This New Hotel In the Rockaways Celebrates Domestic Violence, Names Rooms After Chris Brown and Ike Turner
c/o The Hostile Hostel
Try and imagine what you’d like the last thing you think about before you go to sleep to be. Unicorns? Yes! (By “unicorns” we mean comedy unicorns Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson.) Rainbows? Sure! (By “rainbows” we mean, well, actual rainbows because those are nice to think about before you go to sleep, right?) Noted woman abuser Chris Brown? Uh, no? Not at all? Because we don’t want nightmares, you know? But apparently, this is not a universal opinion, because there’s a new pop-up hotel in the Rockaways that celebrates not only Chris Brown, but also Ike Turner, and has suites named the “Wife Beater Bungalow” and the “Whore House.”
Via DNAInfo, the Hostile Hostel (which has changed some of the incredibly offensive suite names to more innocuous ones, “Wife Beater Bungalow” is now “Kitchen”) is a pop-up hotel in the Rockaways, operated by Laura Jones, who “said she hoped her beach-themed hostel will attract a good mix of people looking for a place to crash after a day of fun at the popular Queens beach.” Jones, whose boyfriend operates the Rockaway Beach Surf Club, said that invoking the names of abusers was “just a joke” and that—in the long tradition of everyone who gets caught doing something gross and offensive—it “hadn’t occurred to her” that the names would be a problem because she’d thought they would “lighten the vibe.”
Which, sure. Where else but a beach community needs a lighter vibe? You know, the kind that can only be provided by jokes about gang rape and wife beaters? Ugh. Luckily for everyone with a sense of, you know, humanity, community board members in the Rockaways were disgusted and called the Hostile Hostel “outrageous.” Jones has already changed the names of the rooms on her website (which, no, will not get a link from us), but apparently hasn’t changed the names in the actual hotel. But we can all do our part to express our disgust with Jones by not patronizing her hotel or the Rockaway Beach Surf Club, because, honestly, that something this disgusting and disrespectful to women could have been signed off on by so many people is one of the more troubling things we’ve heard lately. And, lately? We’ve heard a lot of troubling things about the treatment of women. But this might be the worst.
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