Czech Republic - Exhibit of Ads That Degrade Women

Czech Exhibit Shows Ads That Degrade 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."