Life For Rent

Tugging hard at the bottom-hugging short skirts of tart life Magalluf-style (27 August, “Pros and Cons”) has come the police bust of a male-prostitution network in Palma. “The Boys From Brazil” was a documentary about Brazilian rent boys, produced by Trudie Styler, Mrs Sting. The latest generation has found its way to Mallorca, seduced by offers of work, only to discover that it wasn’t quite what the brochure said.

Gay or straight, prostitution is flourishing. “The Guardian” yesterday ran a feature on the growth of sex for sale. It was in light of Potato Head’s latest playing of an away fixture, but it dealt not just with Premier League footballers. There was, though, a footballing analogy. Free internet porn has created an appetite. “Like watching Match of the Day, and then being inspired to go out and play football, and try out something you’ve seen.”

By coincidence, the day before there had been an interview in “The Diario” with a member of a group which studies prostitution in the Balearics. He was an organiser of a congress at the university in Palma which went under the seemingly alarming title of “good practices in prostitution”. Chiming perhaps with what “The Guardian” discovered, he believes that attitudes towards prostitution among young adults (males) have not become more rejective; the opposite appears to be the case.

The Spanish Government has talked of banning sex advertising in newspapers, but it may well be shooting at the wrong target. The internet fuels much of the sex industry, be it in the UK or in Spain or Mallorca. And then you have the clubs.

Prostitution is not illegal, but nor is it sanctioned. The situation is a not untypical Spanish legal muddle. What is illegal, supposedly, is pimping or the existence of brothels. It is this that has caught the rent boys’ controllers out, as it has been used to net others charged with exploitation. Yet there is a tolerance, allied to the grey area of the lap dancing or show girls’ clubs. Everyone knows what their real purpose is, but they exist all the same. One of the clubs in Alcúdia has a large billboard by the horse roundabout. It’s just up the road.

The tolerance is starting to erode, however. Recently, the police raided a well-known “establishment” on an industrial estate in Palma (see, these industrial estates have all sorts of entertainment, as I’ve mentioned previously). Whether this is a precursor to a more rigorous police approach elsewhere remains to be seen. But some might argue that to get tough with the clubs would be bad for business – tourism business; I once wrote here about the staggering level of sex tourism that Mallorca is meant to attract.

This can all be overplayed, though. While the clubs may hint at seediness, they don’t have a negative impact on tourism in places like Alcúdia. They’re not rammed down your throat, so to speak, despite the billboards. But the tourism angle isn’t really the point. To talk of greater social acceptance of prostitution is probably wrong. The lessening of stigma is more accurate; in the UK at any rate. In Mallorca it is rather different. There hasn’t been the same stigma associated with going to a girls’ club, a situation that shows little sign of changing.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Pros And Cons: Whoring in Magalluf

Pros and cons. Not many for, plenty against. Pros and cons. Prostitutes and to-be or ex-convicts, about to be again. Magalluf is suffering an invasion of bodysnatchers and snatches; the snatch snatches the body of a pink pot-bellied pig of a tourist, lagered and vodka-ed up, egged on by a whip-round of scrunched-up notes from his braying companions. The con pockets the cash; the wretched whore, dragged out of a slum in Senegal, has to mop up more than just the vomit. There’s a further snatch, too – the wallet.

Magalluf. Shagalluf. It’s always been a place for tarting. Paid or unpaid. The streetwalking of the resort has, though, become street running and hassling. The tarts are terrorising tourists, so it is said. Residents have had enough. They’ve begun attacking cars “associated” with the prostitutes.

The mayor of Calvia (Magalluf is a part of Calvia, in case you didn’t know) is being criticised for being on holiday at this time of moral crisis. What’s he going to do? Open a mission for fallen women? The police have been doing their best, but there’s only so much they can do. Like the lookies, detain a prostitute and try and fine her, and see where that gets you. She won’t be able to pay and there’ll always be another one to offer business.

The prostitution problem is, apparently, causing tourists to “boycott” Magalluf. Are they really? According to “The Bulletin”, they are. “British families are staying clear.” It may not have meant to have done so, but in reporting that this so-called boycott is “fuelling a rise in demand for package holidays in the north east of the island”, there was a sense of its being pissed off that elsewhere on the island might derive some benefit from the presence of slappers on the Maga strip. The north east, let’s call it Alcúdia shall we, gains, while the paper’s southern heartland of interest suffers. The paper’s lamentable insouciance where matters others than the incestuousness of what we should really call its home market is exposed yet again. Would there be the same level of reporting or indeed concern, were the reverse to be the case?

If demand for holidays in the north has indeed increased because of Maga’s whoring, then it should be encouraged. But let’s not indulge in this schadenfreude for too long. Magalluf was successful in getting rid of the timeshare scratch-cardists, and they shifted their attentions to the north, resorting – at times – to an aggressive form of hassling employed by the prostitutes. There is little to choose between them. The scratch-cardists may ultimately mug you of thousands if you happen to get sucked in, but that’s your decision; you’re a willing if unwitting victim of pickpocketing. It’s not quite the same with the prostitutes: they aren’t all on the game, they’re just gangs of muggers. It doesn’t matter if you have your trousers down; they’ll lift regardless. “The Bulletin” wants plod to run the whores out of town. Good for it, but rid the Magalluf streets of prostitutes, and they’ll find somewhere else to go.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Lie Back And Think Of … : Ban on sex advertising

So, the Spanish Government is planning to ban the advertising of sex for sale from newspapers. The government is almost certainly right to wish to do so, even if this sounds rather puritanical, a streak I am rarely inclined to display.

There is something of the bizarre about the pages of classifieds for call girls, “massage” and a smattering of rent boys that are to be found in mostly all newspapers locally. The two Spanish dailies in Mallorca have them, as do the nationals, including “El País”, which “The Guardian” points out is of a similar left-leaning nature to itself and thus, you would think, in the PC category, and also “ABC”, a paper with more than a hint of religious righteousness.

The government, though, is going to cause itself some problems. The newspaper proprietors are unlikely to take a ban lying down, either on their backs or in any other position you may care to imagine. “El País”, for example, is a natural ally of the Zapatero government, which can do with all the support it can muster at the moment. There is also a view that banning such advertising would be a curb on free speech, which may be a legitimate argument were it not for the censorious nature of the media when it comes to anything to do with the royal family; overstep the mark and it will land a journalist, or a cartoonist, in the dock before a beak. If the press was wishing to seek a free-speech battleground, this might well be it, and not sleazy ads for well-endowed females.

The sheer volume of these ads can be overwhelming. How much sex can actually be sold? Not enough where the papers are concerned, which already derive significant revenues from the advertising. The papers are also at pains to point out that if the government wants to stop the ads, it should make prostitution illegal. But this argument begins to move into rather murkier territory. Were it the case that the ads were just being placed by some local slapper, then there wouldn’t necessarily be much harm in it. However, though a punter calling an ad might indeed end up with the woman of his dreams as opposed to one who might once have appealed to Wayne Rooney, or worse still, looks like Rooney, between that punter and the bed sheets is usually a third-party; pimps of frequently overseas origin – Russian, Nigerian, South American. The anti-ad lobby argues that the ads represent a form of “slavery” for women caught up in the “industry” (and it might add, presumably, some men as well).

The government’s move to initiate a ban comes against a background of what seems like a growing willingness on the behalf of the police to move against some so-called “relax” or “alternative” clubs; prostitution may not be illegal, but exploitation and trafficking are. And there is a further dimension to this – the potential link to organised crime.

In one respect, the adverts reflect a rather reassuringly un-PC element in local society, but it is what lies behind the ads that the government (and police) are right to take an interest in. The papers may not like a ban, but they are probably going to have to learn to live without the income that prostitute advertising brings them.

* I acknowledge the source of some of the above from “The Guardian” – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/16/spain-sex-adverts-newspapers

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.