Responding to a friend who noted that hotels now advertising themselves as “gay-friendly” would never advertise themselves as “heterosexual-friendly” and rarely as “child-friendly,” a second friend responded:
What if hotels who say “family friendly” really came clean and said they were Fornication Friendly and Adultery Friendly? The hotel business revels in what the French call the cinq à sept: rooms used from 5 to 7 with expensive room service for the same price as a room full of kids pushing all the buttons in the elevator and eating every kind of free food the hotel offers. Even the easy availability of porn for the business traveller says this is a lust-based business model. Adding “gay friendly” is just greedy, trying to get the last few percentage points of fornicator market share.
To which Stuart Koehl, author of Beyond the Pill: Looking for the Origins of the Sexual Revolution (which I commend to your attention), responded:
O tempora! O mores! When was it not so? Though, for what it’s worth, the bread and butter of the hotel business today is the business traveler on per diem. Believe me, we’re too tired at the end of the day for expensive fornication with talented professionals, or even enthusiastic amateurs.
So, a clue: back as far as hotels existed, hotels and prostitution went together like bread and butter—right back to ancient Greece and Rome, truth be told. It may not have been emphasized on the television, but in the radio episodes of Gunsmoke, they’re pretty clear about what kind of business Miss Kitty was running up on the second floor of her establishment.
If you want to point to an epochal, behavior-changing development, maybe the automobile and the motel should be higher on your list. The former gave people the mobility to get away from family, friends, and neighbors, and the latter, with its little detached cottages or single story row buildings with detached entrances that allowed one to circumvent the nosy concierge. All told, a lot more fornication friendly than most hotels today, what with all the security cameras and magnetic door keys creating permanent records of everyone’s comings and goings.
It is a pleasant daydream, though, to think of a hotel that advertised itself as “family friendly” and required that its customers be married.
May 24th, 2010 | 6:30 pm
David,
While both their response have their points (it seems obvious that hotels, by their nature, facilitate some forms of illicit behaviour), this advertising a hotel as gay-friendly seems a difference in kind and not simply more of the same. After all, touting for the gay trade brings along with it a certain atmosphere that winking at the 5-7 trade does not.
Kamilla
May 24th, 2010 | 7:55 pm
The problem is, on a practical level, many married couples “escaping the children” for a weekend will prefer a “gay-friendly” hotel to a “family-friendly” or “kid-friendly” hotel. It IS a pleasant daydream, though, to think of a hotel that advertised itself as “family values friendly” and required coupled guests to be married. It could train its staff not to ask guests registering alone if they require a second key and could send copies of the bill to each guest’s home, under his or her last name only, after each stay. Such a chain would also, of course, have filtered cable television, and maybe even internet. The concierge would have local Mass, temple, and worship service schedules, and directions. The bar would likely close early, too.
May 24th, 2010 | 9:04 pm
Well, RS, I don’t see why the hotels would have to close the bar early. What they’d need to do is make the bar into something closer to a “public house” rather than a bar. Turning the lights up and adding a kids’ menu should do it. And let people bring their dogs, though I suppose that’s much too much to hope for.
May 24th, 2010 | 9:24 pm
Maybe a family-values-friendly hotel in a big city, with people arriving from time zones west throughout the day, could publicly serve alcohol until 2am (closing time in my state), and I have no problem with 24-hour room service, including alcohol, if it’s legal. But I can’t imagine any family-values-friendly activities helped by a pub atmosphere past – I don’t know – midnight. By “early” I didn’t mean 8pm, just sometime before 2am.
May 25th, 2010 | 12:39 am
Ah, a difference of culture. Where I live, the bars that close late close at midnight. 2 a.m. would be downright Babylonian.
May 25th, 2010 | 2:28 am
Ayaan Hirsi Ali recounted in “Infidel” that it was very difficult to find a hotel in Somalia that would allow her and her new husband to stay for their wedding night because they did not have a marriage certificate.
I’ve traveled heavily outside the Muslim world and don’t think it is common anywhere to require couples be married.
May 25th, 2010 | 8:36 am
Perhaps Joseph and Mary were fortunate there was no room for them at the inn.
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