Daily News

The sex shop crackdown
It's about time

by Raoul Felder

In 1934, Mae West looked out at the Broadway audience in "Belle of the Nineties" and noted, "It's better to be looked over than overlooked." Sixty-four years later, purveyors of sexual material more explicit and humorless than anything ever emanating from Mae, are in unanimous disagreement with her observation.

Indeed, their problem is that they are not overlooked. They are the objects of a new zoning law passed at the mayor's urging that at least makes decency - and, possibly, collective sanity - part of the public ethic.

In this world of few unchanging absolutes, the fact that there is a total lack of any redeeming feature in sex shops and lap-dance palaces is as certain as the frailty of the human conscience.

Over the years, the political process allowed virtually unfettered placement, anywhere in the city, of stores selling and advertising sex videos, titillating materials and human beings performing sexual gyrations and offering paid companionship. One can only suppose that while these businesses did not pay their taxes, they did make appropriate political contributions.

The new zoning law sensibly limits these sorts of commercial activities to areas devoid of residence, schools and houses of worship. It is fair to note that the law does not legislate these businesses out of existence. It merely forces them to move.

New York is chock-full of areas whose primary use, in former times, was an alternative drop zone for those deceased gangsters who were at the losing end of an argument with their colleagues, but, for one reason or another, did not get to spend the night sleeping with the fishes.

Various waterfront neighborhoods - Hunts Point in the Bronx, the Long Island City docks in Queens and adjacent industrial venues - immediately come to mind. This would be consistent with the practice in other American and European cities that centralize smut in discrete and appropriate locations.

At present, the sex clubs are involved in grotesque and desperate efforts to comply with the new law, or more correctly put, to avoid the spirit of the law.

Rules have been whipped out to demonstrate with geometric precision that only 40% of the premises are utilized for sex-related activities. Curtains are strung up along the 40% parallel so that a customer can have his dinner on one side of the curtain while another enjoys his gyrating dish on the other.

In a true celebration of imagination over reality, girls suggest lascivious delights clad in modest bathing suits. The courts in New York thus far have, unusually for them, opted in favor of protecting the public's rights rather than those of the evildoers. But still the voices of protest, masked with the music of high purpose and principle, area heard. To twist the right to engage in these sorts of business enterprises with any right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights or the Constitution would require the services of a master pretzel maker.

To suggest that restrictions imposed against the sex parlors somehow do violence to their freedom of speech is to suggest that speech consists of that form of voiceless communication emanating from below-the-waist muscle manipulation.

These gaudy temples of tawdriness demean women, distort children's views of the world, exploit the needs of pathetic men and, in the long run, can only serve to destabilize families. There is no fundamental right or governmental obligation that one can legitimately utilize to justify the decent into degeneracy that these businesses represent.

Felder is a veteran divorce lawyer and a former federal prosecutor.