Czech Republic – Exhibit of Ads That Degrade Women
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: February 12, 2006
Czech Republic
and the Exhibit: “In Our
Faces: Visual Assault on the Streets of Prague”
Women
By Dinah A. Spritzer – WeNews correspondent
PRAGUE,
Czech Republic (WOMENSENEWS)–A woman’s cut-off torso, bound in leather, towers
50 feet above a heavily trafficked city street here.
For the thousands of
people who pass the billboard of the giant, enslaved torso each day, her
enormous and exposed cleavage blocks the view of the sky.
The image is
not an advertisement for a pornographic magazine. It’s for a bank in the center
of the Czech capital city. “A beautiful woman is hard to guard,” wording below
the torso announces. “What about your money?”
The billboard is no longer
just on view at this and other busy intersections. It is now also part of an
exhibit that some think may be the first government-supported initiative in a
formerly Soviet bloc country to combat sexually explicit advertising.
The
exhibit, “In Our Faces: Visual Assault on the Streets of Prague,”
opened earlier this month in Prague’s City Hall in the same medieval
building on the Old Town Square that houses the city’s famous landmark
astronomical clock.
The mayor’s office donated the space for the
exhibition, which includes about 50 large-scale photographs of sexually explicit
advertising billboards and magazine covers that are highly visible throughout
Prague.
“The exhibition is intended to draw attention to the degradation
suffered by everyone–men, women and children–when they must constantly
confront advertising that views the human body as a sexual tool for
advertisers,” said Suzanne Formanek, one of the exhibition’s organizers. “These
ads are all over Prague, but they are not tolerated in many other developed
cities in the world.”
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