Hana Malinova, director of Bliss Without Risk, a prostitution outreach group, said she feared the current credit crunch was pushing more poor women into prostitution, since they could make more money selling their bodies — about 120 euros for a half-hour session at some upscale sex clubs in Prague — than flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Even with the downturn, she added, prostitution was far more resilient than other industries, though the downturn was discouraging adultery.
“An Austrian farmer from a remote area who is not married will still cross the border to the Czech Republic looking for sex,” she said. “On the other hand, the recession is helping to keep husbands at home who might otherwise be cheating on their wives.” In Czech towns near the German border in northern Bohemia, long blighted by a daily influx of sex tourists, many are happy that the business is suffering. Only a few years ago the town of Dubi was so overrun by prostitution that a nearby orphanage was opened to provide refuge for dozens of unwanted babies of prostitutes and their German clients. Sex could be purchased for as little as 5 euros — the price of a few beers in Dresden — drawing a daily influx of more than 1,000 sex tourists. Today, more than three dozen brothels have been winnowed down to four; several were converted into goulash restaurants or golf clubs.
The darkside of this kind of women's work cannot be overemphasised, and neither should it be denied that the modern commodification of sexual services is rooted in the capitalist system.
There is a danger that artworks contribute to the capitalist cultural machine that makes sure this fundamental reality is hidden by a process of the "aestheticization" of this reality.
This photo by Hana Jakrlova can be found headlining a feature shoot webpage:
Photographer Documents Activities Inside the Big Sister Sex Club
(July 10, 2012) with an article by Alison Zavos.
feature shoot says that it is about showcasing the work of international emerging and established photographers
"who are transforming the medium through compelling, cutting-edge projects."
Hana Jakrlova is introduced as;
"an internationally published Czech-born photographer whose work addresses issues of belonging, intimacy and solitude."
“Big Sister” was published as a book in 2010 by Images En manouevres and Eric Franck Fine Art.
On the occasion of an unusual selection of the work by Ed and Nancy Kienholz of their red-light district installation for the National Gallery in London, Laura Cumming of the Observer (Sun 22 Nov 2009) made these salient points in her art review:
And so it is at the National Gallery, where Kienholz's immense street scene of 80s Amsterdam by night has been installed among the old master art, a juxtaposition that could hardly be more advantageous to his enterprise. For even those familiar with his work will surely get a jolt passing from the careful conditions of the main galleries, with their still, silent paintings, to the garish, noisy, cruddy, lifesize shocker of a peepshow that is The Hoerengracht.
The title is a blunt pun, turning the real Herengracht (gentlemen's canal) into a whores' canal with the addition of a single letter. But the street conjured here is really an entire district compressed into a couple of corners and some alleys. All is highly realistic to the point of actual reality – real dead leaves, silted litter, gum stains on the pavements, real china dogs on window sills and bicycles chained to racks. And in the pitch dark, red lights pullulate around doorways and glow inside the prostitutes' windows, enticing you to peer in and see the half-naked women themselves waiting for another client.
But here the realism ends, for although the figures looking back at you are cast from the bodies of real women, and clad in actual underwear, they each have a mannequin head. The faces are highly painted, resin streaks the cheeks like still-wet tears, the eyes are wide and imploring. And if that makes you think of the sacred statues in the tremendous show of Spanish art simultaneously running in the Sainsbury Wing, then the artists (Kienholz died in 1994, but his collaborator, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, continues their work) would no doubt be pleased. For whatever else these women may be – a hybrid of waxwork, statue, dummy and doll – they are undoubtedly presented as martyrs.
The middle-aged prostitute in her ratty coat and headscarf who has to go out into the streets to scratch up some trade; the girl in her tiny cell, back turned but looking anxiously out at the world through a strategically angled mirror; the final face jammed up at the grille of her door as if imprisoned. Each is suffering, abused, entombed, and the wallpaper in one bedsit sings a song of lament to these women. "Darling" runs the refrain, over and again, in snow-white letters on a blood-red ground.
In short, The Hoerengracht is a highly sententious work, and not just because it puts you in the position of a client – an intention, in fact, that is effectively thwarted. Certainly, the tableau presents the women as spectacle and you as the viewer, but only in the sense of a tourist doing the Amsterdam sights. If you could walk in among them, see the world as they see it, then the effect might be different. But as it is, there is no sense of tension and whatever outrage or grief the expressions, poses, props and decor should prompt is stifled by the fairground-cum-Hammer-Horror closed shop.
This artwork stands in stark contrast to the hyperreal glam, glitzy and self-consciously "kitsch" installations of Big Sister dubbed "the world's biggest internet brothel.
PRAGUE — On a recent night at Big Sister, which calls itself the world’s biggest Internet brothel, a middle-aged man selected a prostitute by pressing an electronic menu on a flat-screen TV to review the age, hair color, weight and languages spoken by the women on offer.
Once he had chosen an 18-year-old brunette, he put on a mandatory terry-cloth robe and proceeded to one of the brothel’s luridly lighted theme rooms: an Alpine suite decorated with foam rubber mountains covered with fake snow.
Nearby, in the brothel’s cramped control room, two young technicians worked dozens of hidden cameras that would film the man’s performance and stream it, live, onto Big Sister’s Web site.
Customers can have sex free of charge at Big Sister, in return for signing a release form allowing the brothel to film their sexual exploits.
But even with this financial incentive, Carl Borowitz, 26, Big Sister’s marketing manager, a Moravian computer engineer, lamented that the global financial crisis had diminished the number of sex tourists coming to Prague.
The distance created between us and the events captured in these images has to do with the duration of the time that has passed between then and now.
Everyday life?
The atmosphere of past times carries with it that process of aestheticization of a reality, that consequently distances us from that reality. This kind of aesthetic method was used to some effect in a Louis Vuitton advertisement - and to an unforeseen reaction.
The bear with “Slut” inscription on the body appeared on the scene just in the midst of the national beauty contest “Miss Ukraine 2017”. Thus, FEMEN sextremist pointed out the true nature of the event, the purpose of which is the demonstration of fresh meat for parliamentarians, ministers, oligarchs and other shit. Ukraine is not a brothel! Those, who think otherwise are whores!
FEMEN’s message is not so much to the contestants as to the organizers of the brothel.
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