Sex shop makes unwanted advances
By Daily Bruin Staff
Feb. 3, 2002 9:00 p.m.
 Ben Shapiro Shapiro is a second-year
political science student bringing reason to the masses. E-mail him
at [email protected].
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UCLA has entered the zone of no return. The Zone
d’Erotica, that is.
Zone d’Erotica is a sex shop located just 375 feet from
Gayley Terraces. This store, offering the only kind of deviancy
UCLA lacks, adds a great deal to the campus: a place to buy
assorted pornographic videos, sex toys and lingerie. Just what the
homeowners, students and faculty need…
There are limits to capitalistic enterprise, and this is one of
them. While the government should keep involvement in the workings
of the free market to a minimum, the sex industry is one market
that shouldn’t be too free. It is an illegitimate,
unfortunate function of the market that distribution centers exist
for such twisted items, and while the government cannot ban them,
it can restrict them. Gayley Avenue is a good place to start.
The Westwood Homeowners Association has every right to protest
this travesty. Would you want a sex shop opening across the street
from your home? If you had a five-year-old child, would you want
him to ask “Mommy, how much is that vibrator in the
window?”
Sex shops happen to have a certain, less-than-reputable
audience. Such stores gather a very exclusive, perverted
clientele likely coming from near and far to find such a treasure
trove. Must we wait before the shop is already established to
realize that sordid men walking around Westwood holding Wicked
Enterprise videos will make the area look bad?
And don’t forget the economics of the situation. The total
income garnered from this tiny shop of sin will undoubtedly fail to
cover the decline in local residential property values.
Unfortunately, this reasonable point of view seems to be lost on
both the owners of the shop and the editors of the Daily Bruin.
“If someone wants to buy a dildo, that should be their
decision, not the city’s,” says Bambi Hall, the
store’s manager (“Dildos
push their way into Westwood,“ News, Jan. 30).
Hall’s logic is flawed. Her remark concerning the city
rings true, but it neglects one crucial point: she could very well
peddle her wares elsewhere and gather a similar audience. The city
is not refusing buyers the opportunity to buy ““ it is telling
them to buy 125 feet farther down the street. Which isn’t far
enough.
“Our whole life is based on sex. I want to make people
more liberal in their attitude toward sex,” Bambi’s
fiancee and business partner, John Coil remarked. Coil must be new
to the area. On a campus where, in a single day, the Bruin runs
articles extolling the virtues of anonymous gay sex in bathrooms
and advocating that all women become lesbians, Coil’s kind of
freedom is superfluous.
Our beloved Daily Bruin also shows its seamy side, compromising
its socialist policies in order to forward its sexually deviant
views. Says the Bruin editorial board, that paragon of morality:
“Aside from this harrowing act of social censorship, a larger
issue of economic freedom is at stake” (“Community
has right to patronize sex shop,” Viewpoint, Jan.
31).
How moving from the same staff that tells its readers that
higher taxes are good, government intervention is good, and the
rich are evil. This situation could become very rough for the Bruin
if Hall and Coil actually make money ““ would the Bruin side
with economic or sexual policy?
But it is not a suddenly conservative economic policy that
causes the Bruin editors to get fighting mad over the Little Sex
Shop Around the Corner. “The problem with defining what is
inappropriate lies in choosing whose values are worth more. Many
find Biblical or otherwise religious paraphernalia offensive to
their beliefs. Would the same effort be made to keep out a
Christian bookstore from the Westwood community? Not
likely.”
Any paper equating a Christian bookstore with a pornographic sex
shop is not worth the paper it is printed on. This is another
disgusting example of an attempt to strip away stable values and
implement a set of “subjective, tolerant, diverse”
values.
Anyone who believes that a Christian bookstore promoting God,
love and morality is as offensive as a sex shop promoting animal
lust and the degradation of sexual intimacy into a merely
hedonistic act is quite simply a disgrace to the human capacity for
knowledge and reason.
The Westwood Homeowners Association has the moral and
intellectual high ground. The kind of situation that would allow a
child to be exposed to pornography mandates some sort of action,
governmental or otherwise. There is no benefit to having this sort
of smut in any decent neighborhood.
Get rid of it.
