Once again we rely on X-Biz.com for the story.
LOS ANGELES — A movement to make porn films condom-only is sure to gain further traction on Wednesday as two groups plan to protest the Marriott hotel chain.
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation and Pink Cross Foundation claim Marriott acts as a “middleman” in selling condom-less porn productions because it makes millions from the pay-per-view lineup it offers in its hotel rooms.
The groups are planning a “Porn In” Wednesday night at the downtown Los Angeles Marriott. They also will announce a viral and print ad campaign for a hotel boycott.
They will protest in front of the Figueroa Street Marriott with banners and three-foot wide condoms. Later, a press conference will be held in a hotel room with streaming porn on the room’s flat screen.
Michael Weinstein, president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation, said that until he gets a commitment from Marriott officials to block condomless adult films to their hotel guests he will urge a public boycott of the entire Marriott chain, which pencils out to about 3,000.
“We want to highlight the brazen hypocrisy — the Mormon Marriott’s moral masquerade — of such a so-called family oriented hotel chain profiteering off adult films that endanger the lives of the performers acting in them,” Weinstein said.
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation has taken a stand after an adult performer tested positive for HIV several months ago.
The Los Angeles-based group filed suit against Los Angeles County public health officials, claiming they have not made any moves to require condom use on the porn set, and filed formal complaints against 16 adult entertainment companies with Cal-OSHA in order to push for mandatory condoms at the workplace.
Weinstein said that the viral online component of the ad campaign against Marriott will launch later this week, with the print ad campaign to follow next week in the Salt Lake City area.Now...one of the grandest ironies is that Marriot has been the target of boycotts for their policy of allowing adult films and videos to be shown in their rooms...but usually it is from the Religious Right who wants to ban them outright, not merely to engineer which particular kinds of films appear. And, if I remember right, most of the hotel chains that do allow porn movies or porn channels specifically limit them to the late-night cable channels like Spice and Adam and Eve and Hott Network....which for the most part tend towards the straighter, more couples-oriented genres which tend to include condoms anyway.
“[It’s] home to the Marriott founder’s Mormon religion,” he said. Weinstein was referring to deceased founder J. Willard Marriott, a lifelong Mormon.
But then again, one can never underestimate the gravitation force that a microphone has on such a media whore like Michael Weinstein.
If boycotts from far more politically powerful folk like Donald Wildmon's American Family Association and Morality in Media haven't worked in pushing Marriott towards banishing porn, then how in the hell does Weinstein think that his "pressure" will make any similar headway?? Is he that stupid to think that selective censorship is more feasible and will be more accepted by the swarms of consumers of hotel chains than a total ban??
And...even by the slightly less then slim-to-none chance that Weinstein's efforts succeed, that will certainly put about as much a dent into sales of condom-free porn as...well..a popgun would affect a nuke. I mean, what about all those Internet sites and all the porn produced outside of Utah,and all those other firms, Michael...surely they will succumb to your superior progessive wisdom, too??
Yeah, right.
Still, the notion that a corporate entity like Marriott Hotels could surrender to such nonsense is more than just a slight threat, and given how much the adult sexual media is under the rocks due to the recession, this is something that should be taken very seriously by we who favor freedom of choice and performer autonomy...and who think that performers, not bureaucrats or holier-than-thou activists, should decide for themselves how to protect themselves.
To make a further connection, Marriot Hotels was specifically named in the Tim Samuels' "Hardcore Profits" doc as a Christian-owned company making money from porn. There seems to be a very specific feedback loop between Weinstein/Lubben and Tim Samuels.
ReplyDeleteDon't leave Gail Dines out of the happy group. She's the one who hooked Samuels up with the OTT racist "Savage Negros Driven Wild by Western Porn" bullshit through the SPC's collaboration with the anti-porn NGO Groupe d'Action pour le Droit (GAD).
ReplyDeleteQuite the little party they're all having.
As for the Marriott protest, it's SOP for Weinstein. One of his own people confided to me that AHF's strategy was "fundraising through litigation."
Wonder how much AHF shook out of Pfizer to drop the suit against the company on the grounds that Viagra encourages irresponsible sexual behavior.
Utterly shameless would be too kind a phrase to describe this band of hucksters.
Don't leave Gail Dines out of the happy group. She's the one who hooked Samuels up with the OTT racist "Savage Negros Driven Wild by Western Porn" bullshit through the SPC's collaboration with the anti-porn NGO Groupe d'Action pour le Droit (GAD).
ReplyDeleteQuite the little party they're all having.
As for the Marriott protest, it's SOP for Weinstein. One of his own people confided to me that AHF's strategy was "fundraising through litigation."
Wonder how much AHF shook out of Pfizer to drop the suit against the company on the grounds that Viagra encourages irresponsible sexual behavior.
Utterly shameless would be too kind a phrase to describe this band of hucksters.
On another topic, it looks like Robert Jensen is giving a talk in the LA area again:
ReplyDeleteRobert Jensen will discuss his feminist critique of pornography
Thursday October 22 at 7 pm
Occidental College, Johnson Room 200
Eagle Rock
http://uprisingradio.org/home/?p=10503
Interestingly, the one site that has any news of this appearance posted it on the same day as the talk. One might get the impression he's trying to avoid confrontation with those he claims to speak for.
I'm shocked ... Shocked I say!
ReplyDeleteOMG....it just keeps getting more and more bizarre by the moment. Check out this blog entry over at LukeIsBack where Shelley Lubben gets called out on some of her recent attempts of apeing FOX News ambushery....this time towards VIVID.com guru Steve Hirsch over at this year's AdultCon convention:
ReplyDeleteLukeIsBack.com: Shelley Lubben Has Lost Her Mind & It's Captured On Video!
And pay special notice to the comment section, where Shelley attempts to personally respond to her critics...and actually challenges Nina, Ernest, Sharon Mitchell, and Larry Flynt to a debate on 24 hour notice!!
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ms. Glenn Beck.
Oh....and a bonus:..guess who she's attempting to latch her ministry on now?? Yup, that would be Chris Hedges, that great pwogwessive of the Nation Institute who's lates tome attacks porn as seperating sex from reality...and which includes a quote or two from Lubben herself. Of course, Lubben builds those quotes into a happy endorsement of Hedges's book (ignoring the ungodly liberal bias of the rest of his text...but we won't spoil her fun, will we???
For entertainment purposes only, here's the link to the page at Lubben's blog pimping Hedges:
ThePInkCross.org: Chris Hedges, Best Selling Author, Talks About Pink Cross!
Zealotry makes for strange alliances, ehh??
Anthony
The Chris Hedges thing would be funny, if it weren't another example of a disturbing trend.
ReplyDeleteA former liberal supporter of The First Amendment falls under ths sway of an anti-porn crackpot and suddenly sees that suppressing porn is more important than preserving constitutional government.
As I keep saying, that erosion of support from our only traditional mainstream allies is the ultimate political disaster in the making, and unless this industry starts to push back against the Shelley Lubbens and Bob Jensens and Melissa Farleys who have gotten the ears of these people, we're going to be facing the biggest battles in the history of porn since Miller v. California with no one in our corner but our lawyers.
That's very bad news.
Welcome Chris Hedges to the fraternity of the deeply gullible. Get off your ass and do some investigation of your own before you decide that some religious fanatic tent-show revivalist in it for the publicity and the bucks is actually telling you some important truth.
I think Chris Hedges had already lost it with last year's I Don't Believe in Atheists, a "leftist" attack on non-belief. Similarly, Robert Jensen's language has been getting progressively more religious over the last couple years.
ReplyDeleteThere seem to be an unfortunate subset of "leftists" and "progressives" who are perfectly at home in the moral universe of the Religious Right, but anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, and/or anti-war sentiments keep them on the political left. What is truly unfortunate is the success these people have had in rolling back social liberalism among liberals and leftists.
Whie I have not gotten a copy of Hedges book yet, I have seen the notorious second chapter.
ReplyDeleteGuess how it starts?
Hedges quotes Andrea Dworkin's famnous attack on the Left, blasting the Left as a whole for its defense of porn on First Amendment grounds, describing pornography as a "graveyard where the Left has gone to die."
Hedges' entire chapter on porn is an enthusiastic thumbs up for Dworkin and her philosophy (he omits any mention of her censorship ideas).
Can he really be considered a leftist of any kind, except, you know, an anti-leftist?
Sad but not surprising that Hedges has bought into the lionzation of Dworkin that began with her death, and the gusher of praise for her "trailblazing" work in the obits that followed. Indeed, she seemed to gain a lot of cred by dying even among those who had openly called her out for her bullshit when she was alive, demonstrating a certain sentimentality to which a certain stripe of self-identified leftist is prone.
ReplyDeleteI've never found that death improves the quality of anyone's thinking and, there was ample evidence that Dworkin's had swerved far to the right in her final years. Her vocal support for the invasion of Iraq was hardly consistent with and views I'd consider leftist, any more than those of Preacher Bob. These characters were righly called out as "neo-con feminists" by Kelly Holland during our encounter with Jensen in Pasedena last year.
The so-called left here, as in many other parts of the Western world, has been largely ineffectual in its more important causes, from mitigating the economic and environmental devastation caused by globalization and climate change, while it squabbled over identity politics and social issues, much like the right.
I believe, for the first time in a very long time and mainly because of harsh economic conditions, a much larger percentage of the population in advanced industrialized nations, is genuinely open to new thinking about those major concerns than in a generation.
In this country, a clear majority favors publically funded healthcare, wants quick action on global warming, opposes both of the wars in which we're currently involved and generally leans further in a progressive direction than it has since before Ronald Reagan.
However, they continue to support invididual rights, as opposed to collective liberatioin of the sort favored by cracked fanatics like Dworkin and her latter-day followers, and are no more willing to be dictated to regarding he impropriety of their private lives over what they consider to be victimless pursuits, whether those pursuits be viewing pornography, getting abortions or smoking pot.
To the extent that the liberal left has abandoned the ideals of individual freedom and choice, it has lost what little appeal it ever had in this part of the world to any but the most die-hard adherents of its peculiar brand of group-think.
It's not pornography that's proved to be the graveyard of the left. It's the left's embrace of the right-wing social agenda that has driven off much of what little popular support it ever enjoyed here and burnished the somewhat dubious appeal of the very kind of libertarianism that leftist apostates like Hedges find so apalling. Nice work there.
Both far left and far right are now seen in the public sphere as enemies of personal liberty favoring intrusive social policies and opposing the basic civic freedoms upon which this society if founded.
It would seem that if the left has found itself in any graveyard, it's the one where Dworkin lies buried and should have been allowed to rest in peace.