MEXICO CITY – Which of these landmarks doesn’t belong in Mexico City’s historic center?
a. The Palace of Fine Arts
b. The Cathedral
c. The new sex plaza with 80,000 square feet of strip clubs, adult-movie theaters and boutiques stocked with sex toys
The angry buzz is that a blatant sex beacon has no place in the heart of this centuries-old city, setting the stage for a showdown over this month’s opening of the first sex mall in Latin America.
As topless posters go up in the three-story building and promoters schedule American porn stars for the opening, city officials are waffling over their approval and warning they may block the inauguration.
Yet in this very Catholic, very traditional country, there’s no opposition from the church. And the mall is already attracting hand-holding couples and groups of women curious about the offerings.
In Mexico’s new era of freedom of expression, ushered in by President Vicente Fox’s government, sexual expression has blossomed.
Now everyone – from government officials to sexologists to priests – is confronting Mexicans’ conflicted attitudes about sex.
“People secretly go to these places and then publicly criticize them. We cannot continue this double morality,” said the Rev. José de Jesús Aguilar, deputy director of information for the archbishop’s office in Mexico City. “Every person has to decide for himself. If someone wants to try it out, then try it. If people are scandalized by what they see, then they should share their opinion.”
Alberto Kibrit, the 24-year-old businessman who dreamed up the idea for the plaza, says it will help end taboos by drawing men and women and people of all sexual persuasions.
The mall’s skylights, marble floors and rose-colored walls run counter to the sordid images of traditional sex shops. With more than 100 shops, it feels more like a shopping center than a sex palace.
It has a museum with exhibits about sexual practices around the world and a bookstore that offers sex manuals and children’s books explaining reproduction.
Boutiques sell lingerie, exotic oils and French maid costumes. In the food court, exotic dancers strip to scanty underwear. Instead of after-dinner mints, they hand out condoms.
Opponents say the mall, which will also offer table dancing, live sex shows and XXX-rated movies, will draw prostitution to the colonial street that is just around the corner from the majestic Palace of Fine Arts.
“It can bring crime,” said Erika Sarabia, assistant manager of the Krispy Kreme that opened next door a month ago. “We feel insecure because there will be a lot of people around here at night, and most of them will be men, or women who want them as clients.”
Across the street, managers at the Pasteleria Ideal worry that the sex plaza will frighten away longtime customers. For 77 years, the bakery has sold breads and wedding cakes to downtown patrons.
“This is a place where families come,” said sales manager Arturo Romo. “It is a long-standing tradition that parents and their children stop by on Saturday and Sunday.”
There were once so many bakeries on the downtown street named 16 de Septiembre that “it was known as the street of pastries,” Romo said. “Now, they’ve put a mall over there with all those adult products and hung a 20-foot-long banner saying it is the world’s sex capital.”
Such complaints have made city officials consider backing away from final approval of the project, said Gerardo Zapata, spokesman for the government sector responsible for the city’s historic center.
“There have been verbal complaints, there have been written complaints, there have been complaints to the media,” Zapata said. “The problem is that this is a plaza that has been openly declared a sex plaza. We have never had anything like that in Mexico.”
The $12 million plaza was originally a high-tech mall full of computers and electronic devices. When that project failed, investors jumped at Kibrit’s idea of turning the building into a sex-oriented shopping center.
Zapata acknowledged there is a demand for the kind of merchandise and entertainment that the plaza offers.
Just two doors down from the PastelerÃa Ideal are an adult movie theater and a sex shop with hard-core porn videos.
“There are a lot of people who say, ‘Thank you for permitting a plaza where we can buy sex toys.’ They say it is not a sin, that there is nothing wrong with commercializing sex,” Zapata said. “They think that we are on the way to becoming part of the First World, and that we ought to be mature citizens and accept this kind of plaza.”
“The good thing about this industry is that sex is for everyone, whether you’re rich or poor, fat or skinny, young or old,” he said. “And sex is for every day, it’s not just for special occasions.”
There aren’t any official numbers on Mexico’s sex industry, but Kibrit estimates Mexicans spend $1 billion a year in adult-movie theaters and sex shops and on telephone hotlines and erotic cable programming.
In sex shops alone, Kibrit said sales surged 10 percent in the past year. His survey found only 60 sex shops in a country with enough demand to support 600.
Kibrit, a bachelor whose girlfriend supports the idea of a sex plaza, tested his theory at two “sex expos” he staged in 2004 and in February.
Modeled after the Adult Entertainment Expo he visited in Las Vegas, it featured porn stars and booths of sexually explicit merchandise. His goal was to attract 20,000 people, but by the time the first expo closed, it had drawn 80,000.
“The first expo was a stampede,” said Luis Perelman, vice president of the Mexican Association of Sexual Education and Sexology. “There were so many people there that you couldn’t even walk. They bought everything.”
Samuel Sadovich was stunned when he sold his entire inventory of racy underwear at the sex expo.
“The mentality has changed a lot in Mexico. It is opening, opening, opening,” said Sadovich, 41, who owns Sexy Burger restaurant and an underwear shop in the sex plaza. “Young people are changing the way we think. Sex, love and rock and roll are overtaking Mexico.”
Even the Catholic Church, which once emphasized that sex was for procreation, is beginning to acknowledge the need to lift the taboo from sexual activity.
“Human beings have the right to learn about their sexuality,” said Aguilar, the church spokesman. “Our point of view is to educate people so they can make their own decisions.”
Aguilar said church officials know they made a mistake when they publicly denounced a 2002 film, “The Crime of Father Amaro,” about a priest who violated his vow of celibacy when he fell in love with a teenager.
“The minute the church spoke out against the movie, the box office sales for a bad movie went up,” Aguilar said. “When the church prohibits without education it makes things more appetizing, more tempting. So if we say, ‘Don’t go to the plaza or you will be condemned,’ that will certainly prompt more people to go.”
Lizette Bolero intends to tell her girlfriends to check out the plaza.
“This is like a normal mall,” said Bolero, 23, as she snapped pictures for her college newspaper at the Autonomous Metropolitan University. “It’s not perverse. It’s something you can enjoy, whether you’re a woman or a man.”
The sex plaza is designed to reach beyond the male audience and attract women looking for ways to express their sexuality.
The food court is already showcasing male dancers every afternoon. Soon male strippers will offer nightly shows for women.
That women are shopping at the plaza is “a demonstration that they also have desires and fantasies,” said Perelman, who opened a bookstore in the plaza with manuals by recognized sex experts.
Studies show that “50 percent of Mexican women don’t have orgasms and many don’t even know what an orgasm is,” he said. “In Mexico, the less a woman knows, the less she asks, the more she is respected.”
The plaza will help reduce that kind of sexual naivete, Perelman said, because “it takes away the fear that being openly sexual is perverted.”
He says the mall also makes a powerful statement about Mexico’s emerging sexual freedom.
“People are afraid that when you open your society up to this, it will be the end of the world – orgies, perversion. But when it is hidden, that is when there are abuses,” he said. “This will help people stop approaching sex like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mexico will be at the vanguard of a sexual revolution.”