One Voice in the Gutter
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
So what do you do when you’re the only well-known New York weekly still taking ads for “Asians Gone Wild,” “Young and Pretty Chinese Girls,” and “Beautiful Latin Ladies Ready for you!”
You come out swinging and pretend you’re the ones fighting the good fight.
“For more than 50 years, The Village Voice has been a haven for the people of this city who crave free speech,” a press release issued by the weekly last night reads.
Like free speech is what the folks calling “Asian Lips” are craving. Gotcha.
The Voice crafted this statement when it found itself suddenly alone in the gutter, after both New York magazine and the New York Press swore off escort service ads. New York’s pledge of abstinence, which came on Tuesday, must have taken the Voice by surprise. Just a few months ago, New York was insisting: “If ever the authorities bring us any evidence at all that illegal activity is behind any of the services or businesses advertised in our magazine, those advertisers will no longer be welcome.” That’s what spokeswoman Serena Torrey said back in June.
When the National Organization for Women scheduled a protest outside the magazine that would have been held today, though, the scales fell from some higher-ups’ eyes.
“We’re pleased to finally be able to do this,” Ms. Torrey said yesterday. “It’s the right thing to do.” Well, better late than never — and I don’t just mean that snarkily. New York is a real icon in the publishing world. “They weren’t taking many hits for running these ads,” an Advertising Age media reporter, Nat Ives, said. So to admit, publicly, that they had been doing something slimy sends a message to all the other publications still swimming in the muck.
That muck is particularly thick because it involves not just selling sex, but selling sexual slaves — the victims of human trafficking — which is why NOW decided to start protesting the ads.
“Trafficking exists because there aren’t enough women to do this assembly line brothel work,” the president of NOW’s New York City chapter, Sonia Ossorio, said. While no one knows exactly how many women are prostituted against their will, it is indisputable that some come to New York with promises of legitimate jobs only to find these don’t exist and there’s only one way to pay off their debts.
One would think that this would be exactly the kind of exploitation the Voice would revel in exposing. But because the Voice is free, it apparently needs the revenue brought in by, this week, 10 pages of these ads.
And so its press release yammers on about how our freedoms are “under attack by the Bush administration,” and makes NOW sound like the Taliban, and finally trots out the same pathetic excuse New York once made: “If there is evidence that any advertiser in our pages engaged in … sex slavery. …” Blah blah blah.
It’s hard to be part of the solution, when you’re part of the problem.
lskenazy@yahoo.com