It was one of those stories doing the rounds a few years ago.
Teenage girls in Russia were asked what career they wanted to follow when they left school. Top of the list when all the results were counted?
Prostitution. A guaranteed income, and more money than doing anything else.
OK forget the moral aspects involved, and argue with the logic. Being a prostitute sounds like a rotten life for most involved, if not downright dangerous, but the lure of the money involved was another thing entirely. Well, let's face it, financially it beats working at McDonalds by a long way, right?
I recall noting the other day that things do not seem to have changed much. Russia apparently has overtaken the United States as the major producer of pornography. Sex still sells apparently, and there are still plenty of young Russian women lining up take advantage of the (dubious) opportunities. Pornography also seems something that may be a bit safer than prostitution - there is not much chance of finding yourself alone in a lurid room with a dubious individual bent on sadistic violence.
There is though the warning here that came from the former French porn star (and if I am not mistaken, current anti-porn crusader), Raphaella Andersen, that she saw rehearsals for some of these Eastern European women who were asked to carry out some extremely painful acts to prove their sexuality and prove that they were suitable performers in such movies.
The spread of "sexual openness" was one of those areas that followed the end of the Cold War across Eastern Europe.
I remember being in Prague with two friends in 1995, and discovering that prostitution was widespread and that "live shows" (the sort of thing that was now on its last legs in Hamburg for example) were common-place. I recall emerging from a bar where they sold wonderful beer at a price that you could not have imagined in the West, and seeing a young attractive blonde who had more leg than skirt and was obviously plying her trade. One of my friends made a joke about her in his broad Glaswegian accent, but that was about as far as we would go.
In Budapest the following year, it appeared that when dusk started to fall, the vice industry would take over in a way that made Prague seem really quite tame. Curiosity drove me into a bar eventually - the price tab in Germany would put you off immediately, but Eastern Europe was still only learning how to rip people off in a big way, so what might seem a frightening price for a beer for a Hungarian was a pretty standard price in a Biergarten in Munich.
The girl that I met in that place epitomsed the sad state that had hit the people of that city. She was 24, married, had two kids, and was one of those attractive brunettes that you do not forget in a hurry. I bought her a relatively affordable drink, kept the subject away from the obvious, and tried to get her to talk about her life, as well as her broken English would allow (no slipping off into German, she spoke none).
It was her first night (probably as well - I hope that she didn't stay there for a second night). She loved her husband and her kids; no, she did not want to be unfaithful to him; yes, she understood what she had to do if the customer wanted usw ....
Why? Her husband had lost his job, unemployment had become rife across the country (over 20%, sounds like they had brought in Margaret Thatcher to advise on employment policy), the cost of living (after the end of Communist style price fixing) was rising inexorably, and what jobs were on offer made McDonalds-style wages seem almost generous! So what choice was there? And was I now ready to go to the hotel, as her drink was running out?
You're married, you love your kids and your husband and you want .... Sorry, no.
If she had learned to lie and told me that she was single? Still no, but with a bit less rancour on my part.
I do not know whether Eastern Europe has emerged more into the economic mainstream now, and whether the exploitative sex industry is still quite as omnipresent across the whole area (it obviously is still significant in Russia - see above), but is this what people in Easten Europe really wanted when the Wall and the Iron Curtain, and all the barbed wire fencing that went with it, came down?
This was a better life? Is it better now for the mass of the people (OK the Stasi and equivalents have gone, but ....), so that this is not needed?
More on the economic issues in part two of this discussion.
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