and the vast bulk of men are not, it turns out men make pretty durned boon companions and are rather a lot of fun to be around. She knows this from experience and then sees the misandrist nastiness coming from certain women who spend very little time in the company of men themselves and spew their vitriol all over the media. So she is doing what anyone who sees large-scale bullshit is inclined to do when she is in a position to contradict it: she does. In this case, she simply lit up her club sign a certain way, to form letters that *gasp* contradict the sputtering foolishness being vented forth these days from formerly-respectable MSM outlets.

Good for her.

But I do agree, heck, it can't hurt business.

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