Men in High Dudgeon After Sex Expo

LOS ANGELES (CN) - Men filed a class action against the organizers of a Sex Expo in Los Angeles who made them pay $44 to get into a promotional event, while women got in free.

Lead plaintiff Glenn Samuels says he parted with $44 to get into the Exxxotica Expo at Los Angeles Convention Center, while women breezed in por nada. He seeks class damages for civil rights violations.

"Despite the many State of California anti-discrimination statutes, unanimous California Supreme Court opinions, California Attorney General and Department of Fair Employment and Housing actions, and California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control regulations - all prohibiting California businesses from treating patrons unequally based on their sex, defendants brazenly advertised, employed, or aided the Ladies Free promotion, which treated male and female patrons unequally based solely on the patrons' sex," he says in his Superior Court complaint.

An ad for the event, 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."

Named as defendants are National A-1 Internet Inc. dba Hotmovies.com, Always Private Security Services Inc. and Victory Tradeshow Management.

Samuels says the "brazenly touted" promotion 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."

He claims 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."

The aggrieved plaintiff notes that "working class men" had to pay a minimum of $35 while women "from all economic strata, including wealthy women" were admitted for free.

"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 complaint states.

Samuels adds: "The invidious Ladies Free promotion caused discontent, animosity, harm, resentment and envy among the sexes."

San Diego attorney Alfred Rava filed the class action suit for "all male patrons" at the event. Samuels seeks an injunction and damages for violations of The Unruh Civil Rights Act, The Gender Tax Repeal Act of 1995 and negligence.

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