LONDON — The Portman Group, the U.K.’s alcohol industry self-regulatory body, ordered supermarket chain Marks & Spencer to rename Porn Star Martini, their passion fruit-flavored vodka mix, to the nonsensical Passion Star Martini.
The trade group’s complaints panel decided that the Porn Star Martini brand contravened “section 3.2d of the Portman Code” which prohibits any suggestion or explicit connection between alcohol “and sexual activity or sexual success.”
Marks & Spencer’s canned Porn Star Martini is a downmarket, aspirational version of a signature drink that became a brief sensation at posh early 2000s London establishments Townhouse and LAB. The upmarket version was served in two glasses: vodka, passion fruit, lime and vanilla in one glass, and a side shot of sparkling rosé Champagne.
Celebrity mixologist Douglas Ankrah created the Porn Star Martini in 2002 and mixologist Giuseppe Gonzalez developed a U.S. version at New York’s Suffolk Arms.
Marks & Spencer's DIY version, priced at a working-class-friendly £2.25 a can, launched last September. A single complaint by “a member of the public” reportedly made the deliriously puritanical slippery-slope argument that if the alcohol industry “continued to allow this, it will open the floodgates to others, e.g. Sex on the Beach, Slippery Nipple, Sloe Comfortable Screw, Liquid Viagra, etc.”
The concerned busybody added that using the words “Porn Star” would inevitably link the canned fruity drink to “sexual success,” given that because “porn stars are idolized.”
The Portman Group could find nothing on the packaging that supported or suggested such a claim, but ordered the name change to the thoroughly bizarre and meaningless Passion Star Martini “because of the established definition of a ‘porn star’ — an actor/actress famous for appearing in pornographic films which by their nature contained sexual activity.”
A Marks & Spencer rep pointed out that Porn Star Martini is “a common name for a passion fruit cocktail drink” and that their canned version “quickly became one of our most popular cocktails.”
“However,” the rep continued, “as a Portman Group co-signatory, we respect the ruling and will change the name to Passion Star Martini.”
Meanwhile, here in the United States, we are still free to enjoy Doom's, a 100-proof rye created by "passion stars" Small Hands and Joanna Angel, which may or may not lead to "sexual activity or sexual success." Your mileage may vary.
