'50 Shades' Musical Adds Raunch to Matt Barber Website

LOS ANGELES—Sometimes the ad server gods just smile down upon you and deliver unto your computer screen an image of such breathtaking irony that it's enough to make one believe in divine interference. Such a miracle just happened here in the offices of AVN, when, upon making the normally discouraging trip to Matt Barber's despicable website, BarbWire.com, where the far rightwing lawyer with Liberty Counsel, an anti-gay legal group, posts up a steady diet of hate speech targeting not only gays but all "progressives" as well as any group or idea that offends his theocratic sensibility, we were surprised (delighted?) to see a banner ad in a prominent position on the page promoting a musical for one of the best-selling BDSM titles in history. Yes, that would be 50 Shades of Gray, a musical version of which is playing now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California, on the Westside of Los Angeles. So, not only is a noted Hollywood liberal's name—Kirk Douglas!—featured prominently on the virulent anti-liberal's website, but the ad for a musical about what he would no doubt deem to be filthy acts of sexual depravity appears on the same page as Barber's asinine tirade today about... "raunch" appearing on the Huffington Post, in which a divorced woman writes about the "5 Benefits of Having a Friend with Benefits." Really racy stuff... not. But Barber's reaction, which we found kind of wussy for a man who used to be a heavyweight fighter, is an oh-so-sensitive, "I don’t know whether to laugh, throw up or both... In case you’re not hip to liberal-speak, 'friends with benefits' refers to the 'progressive' idea that it’s really cool for friends to use each other for casual, meaningless sex." Yes, it goes on like that for a while, the usual juvenile garbage from Barber—whose constricted world view cannot accept the grownup reality that divorced adults can actually have meaningful sex outside the bonds of matrimony—only this time, as readers can see from our screen grab, his garbage is paired with a nice large graphic for 50 Shades, complete with topless dude and a pair of handcuffs. As far as ad-serving ironies go, it rarely gets any better than that, especially since the 50 Shades ad shares the top half with another banner ad for a AR15 giveaway. Sweet. For more on the 50 Shades musical, go here. Anyone wishing to buy Matt Barber a ticket to the show can contact him here, though we don't actually recommend that anyone spend significant time on his site, as it may cause headaches and maybe even a migraine.