Legalized Prostitution in Germany

Inside the New Mega Brothels

Annegret Staiger

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253058959
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Germany has been infamously dubbed the "Brothel of Europe, " but how does legalized prostitution actually work? Is it empowering or victimizing, realistic or dangerous?

In Legalized Prostitution in Germany, Annegret D. Staiger's ethnography engages historical, cultural, and legal contexts to reframe the brothel as a place of longing and belonging, of affective entanglements between unlikely partners, and of new beginnings across borders, while also acknowledging the increasingly exploitative labor practices. By sharing the stories of sex workers, clients, and managers within the larger legal system—meant to provide dignity and safety through regulation—Staiger skillfully frames the economic aspects of commercial sex work and addresses important questions about sexual labor, intimacy, and relationships.

Weaving insightful scholarship with beautiful storytelling, Legalized Prostitution in Germany provides readers with a deeper understanding of the complexities of legalized prostitution.

1

SEX IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

“THE PUBLIC CHARACTER OF THE JOINTLY INHABITED INTERIOR of our lifeworld is both inside and outside at once” (Habermas 2004, 3). Doing ethnographic research in Neuburg was a return home. I had left Germany in the late 1980s when I was in my midtwenties, so it was little surprise that things looked different from what I remembered. Moreover, Neuburg was not just any German city but the city of my childhood and early adulthood. My local dialect marked me instantly as a native to the people I met, even if my vocabulary occasionally included words nobody had used in the last twenty years, and my unfamiliarity with the new public transportation system was met with consternation by locals who insisted that it had always been that way. Although intimately familiar with the culture and the place, I often found myself perplexed by the abundant erotic imagery in public spaces: the blatantly sexualized portrayal of women in media, the pervasive use of sexual double entendres in public speech,¹ and the nonchalance of advertisement for sexual commerce in the cityscape. Compared to the United States, Germany had always seemed a more liberal and permissive society, at least in regard to drinking alcohol, speeding on the autobahn, and sex. Nevertheless, I was unprepared for the brave new world of erotic invitations I encountered on billboards, in advertisements, and in public slogans, and I was surprised that they were tailored almost exclusively to heterosexual men. Had I turned into a prude, or had Germany turned backward into a dark age of unbridled sexism, gender inequality, and heterosexual male gaze?

As I tried to gain entry to Neuburg’s world of commercial sex for my ethnographic project, I had plenty of time to contemplate this sexual imagery and wonder how it was different from that in the United States. Could this visual landscape reveal something about why prostitution was so much more palatable to Germans than to Americans—a country where clients are customarily presented as perverts, considered social misfits, and referred to as deviants, and where sex workers are made either the subject of a pervasive rescue industry or the object of public shaming or both? Was there a relationship between how sexuality was presented in society and how prostitution was regulated by the government, with sex work treated as “a job like any other,” the slogan used by sex worker activists? More broadly, how was sexuality imagined in a society that decided to legalize prostitution at a moment when many of its neighbors—such as Sweden, Norway, and Iceland—were undertaking steps to restrict it?

By taking the reader with me on a walk through the streets of Neuburg, this chapter explores representations of sexuality in outdoor spaces—its content, audience, and implied meanings—from the perspective of a pedestrian, or what Certeau (1984) has called “a flâneur.”² Looking at what the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas has called “jointly inhabited” public space (2004, 3), as I am recording my own reacquaintance with Germany and discovery of its exterior and interior sexual worlds in outdoor advertisement and public speech, I hope to familiarize the reader with this different imagery: the visible and invisible repertoires of sexual representations and their implied sexual scripts.

Sexuality in Public Spaces

As Habermas (1996) reminds us, public discourse and contestation and the spaces in which they take place are central to democracy: viewpoints are disseminated and challenged, and positions are negotiated. A crucial aspect of public space is the claim to civility and legitimacy (Habermas 1996). Public space is linked to the democratic space of the public sphere, in which people come together and engage in various forms of interaction. Public space and the freedom of members of the public to come together in this space and voice their opinions—the right of assembly and freedom of speech—are staging grounds for civil society and for democracy in action (Habermas 1996). As Judith Butler (2015) has argued, the significance of this aspect of public space has been powerfully illustrated in political demonstrations from the Arab Spring to rallies caused by European Union austerity measures. The same can be said for FEMEN, a feminist protest organization where women protesters command visibility via political slogans written on their exposed breasts. Taking one’s concerns to the street is perhaps the most basic expression of democracy.

Unlike private spaces, public spaces are accessible to—and to some extent owned by—the public. Users of this space are expected to abide by a public code of conduct. Moreover, pedestrians and others who use this space ensure the civility of conduct and its reinforcement through what Jane Jacobs (1992) has called the “eyes on the street.” Public space thus carries with it an expectation of legitimacy and civility: what is seen in public and what one expects in public is civility. At the same time, public space and the public order are of course highly contested and marked by a constant intrusion of competing interests, of which advertisement is but one (Habermas 1996). In his Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau (1984) juxtaposes the repressive strategies employed by organizational power structures—whether municipalities, corporations, or private owners—against the tactics of those targeted and subjugated by these strategies. As Certeau emphasizes, the tactics available to the urban flâneur, the pedestrian, or the customer are always more restricted than the spaces and contexts created and organized by more powerful entities. Even the illustrious advertiser Howard Gossage (1995) complained about how outdoor advertisement imposes itself on the user: it forces itself into the viewer’s field of vision.

Visual representations that inform our sexual imaginaries often operate on a subliminal level, barely brought to the surface of conscious reflection, noticed only when implicit rules are violated or when unfamiliar sexual images jolt us into tangible discomfort and emotional dissonance. This is particularly the case in advertisement, which is also a critical element of our social reality (Goffman 1979; Hellmann and Zurstiege 2008; McLuhan 1970; Zurstiege 2008).

Contemplating and analyzing images in Neuburg’s public spaces, I situate them within the contemporary debate about the “sexualization of culture” (e.g., Attwood 2006, 2014; Gill 2012) and “pornification of society” (Jensen 2007; Paasonen, Nikunen, and Saarenmaa 2007), as it has been articulated by a number of media critics. As these scholars argue, sexual and pornographic imagery has become ubiquitous in our everyday lives and constitutes an objectification of women, which harms and humiliates them as public actors and degrades our society with the commodification of sexuality and intimacy. There are, however, a number of problems with this argument. First, implying a generalized, global sexualization and pornification, these studies often overlook the specific cultural contexts in which such images are placed, generalizing from an American mediascape to locations beyond US borders that are not further specified. This obscures the cultural contexts in which such images are placed. While it is readily understood that obscenity laws in a conservative or theocratic society—for example, Iran—will differ from those in a secular modern democracy like the United States, it is less obvious how cultural imaginaries differ between the United States and Germany, which have a considerable degree of overlapping media space.

This leads to my second point. Studies of sexualization of culture do not differentiate between the virtual public space on one hand, in which print, television, video, and internet media are predominantly consumed, and the tangible public space in which outdoor advertisement is encountered on the other (Jacobs 2007; McNair 2013; Ray 2007). This is an important oversight. The Australian feminist Lauren Rosewarne (2007, 2005) has argued that sexualized images encountered in outdoor advertisement follow a different logic from similar images consumed in private spaces. For example, virtual porn sites visited on a personal computer or laptop presuppose a degree of privacy where the rules of public behavior do not apply. When we are browsing the internet, we are not engaging in a face-to-face public interaction, in a social space that, as Goffman (1972) argued, commands a deliberate set of rules and has its own dynamics. When using the internet, we are either in private or not expected to behave as if we are in public. Even if we use the internet in public spaces, common courtesy demands that we treat others’ digital screens as extensions of their personal privacy. In public spaces, face-to-face interaction with others is unavoidable; we are keeping up appearances (Goffman 1959b, 1972) to avoid revealing too much about ourselves. As pedestrians walking through the city, we put on our public masks, steer toward our destination, and interact with others and the world around us in a carefully orchestrated and disciplined way.

Outdoor Advertisement and Slogans

The ubiquity with which women were objectified in Neuburg’s public spaces—like in other cities in Germany—stood in sharp contrast to the cityscapes with which I was familiar in the United States. If the tolerance of sexualized advertisement was surprising, the nonchalance with which sexual commerce was advertised to the broadest possible audience was astounding. With ads for photography studios offering erotic shoots placed next to ads for mega brothels, the boundaries between commercial and noncommercial sex were blurred.

Nudity in Germany was not limited to advertisement, however. American students whom I took on a trip to Germany were puzzled by the not uncommon sight of nudity of real people in real spaces. Public nudity, accepted in both East and West Germany before 1989, became even more common after reunification. Public swimming pools sometimes featured a “textile-free” section, and modest saunas had transformed into grand water parks featuring a multitude of culturally themed sauna experiences all to be enjoyed naked. Saunas, a mainstay of leisure and wellness activity in Germany, have always been decidedly nonerotic. In fact, nudist environments generally tend to have an unspoken etiquette to avoid any behavior that could be construed as erotic.

However, while nudity was unspectacular and often not eroticized, ads featuring nudes were a different story. Unlike the ordinary bodies of real women and men visiting public swimming pools, tanning themselves in the park, or steaming in saunas, the naked bodies depicted in advertisement—whether in store windows, on banners, or on construction scaffolding—were young, attractive, female . . . and overwhelmingly sexualized. Women’s breasts, their buttocks, or both were featured in a wide variety of product ads for everything from coffee machines, cell phone plans, and cigarettes to cold cuts and frozen dinners. They covered the walls of bus stops, subway stations, and house fronts. Had I just never noticed them before?

As I reacquainted myself with the city, I noticed that commercial venues were not the only spaces that featured sexy young women. Neuburg’s tourist information center—situated next to the train station and functioning as the city’s official welcome hub—greeted me with a poster of a woman posing on all fours. Dressed in a pink bikini, she was balancing a ball on her behind while a soccer player lunged from the background, reaching for the delicately balanced ball. Then I noticed the title “What Men Love” and realized that the poster advertised a new book about soccer, Germans’ favorite sports. I thought about my niece, a rising soccer star, and wondered how she would feel about this poster. Unlike in the United States, where sports and eroticism are deeply culturally linked—for example, in the institution of cheerleaders or the spectacular advertisements of the Super Bowl—I had never before noticed the sexualization of soccer in Germany. The fact that this was placed at a tourist information center, as if put up in the name of the city, suggested an even greater stamp of public approval.

Figure 1.1 “What Men Love.” Advertisement poster for a book on soccer displayed in Neuburg’s Tourist Information Office.

Figure 1.2 Advertisement for erotic photoshoots.

Strolling down a busy thoroughfare, I came across a large photo of a nude woman lying on the floor, displayed on a tripod on the walkway: it was an advertisement for a photography studio’s offer of “erotic photo shoots” as Valentine’s Day gifts. Making a quick stop at a pastry shop to grab a bite to eat and getting in line for my turn, I noticed two chocolate bars on the display counter: one featuring the naked body of a young woman, the other a clean-cut face of a middle-aged man. Another suggestion for a Valentine’s present, I realized.

Many of the images featuring nude or seminude women were ads for consumer items, but there were also ads for sexual services. Although individual sex workers could be cited for violating public decency if their ads were too explicit, ads for brothels were not particularly hidden. Eye-catching diminutive smart cars covered with images of a seductive bikini-clad blonde darted through the city advertising a new Club Love. Hefty Humvees, strategically placed at sites notorious for traffic jams, announced in great pink letters the grand opening of a new flat-rate sex club. Across the street, a Mercedes Benz from the local taxi fleet displayed the logo of the Flamingo, the new sauna club brothel I would eventually study, similar to the taxicab advertising a local strip club. Most baffling, maybe, was the large banner for a local eros center that hung from a ten-story building at the entrance of a busy pedestrian area. Not limited to the red light district or adult-only areas, such ads for sexual commerce throughout the c...