LOS ANGELES — Exxxotica Expo organizers make men pay to enter its event but women get in free, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday at Los Angeles Superior Court.
Lead plaintiff Glenn Samuels seeks class-action status with other male plaintiffs who may have parted with their $35 at last week's Exxxotica Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Victory Tradeshow Management, which runs the Exxxotica Expos in Los Angeles, New Jersey, Miami and Chicago, is named as a defendant. So is sponsor Hotmovies.com and Always Private Security Services Inc.
Samuels said a "brazenly touted" promotion that offered free admission was "as offensive, archaic and unlawful as providing free admission to male patrons, or as offensive, archaic, and unlawful as charging people of color more than Caucasians for admission into this place of public accommodation or vice versa, or charging homosexuals more than heterosexuals for admission, or vice-versa."
Advertising material, attached to the complaint, states: "You heard right! For the first time ever in Los Angeles we're letting ALL Chicks in for FREE on Friday, August 26. We're using Einstein's most famous quotation: More girls = More fun. We first did this last year at our New Jersey even it was a HUGE success. HUGE! There were so many girls there, you would have thought you were at a Jack Johnson concert."
Samuels claimed that such sexist incentives advance "harmful stereotypes" and suggest that "women are genetically incapable of earning as much money as men; women enjoy being subsidized by strange men at an adult entertainment exhibition at a convention center; women enjoy being treated like little girls by not being required to pay full price" and "have little value except to be used as sexual bait to attract men.
"Furthermore, on Ladies Free Friday, the national unemployment rate for men was much higher than it was for women, standing at about 9.7 percent for men and only 8.6 percent for women," the suit said. "The invidious Ladies Free promotion caused discontent, animosity, harm, resentment and envy among the sexes."
Samuels seeks an injunction and damages for violations of The Unruh Civil Rights Act, The Gender Tax Repeal Act of 1995 and negligence.
J Handy, who operates Victory Tradeshow Management, told XBIZ he had heard of the suit but has not see the complaint.
"So until we have more info, we can't comment," he said.
