Surplus Cats

Earlier today Ed Brayton discussed and linked to a letter from those despicable hypocrites at American Family Association/Focus on the Family to Marriott hotels urging them to stop including adult films in their in-room pay per view selections.

Why stop there? Maybe it’s not just the porn. Maybe it is the hotel industry encouraging such sinful activities, offering a private den of iniquity for the traveling Weak. Maybe it’s traveling; the siren song of Adventure pulling people from the safety of their good, clean, Good Clean Christian homes and thrusting them into worldly situations. Stop it all right now! Stay in your homes and lock the doors cuz you just never know when you’ll be confronted by choices and everyone knows choices are anti-family.

I used to work in a video store with a cornucopia of options of the adult variety, rivaling that of many all-adult content video stores. Christianity, even the deep raving fire and brimstone sort, was well represented in the menagerie of partakers of our dirty dirty sinful wares.

I’m indifferent when it comes to the porn issue. My only issue with adult films is their typical plot deficit,  but if they do something for other folks, well, that would explain their popularity, is none of my business anyway, and I’m certainly not going to deny them. I’ll judge them, but only as harshly as I would someone who likes stupid action flicks or those awful movies on the Lifetime network. A bad movie is a bad movie is a bad movie. The harshest judgment I made during my stint as a video store clerk was of people who treated us badly without provocation, and those who returned films damaged, or excessively late (and then demanded I waive their late fees), or –in the case of adult films– covered in bodily fluids.

Over the course of several months we conducted our own little unscientific survey to figure out which jerks were the culprits of the constant stack of un-rewound adult VHS tapes, and adult dvds returned encrusted post-jerk. Who should we gently remind to “Be Kind, Rewind” (or “Don’t Vex, Windex”) without nagging innocent porn aficionados?

My coworkers and I had noted these movies were usually the strangest, most violent, or disturbing of the lot. A chart was made categorizing the bio-hazard returns into genres, and noting the length of time they were out, condition sent out and returned (from each tape or disc’s history as recorded in the system),  the customer’s attitude, and nervousness on a scale of none to crazy, and the addition of any memorable quotes from the exchange. Perusing this highly scientific data one of my coworkers says, “We didn’t sort them into hetero/glbt! Give me different colored highlighters!” We argued for a bit about this because the overwhelming majority of adult films rented from our store were “lesbian” flicks made by men for men. It was settled that these would be “hetero” unless the customer had been noted as female and wasn’t “Mrs. X” who came in to pick up films for her shut-in husband. It wound up being a very complicated endevour and I wish that I still had the scan of this great research work. (Well, great –amazing even– for this group of slackers.)

Our findings? The most uptight, anxious porn customers were also the ones most likely to rent the most hardcore films and return them in the most unappreciated states. They were also the ones most likely to complain about the “rock n’ roll” played in the store, and pass you a Chick tract on their way out.

Of course we were the wicked ones tempting these fine upstanding family men into such filth. They certainly wouldn’t have been interested in it if we hadn’t had it on the shelves in the back room, out of sight, a spot most people had to ask for directions to the first time, and a large number of regular customers didn’t even realize was there. Right? Sure.