NEW YORK CITY, NY —New York Magazine is the latest magazine to drop escort ads from its pages. The publication announced this week that it was dropping the advertisements after facing protest threats from the feminist National Organization for Women.”We worked to educate them on the connections trafficking and the existing sex industry,” said Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW-NYC to The New York Post. “Numerous publications have come to the conclusion that it’s not a business they really want to be in.”
Fifteen New York-based publications have dropped the adult ads this year, including Time Out New York and The New York Press.
New York Magazine spokeswoman Serena Torrey declined to comment on whether NOW’s public pressure tactics had influenced the weekly magazine’s decision to pull the ads but said that the publication had been looking to get rid of them for some time before the feminist organization’s threatened temper tantrum.
“It’s just the right thing to do,” Torrey said. “The magazine is really prospering now and it’s finally time to get out of a business that we were never comfortable being in.”
The now-cancelled NOW protest was to be part of their anti-human trafficking campaign and the plan was to target New York Magazine to “shed light on how the trafficking industry is a part of the local economy and identify the legitimate businesses that do business with traffickers.”
“Traffickers brazenly operate in our neighborhoods, advertise in our newspapers, set up makeshift brothels known as “10 day houses” and supply existing massage parlors, brothels and escort services. High profit margins coupled with negligible-to-low risk of arrest and prosecution have led to the proliferation of organized prostitution and labor exploitation in urban, rural and suburban areas of New York,” NOW’s site says.
NOW also claimed that New York Magazine was receiving $10,000 a week for the escort ads. No word on how much losing these ads is going to cost non-exploited American escorts.
