WUNRN
CZECH
REPUBLIC
Example from "In Our Faces" Exhibit of Sexually Explicit
Advertising
Degrading to Women.
Contact: Czech Republic - Beth
Lazroe - beth_lazroe@yahoo.co.uk
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, towered 50 feet above a heavily trafficked city street here.
For the thousands of people who passed 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,"
was on display 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 included 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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