FOOTBALL GURU GREGG
EASTERBROOK AND DRIVE BY JOURNALISM

"Any kid can chatter — few can inform"

— The Who in the song, "It's Hard" (1982)

Response to Gregg Easterbrook's remarks about the Houston Topless Dancer Survey:

At the time of Easterbrook's comments, the "topless dancer" section of this web site was not the elaborate suite of material that you see now. It was only an old research paper with a brief introduction.

I originally put the topless dancer material on line in 1998 along with a number of other articles and academic papers. I never expected to receive much reaction to the survey.

As it has turned out, the paper has drawn a fair amount of attention -- often of the kind I could do without. That can range from young punks looking for anything about topless dancers to a neo-con editor of a prestigious publication.

A while back, I discovered that the survey is mentioned on Slate, the politics and criticism site run by Microsoft. It is sardonically quoted on a web column by football guru and all-purpose critic Gregg Easterbrook.

I pay little attention to professional sports, so the last place I expect to find my name is in a sports column. It seems that Easterbrook will make sport of anything at all, and he invites readers to provide names for an Easterbrook potshot. The process results in this kind of drive-by journalism:

Last Week's Challenge … was to name the first recipient of the Hal Rothman Award for devising serious-sounding reasons to leer at cheesecake (or beefcake, should that be your preference). Last week's column created this award in honor of Rothman, an historian who studies naked showgirls in Las Vegas.

Reader Matt Pierce suggested one Grady McAllister, whose sociological study of Houston's topless clubs begins with the admonition, "In spite of the subject matter, this is not the most exciting material I ever wrote." McAllister's research delved into whether topless dancers believed government should regulate their profession. After four years of observing and interviewing topless dancers, McAllister concluded that they opposed regulation because it would reduce their income. Also, he recommended further study.

Easterbrook implies more than he writes and writes more than he knows. His comments about the motivation, methodology, and circumstances for the material are so far from the reality that it is hard for me to justify the time which a proper rebuttal requires. I've learned over the years that it usually takes many more words to refute a cheesy barb than it takes for someone to make one.

It will suffice to make the following points:

• The paper is not a sociological study. There is nothing in it to indicate that it is. It is a study of occupational issues, and I have since received a master's degree in Occupational Technology. My master's program had more in common with one in business or in education than one in sociology. (I have only had three courses in sociology, and they were all taken a few decades ago.)
  
  
• Easterbrook glibly infers that the survey was a long term study. Anyone actually reading this paper would know it was conducted during a few weeks in 1997 and was completed at that time. It was not a four year project. The survey material is virtually unchanged from the time it was presented over a decade ago.
  
  
• Easterbrook's remarks about the research methods (extensive "interviewing" and "observing") are also way off the mark. The research involved nothing more than getting a one-page questionnaire completed. In any event, you don't -- as Easterbrook implies -- need a research project as an excuse to meet dancers in Houston. They tend to be more impressed by money.
  
  By the way, on two different occasions, female students have contacted me to express an interest in this topic. Were they looking for an excuse to go "leer" at other females? I seriously doubt it.
  
  
• My choice of subject mater was purely pragmatic: I had originally planned to do a survey on the much safer subject of time management. That would have augmented my prior research on that subject. However, I saw a great deal of difficulty in persuading corporate types (who would be hiding behind secretaries, security guards, and voice mail) to return survey forms.
  
  Corporate executives are not very accessible; topless dancers are. No appointment required. Moreover, the dancers had an immediate vested interest in completing their forms and having their voices heard.
  
  
• The recommendation for additional study commonly appears at the end of all sorts of formal research papers, including the medical research that makes the news every day. The idea is to discourage people from making generalizations based on a small study. You would think that Easterbrook, who is a Senior Editor at the New Republic, would have seen that sort of thing before.
  
  Note how Easterbrook tries to make the idea look ridiculous by paraphrasing it in italics. The fact is that I never even considered conducting another survey myself. Who would pay me for the time? My paper had the limited purpose of filling a requirement for a course that is now a distant memory.

What we are really looking at here is someone with a forum on a big Microsoft-backed web site taking a cheap shot at a personal web site. It's hard to believe that Easterbrook read my article beyond the most facile level.

Looking at some biographical material on Easterbrook, it strikes me that he is a writer who is into a lot of bags at once: sports, trivial news items, the environment, general science, economics, movie reviews, politics, sociology. He has a blog diary to record his deep thoughts on the New Republic web site. He is even a novelist.

With his talents, such as they are, spread so thin, it must be tempting to get slack on the facts while playing Quick Draw McGraw against a mere personal web page. The once over lightly treatment is just what you would expect from such a wholesale wordsmith.

Publisher's Weekly has this to say about one of Easterbrook's books: "Sarcastic patter and a flair for catch phrases . . . barely disguise a padded thesis . . ."

No surprise here.

Additional note: After the above item was first posted, I learned about an unrelated incident which led to Easterbrook's temporary firing at ESPN. Easterbrook explains it at the New Republic web site. Also see Gregg Easterbrook and the Perils of Writing Before You Think. It is one instance in which Easterbrook's glib writing caught up with him in a big way.

Return to the Houston Topless Dancer Survey.