Ooh la ugh!
The abundance of quasi-porn magazines on city-owned newsstands has got some parents in Boerum Hill all hot and bothered.
“Naked women in lascivious poses should not be what my daughter sees on her way to school,” said Emily Fisher, a Pacific Street mom who recently stopped taking her 9-year-old to the Nevins Street subway station in order to avoid the porn-filled newsstand there.
The sex-drenched “men’s interest” glossies are the best sellers. City code doesn’t consider these magazines “explicit” because they don’t show fully expose genitalia and, thus, can be sold without breaking city consumer-protection laws that limit city-licensed vendors from selling “sexually explicit materials.”
One popular magazine at newsstands in Brooklyn is “SSX,” whose latest issue features a buxom woman leaning over in a latex, bikini-like dominatrix suit (see photo).
Fisher recently asked the vendor to move the skin rag off the front rack, but he said he couldn’t because the flashy image helped attract customers.
When asked the same question by The Stoop this week, he laughed.
“I thought this was America, where there is freedom,” he said, turning the question back on The Stoop: “Does this picture embarrass you?”
Before we could answer, a mom standing next to the newsstand pointed to a bare bottom on a fan magazine for Playboy model Vida Guerra and said that it should be the vendor who was embarrassed.
“I don’t think this is right,” said the mom, Alethia Byard.
“It’s too sexy for the street,” chimed in Lola Davis, another mom standing nearby. Davis said that she frequently notices groups of kids staring at the tawdry pics.
“They are boys, and girls, just ogling,” she said.
In the 1990s, the Brooklyn Heights Association asked local merchants to move the sex magazines out of plain view. After some pressure from customers, the smut was moved, BHA President Judy Stanton said.
“I’m not familiar with the titles we had trouble with,” she said, “but the pictures spoke for themselves and the problem was solved.”
Stanton advised her neighbors in Boerum Hill to approach the newsstand owners.
“The magazines will always be a destination [for buyers] whether they are in the front rack or not,” she said.
©2007 The Brooklyn Paper
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