Free America, You Sexy Bitch by Michael Black Meghan McCain Page A

goddamned chipper it creeps me out. Meghan looks creeped out too.
    “I could never work here,” she whispers to me at one point.
    “I don’t think I could even breathe here,” I say.
    And it’s true. Everybody seems passionate and happy, but the whole thing feels too hunky-dory to be real. Can anybody survive this amount of enforced cheeriness? I know I could not. But Zappos is not for everybody, and our smiley tour leader tells us that they accept one employee for every thirty applicants. Everyone has to fill out personality tests and undergo a rigorous interview process. Then, after a couple of weeks at work, the new recruit is offered two thousand dollars to leave. Very few of the Zappoistas take the money. After all, they have no-pay lunch, assorted free vending machines, the kind of health care only Congress has, and the encouragement from above to make sure that everyone plays as hard after hours as they do during them.
    “How do you know if somebody is a good fit?” Meghan asks our tour leader.
    “You just know,” he says, and I don’t doubt it. He’s got the glow of a true believer about him. The whole thing has a fevered Scientology vibe to it, and I’m happy when it’s finally time to go. If Zappos were a child instead of a company, I’d prescribe some serious Adderall.
     
    Meghan: Although I consider myself a Las Vegas veteran, coming to this city with the anthropological intention of figuring out exactly what role Las Vegas currently is playing in American culture still felt like a daunting task, and I thought I needed to call in a little backup. My friend Paul Carr is a British writer and journalist who notoriously lives only in hotels and has written several books about his nomadic and unconventional lifestyle. He has just spent a month living on the Strip in Las Vegas and stayed at every single hotel on the Strip while blogging about the experience for the Huffington Post . I asked Paul for advice on where Michael and I should go to experience the “real” Las Vegas and to make sure there was
nothing we could possibly miss during our stay. He gave me a list of recommendations and asked if I wanted to meet some exotic dancers, then signed off our email exchange: “Viva, etc.”
    Strippers. Strippers. Strippers. What is a proper trip to Vegas without strippers? Or excuse me, exotic dancers. Well, actually I have had many trips to Vegas that did not include the presence of strippers or a trip to a strip club. Michael told me early on that he has never been a huge fan of strippers and maybe only been to a strip club once or twice. He described his forays as “uncomfortable” and “inorganic.”
    A trip to a gentleman’s club with Michael and Stephie turns out to be something that sounded a lot better on paper than it does when we are actually getting ready to do it. Michael is happily married with two young children, and Stephie is getting married in the fall. She really doesn’t seem comfortable with the idea of going to a strip club, and I do not necessarily feel comfortable twisting her arm. Stephie is probably the sweetest, most innocent twenty-five-year-old I have ever met, and I am more than happy to not be responsible for anything that is going to corrupt her.
    The thing about exotic dancing is that I am incredibly conflicted about the industry. The feminist, empowered part of me finds the whole profession depressing, degrading, tragic even, and innately sad for the women who feel the need to resort to taking their clothes off for money in front of strange, and probably more often than not, perverted men. Any woman who elects to become a stripper will always in some fashion have a social stigma attached to her for the rest of her life.
    The other side of me personally knows women who work in the industry. Some of them claim to feel empowered by making the kind of money that the high-end customers shell out. Some of them treat their profession as an art form, and work hard on new