Prostitutes in the Belgian city of Ghent have been told to cover up and stop suggestive gyrating in their windows as of next month.
As of October 1, the “working girls” will have to abide by the rules or else face a 120-euro (£95) fine.
A new local police order will force prostitutes working day and night behind Amsterdam-style, neon-flashing windows, a feature of the trade across north-eastern mainland Europe, to cover up and quit sexually-charged posing before passers-by.
Mayor Daniel Termont told AFP he was not “anti-prostitutes.”
“I’m not a puritan,” he said. “Far from it! A city like Ghent needs prostitutes, but they have to respect certain rules.”
These now include the prohibition of women appearing “naked, in underwear, in bikinis or in see-through clothes,” or of “dancing in windows” or “miming sexual acts,” the decree states.
“Neighbours have been complaining, even the prostitutes themselves, about more and more nuisance in the area, in front of the windows, fights breaking out …,” the mayor said.
Local newspaper Di Morgen cited one veteran prostitute as saying particularly competitive new arrivals from eastern Europe were behind this cranked-up atmosphere compared to a decade ago.
Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, another old wh Bryony Gordon complains that we’re all seeing too many young and nubile breasts : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/kate-middleton/9555695/Weve-had-enough-of-breasts-on-The-Suns-Page-3-and-everywhere-else.html
Boobs, boobs, glorious boobs. They’re everywhere you look, aren’t they? I mean, here I am, writing this column, and as I write, I am also staring at the bare breasts of a girl called Nicole. Nicole is blonde, buxom and just 20 years old. She is wearing nothing but a pair of frilly pale pink knickers with floral detailing. She has unusually dark eyebrows given that her hair is so blonde, though when I showed Nicole to my male colleagues, this was not a detail that many of them picked up on.
Anyway, if this doesn’t seem an appropriate introduction for a column in a family newspaper, then I should point out that I saw Nicole’s bare breasts in a so-called family newspaper – The Sun. They were wedged between a piece about the toughening of knife crime laws and one about Gary Barlow’s admirable coping skills after the death of his stillborn daughter. The day before, 24-year-old Dannii from Coventry posed in a bikini “top” that appeared to be made of the occasional pearl on a string, her otherwise naked body materialising between several pages of coverage about the murders of PCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes. And if they’ve seen enough – or haven’t seen enough at all – the readers (viewers? gazers? admirers?) are urged to go online, where they “can take our girls for a spin” on “Page 360” (“See her from every angle here”).
For the 42 years of its existence, Page 3 has been treated a bit like a benign Benny Hill sketch. Lone dissenters like Clare Short have been attacked for being jealous, petty killjoys who just want to spoil the fun because they’d never look as good with their breasts out as Amii, 25, from Birmingham. The response to anyone who dares to criticise Page 3 – send round a load of girls in bikinis to counter-protest, as happened to Short, who says that the Sun and the News of the World went to “vicious lengths to undermine me” – has only ever proved how misogynistic the concept is. Yet still it has remained, day after dangerously objectifying day.
Now, a (final?) stand is being taken, with the launch of the No More Page 3 campaign by an actress and writer called Lucy Holmes. At the time of writing, it had 26,536 signatures. “Stop showing topless pictures of young women,” writes Lucy on the campaign’s website. “Stop conditioning your readers to view women as sex objects.”
No Byrony, we’re sick of jealous, bitter, aging hags like yourself dictating to men what we can and can’t look at. You make a point of complaining that the girls are all young, and then in the same breath pretend that your dislike is ethical – based upon the girl’s ‘objectification’. Clearly, you’re just bitter that men have no interest in ‘objectifying’ the shrivelled up boobs of bitter jealous shrills like yourself.
Ms. Byrony sounds really frustrated. Despite the bad news from the Phillippines, the femihags really have had a rough last couple of weeks. The attempts to silence Eivand Berge again in Norway have been stalled because of public pressure, and the Vancouver counter-protests are turning into a PR fiasco for the feminists. And now, to crown all their humiliations, they’re even getting demands from prostitutes for STU protection. It’s going to be interesting to see how they work this last problem out.
The Mexicans have a sensible arrangement with their Boy’s Towns – sections of town set aside, and divided by walls from the rest of the city, where prostitution is legal. I believe the Japanese did something similar, though I’m not sure if prostitution is legal there today, or not. That arrangement should solve everything – passer byes can’t be offended, because they know they’re there purposely looking for sex, kids are not allowed, and disturbances can be quickly settled down.
As for the page 3 babes, and the wonderful Lucy Holmes – I thought she’d be a bitter old prune, but she’s pretty cute. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Holmes
Still, that’s not excuse, so: Piss off, Lucy!
@theantifeminist: veteren is spelled veteran (with an “a”)! I’m pointing this out in case your article is destined for reddit or other places.
Thanks Jack – I knew it didn’t look quite right, lol.
It’s quite ironic that the very generation that enjoyed the merits of the sexual revolution like no other before or since, is also the one that now most viciously fights sexual freedom in and of itself. It was all good and well, and all fun and games for these bitter old hags when they were in their late teens and early 20s themselves, and they had firm breasts and bottoms that you couldn’t keep them from showing to the world (and that you couldn’t keep men from fancying). Some feminist currents even applauded the fact that women didn’t have to keep their bodies under wraps anymore, and this kind of freedom was even seen by some of them as a centerpiece of women’s liberation.
Fast forward 20 years, and those same women are having to realize that a new generation of women and girls has taken over the baton, and nobody wants to see 43-year-old bare boobs anymore, let alone feels sexually attracted by them. This is what it always boils down to. Invariably. Because those women can’t compete anymore with their physical assets (and quite often, being the bitter hags that they are, definitely not personality-wise either), they have to outright outlaw men’s sexual contacts with younger, more attractive women. More than that, they don’t even want men looking at their boobs. Hence this harebrained Page 3 campaign.
Inclinedreader:
What’s interesting too is that these same bitter femihags never expend any of their righteous indignation or shaming language on celebrities like Madonna, Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, or any other 40/50 something who tries to pass as a younger woman. Instead, they’re always crowing about ‘how good they look.’
that’s perhaps the greatest irony of our times. The depiction of actual youthfulness, of actual youth and juvenile nudity is being outlawed, while 40-plus women are falling over themselves trying to pretend twentyfive-odd years haven’t gone by and they still pass for schoolgirls.
Nowadays, as we all know, you very likely get a criminal record (and can end up in jail in some countries) for owning a non-pornographic bare breast picture of a 17-year-old, while once women are double that age, youthfulness and the maintaining thereof are a billion dollar industry that enables women past the sell-by date to keep in sheer and utter denial about themselves.
If you have to have images of 17-year-olds banned to look young (and sexually desirable) yourself, maybe something is fundamentally wrong with you, and you’re not so young anymore and should stop pretending. It’s like needing a fat friend so you can look thin next to them.
Inclinedreader:
One of the least discussed aspects of Obama’s Healthcare Reform Act was that it legally defined children as under the age of 26. By this standard (and there HAS been talk over here about raising the AOC to 25), the femihags are obviously intending to make cougarism into the cultural norm.
What none of the paedohysterical nitwits ever figure out is that younger female marriage to older men is actually beneficial to women. Suppose a woman marries at 15 to a 40 y/o man. By the time her kids are grown, she’ll be in her 40s—still young enough to pursue careers or other interests. And, to a 70-something husband, still sexually attractive enough to ensure a monogamous marriage and active sex life. That sounds like ‘having it all’ to me. But the femihags are too misandryist and selfish, and only think of instant gratification.
it’s the same old story… ageing children of the sexual revolution, who had it all – and did it all – when they were young, and now that they’re way past that age bracket, they hate young people for the fact that they can indulge with abandon in the things that these old hags have slowly but surely become much too old for. It’s the true reason why we are seeing such ludicrous movements as the anti-page-3-campaign, or really any anti-pornography initiatives at all. They’re not concerned that young people are being exploited; they want to throw young people in chastity belts.
It’s a trend that actually started over 20 years ago, with baby boomers entering middle age. And that’s (not concidentally) when all those punitive laws started which turned masses of young people into sex offenders for getting it on with their teenage girlfriends, which saw “decency” campaigners and Christian Right warriors battle any kind of sexual freedom, which also led to the wholesale replacement of sex ed in the U.S. by abstinence-only education, and saw ageing femihags take to the world stage trying to spread their oppressive gospel around the world.
George Carlin, back in the day, nailed it in one of his standup routines, als he always did without fail:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR8aFDosQBQ
Inclindedreader:
Exactly—jealousy is the bottom of most of these initiatives.
It’s funny to listen to these hypocritical socon and tradcon women who pop up on MRA blogs regulary. Almost without exception, they spent their teens and twenties as red-hot viragoes, chasing thugs and rejecting decent men for sport (they even brag about this). Many are on their second or third marriages. But now, they’ve all suddenly ‘seen the light’ and preach to younger women about virginity and moral purity. Invariably, too, they all oppose anything like early marriage, because women under 25 are too ‘immature’.
I can’t imagine a 30-something virgin as anything but sexually frigid.
Another thing that Obama’s supporters never mention about the new law is the fact that women who postpone childbirth well into their 30s and 40s run significantly higher risks of health complications during pregnancy, and also a higher risk of birth defects.
yes, that’s another facet of this self-righteous nonsense.
Just take the case of Mandy Smith, who at 13 became a Rolling Stones groupie, and for quite some time had a sexual affair with Stones bassist Bill Wyman, who at the time was in his early to mid-30s. They later even got married to each other. Nowadays, Mandy Smith is in her early 40s, and all of a sudden, she “has seen the light”, she has become a devout Christian and a spokesperson for telling teenage girls to abstain from sex.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1266664/Mandy-Smith-I-DID-sleep-Bill-Wyman-I-14–man-life-God.html
What a weird concoction of utter nonsense.
And yet most MRAs will be happy accepting this kind of testimony of bitter, jealous middle-aged women (‘I was too young, I didn’t know what I was doing’) in order to justify
priviliged princess daughter chasity lawsage of consent laws, and yet at the same time rail against laws that allow women who feel like a slut after regretted sex to cry rape.@inclinedreader
What a weird concoction of utter nonsense.
Indeed and also: what a classic example of the sexual trade union hypocritical, bitter, jealous middle-aged femihag stereotype…
… she “has seen the light”, she has become a devout Christian and a spokesperson for telling teenage girls to abstain from sex.
In “The Possibility of an Island” Michel Houellebecq writes about Maroccan soap operas in which a young and strikingly beautiful female character invariably returns to the “true values” of religion and family as soon as her looks begin to fade. Houellebecq calls this the “hypocritical scenario”. P.S. Read Houellebecq’s novels but not his latest, it’s a waste of time.
@ antifeminist
And we should also not forget that this kind of reasoning (or defense) will not help you if you are a 17-year-old boy who has sex with his underage girlfriend. Somehow the law expects of boys who are still legally children themselves to know and be aware of all the consequences of their actions, or else be punished to the full extent of the law, which in some countries includes being registered as a juvenile sex offender. On the other hand, by stark contrast, girls and young women are in the application of those very laws considered and portrayed as innocent little angels whose innocence is at risk of being corrupted by male lechery.
It seems we haven’t moved on much since Victorian times after all. The only new aspect that feminism has brought to the table is systematic misandry.