World Sex Guide Document: daily

WSG in the Daily News
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 19:16:01 UTC

The WSG was the subject of a front-page article in the Los Angeles
DAILY NEWS on July 15, 1996.

Here's what happened: some apple-knocker tourist from Indiana got
busted cruising hookers in the Sherman Way "corridor". For the curious
:), that's Sherman Way between roughly Topanga Cyn. Blvd. and Reseda
Blvd.  BTW, your correspondent lives fairly close to the area, and I'd
say don't bother.  The hookers there are mainly the semi-pro druggies
who moved west after the Great Sepulveda Blvd. Bust a few months ago.

The tourist said he had the bail money in cash at his hotel (the
Warner Center Marriott).  He was promptly taken there by Sgt. Minner
of the LAPD West Valley Vice Squad. A police escort to get the bail
money!  Nice!  Next time I'm being mugged, I'll make sure I crawl
toward a hooker!  Later in the article, Minner complained that there
are only 5 vice cops in the West Valley squad.  So he wastes 20% of
his manpower to personally go and collect a misdemeanor fine?  Oh
yeah, in cash...hmmm...

When Minner asked what this yokel was doing on Sherman Way, the
wayward tourist blurted out that he had seen "the corridor" mentioned
on the World Wide Web.  The technically challenged vice cop apparently
thought this was a new sex magazine dealing with arachnophilia.  But
when he got back to the station, with some Nethead help, he managed to
find the World Sex Guide.  Minner further reported that the vice squad
only got an Internet connection two months ago, thanks to some local
do-gooder who donated a PC.

The rest of the article was the usual holier-than-us sex-bashing.  One
expert, whose name I forget, said the WSG was "a bunch of unsavory
people who like to talk about this sort of thing."  Yeah...a _big_
bunch; entering "World Sex Guide" in Webcrawler brings up about
250,000 entries.

Naturally, this incident allowed lots of political grand-standing.
Councilwoman Laura Chick weighed in with another sermon on her pet
peeve, Le Sex Shoppe on Sherman Way. This is one of the few XXX book
stores left in the San Fernando Valley.  Chick and her fellow members
of the Anti-Sex League have been huffing, puffing and trying to blow
down L.S.S. for over a decade.  The moralists routinely lose their
court cases on First Amendment grounds, which of course just irks them
even more.

The article ended with Sgt. Minner himself taking a bizarre detour
into constitutional law, declaring that the World Sex Guide was
"probably not what the Founders had in mind."  Maybe not.  But based
on my reading of their works, they didn't intend for the state to take
an active interest in its citizens' sex lives, either.
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