Protest by women's group forces New York magazine to drop sex ads

New York magazine has dropped sex ads, bowing to a protest from the National Organization for Women (NOW) For its pains, it was criticized by the Village Voice alternative weekly for doing so.
According to a story in Folio: magazine, the "escort" ads, which were part of the classified section in the back of the magazine, were essentially a front for prostitution and typically included phone numbers for what were euphemistically referred to as "escort" and "massage" services. According to NOW, New York made $10,000 per week on the ads. The pressure on New York was part of a larger campaign against "human trafficking" by NOW.

Such advertising is a commonplace in alternative and lifestyle weeklies across North America and has always been in New York, which leads and virtually created the "city magazine" category in North America. In Canada, publications such as NOW and Eye Weekly* in Toronto and the Georgia Straight in Vancouver carry pages of such ads. Toronto Life has not traditionally carried such ads. (*There has always been an irony that eye is owned by the Toronto Star which, as a "family paper" wouldn't carry such ads in its own pages.)

NOW New York chapter president Sonia Ossorio, said the ads' purpose in New York magazines was an open secret. "There's not anyone that doesn't know these ads are for prostitution," she said yesterday.

The decision to drop the ads, made by Publisher Larry Burstein, came soon after a meeting with Ossorio on Tuesday. A spokeswoman for New York said: "The magazine is prospering now, so it's finally time to get out of a business we were never comfortable about.”

NOW pressure has previously forced the New York Press — a competing alternative newspaper to the Village Voice — to drop the ads from its pages. In March, Time Out New York pledged to not profit from trafficking, though the magazine still accepts ads from licensed massage parlors.