Losing Peep World And Gaining Hooters.

Sleaze Culture

Starting in 1998, there was a feeling New York in general and Manhattan in particular was becoming stale, sanitized, cleaned up for the tourists.  No longer a Mecca for those who wanted to become the best and the brightest of the best and brightest but a place where only those who could fit in as the powers that be saw fit could roam.

Where once stood porn shops stand banks.  Where once were Mom and Pop coffee shops and diners now stand Starbucks Coffee joints.  And every celebrity chef has his over priced theme restaurant for the Foodie Yunnies.  There are no more corner bars but Gastro Pubs and massive sports bars with the out of town games showing for the ‘New Yorkers’ to watch their hometown teams.

And now even the sleaze is becoming suburban for the Yunnies.

(From www.dnainfo.com)

MIDTOWN — Devotees of a closed-down porn shop near Penn Station will soon be able to gawk at voluptuous ladies inside its former home — but from now on they’ll be wearing clothes, if only just barely.

The space that housed longtime fixture Peep World will soon become a Hooters restaurant, according to liquor license records.

In July, Community Board 5 received an application from Hooters of 33rd St. Inc. for a liquor license at 155 W. 33rd St. — the same spot where Peep World spent decades peddling adult films and sex toys.

The board recommended the State Liquor Authority approve the license without comment at a July meeting.

Peep World closed on March 26 after a close-out sale, prompting widespread sadness from its devoted clientele.

“It’s a sad state of affairs that this city’s perverts have so few places to go these days,”  one regular customer lamented at the time.

The location, in a prime spot across from Madison Square Garden, was set to become a rooftop gastropub run by the owners of the Overlook Lounge on East 44th Street. That deal apparently fell through.

Neither Hooters nor the Overlook Lounge responded to requests for comment. It’s unclear if the Hooters location will take advantage of the building’s rooftop as the Overlook planned.

The West 33rd Street location is also a stop from BoltBus, where dozens of customers regularly line up at the curb their way out of the city.

“I’d go to a Hooters while I wait for the bus,” said a rider who identified himself as Matt.

“They’ve got good wings. I’d go for the wings.”

I’d like to get irate about this closing because Peep World was a great place to find whatever sort of sleaze your heart desired 24/7 but I can’t, I get it.  With the rise of porn on the Internet all sleaze, kink and whatever can now be found in the privacy of your own home.  Losing Peep World and all the other porn shops and sleaze merchants takes away the danger and shame of being outed as a kink consumer by a random acquaintance which was part of the fun but that’s been replaced with forgetting to erase your browsing history.

However, what we lose in old school sleaze, we gain in the latest sanitized, suburban version of the stuff.  Young girls in tight shirts and tighter shorts hawking wings and merchandise for kids (like the wonderful I’m a Boob man t-shirt.)

Jeremiah Moss calls this a new form of degradation and he maybe right.  Personally, I think the loss of shame by a generation that doesn’t understand why certain societal boundaries exist.  It’s hard to wallow in degradation when you have no shame to get you there.