Strange Bedfellows
(Originally Published in Barcelona Metropolitan, March 2008)
Inside Club Sheik, in the Horta district, Angie swirled her tongue in a reporter’s ear while she answered questions. The ceilings were black and some few 25-watt bulbs –reminiscent of a cinema aisle—were strewn with the kind of plastic flowers that are found in a Chinese-owned variety store. Gloria Gaynor’s She Works Hard for the Money (seriously, it was) blasted through speakers that crackled with a 70’s era hi-fi buzz while Angie pressed her body close and ran her hands up and down. “If you’re writing a story, you should have the complete experience,” she warbled softly, then itemized the whole menu of things she could do in a half hour, all for a mere 60€. When told that, unfortunately, the magazine promised to pay only for the first beer, she remained undeterred and punctuated her answers rather adeptly with physical and verbal attempts at coercion. Angie liked her job, even though as an undocumented Bolivian she admittedly had few alternatives. She whispered, with hot breath, that the clients treated her well and that it was safer than working on the street, where men could potentially perform whatever act of violence they chose. Here she had protection. Nor did she fear the club closing down, because it was licensed as a tapas bar, not as a club d’alterne. Then, suddenly, once it became clear that nothing more than an interview was forthcoming, her tongue returned to its rightful place as she glided away, leaving a flock of other women to try and ply their powers of persuasion in lingerie.
Traditionally, in Spain, they’re called púti clubs, though the less pejorative term is clubs de alterne. They are places where men go to pay exorbitant amounts for drinks and have the option of contracting a prostitute for her services in a back room of the club. For over a hundred years these clubs have coexisted –for the most part discreetly—with the rest of the population; so much so that they are generally over-looked by citizens in the same disinterested way that a philatelist’s or dollhouse store is ignored. However, the Ayuntamiento is not over-looking them. And if the projections of a club owners’ association, la Associació d’Empreses de Clubs d’Altern (ACECA), is to be believed, as of January 1st, 2008 the majority of these clubs will close down in Barcelona.
In September of 2007, the Supreme Court of Catalunya upheld provisions of a law passed in 2004. La Ordenanza de Locales de Pública Concurrencia (The Public Attendance Venues Ordinance), gave Clubs de Alterne nearly four years to fulfill certain conditions in order to renew their licenses by the first day of 2008. Some of these conditions are concerned with hygiene and noise-level. Others are impossible to realize, not without closing up shop: They may not be located within a hundred metres of each other, of educational or health centres, nor governmental organizations. And they can’t exist in buildings where people live --which is essentially every building where a business exists in Barcelona.
ACECA, who lost the dispute against the ordinance in the Supreme Court, sees this as an all-out assault on the sector, though city hall claims that it is merely trying to regulate the conditions. Francesc Santiago, a spokesperson for the Ayuntamiento, said to Metropolitan, ‘We’re not looking to apply any kind of discrimination. This Ayuntamiento wants only to introduce regulatory clauses regarding the licenses of these kinds of places. If they can’t make the changes, they can’t have a license. This provides a mark of security also for them. The ordinances are general and they apply to other businesses as well.’ While this may be true for some of the regulations, such as noise pollution and providing security guards where more than 50 people are gathered, it’s not true for the conditions stated above.
Gemma Mañosa, the Secretary Director of ACECA, argues this is entirely unfair. “The people we represent spent a lot of money to do what they possibly could. We did what they asked us to do, isolating the sound, putting in air-conditioning, bidets. But some things we can’t do. We can’t change the width of the street, for example.”
Mañosa calls it an issue of political correctness. In Spain, there is no law against prostitution. Yet, according to her, the Socialists consider it an undignified profession and are trying to blindside it by other means. In her view this will merely push prostitution out onto the streets and into the hands of the mafia.
According to the Report of the Committee on Prostitution in Our Country (Madrid, 2007), prostitution is the second largest industry in the world –behind weapons and before drugs. It generates revenues of between 5 and 7 trillion dollars. In Spain alone, 18 billion euros changes hands. This same report estimates that there are between 200,000 and 500,000 prostitutes working in the EU, two-thirds of them from Eastern Europe.
Clarise Velocci, of Genera, an NGO that works to defend women’s rights –specifically women who work as prostitutes—disputed trying to find any exact statistics. ‘The nature of the business makes it hard to find real numbers. Suffice it to say that there are a lot.’
Sometimes politics makes strange bedfellows, so to speak. ‘The world of prostitution isn’t that easy,’ chuckled Velocci. ‘We have another point of view because our role is distinct. ACECA is representing the owners of the businesses, we represent the workers. But that doesn’t discount that, often in the public forum, different interests can coincide, despite having different arguments.
‘We also believe that effectively this is an attempt to ‘deregulate’ a job sector. Evidently, nobody has the political intention to give true rights to women who dedicate themselves to prostitution, and so this whole debate is about imposing a limitation of space. In this sense, we believe that the issue has to be considered very carefully, because we are limiting a collective that has no labor rights. And as such, in one way their citizenship will be undermined. In the case of regulating these public spaces—such an ordinance effectively penalizes and stigmatizes women who work as prostitutes.
‘Any effort to improve the working conditions of women is perfectly acceptable. However, one can’t attempt –from a moral point of view—to limit the number of spaces that have always co-existed very well with the city, that have existed for years as places where women have worked in relatively good conditions –considering that it’s a collective that has no rights.’
Margarita Carreras is a woman who has collaborated closely with Genera. By day she works as a cleaner, by night as a prostitute. Short and humble in appearance, she at first seems rather unimposing. But when speaking about the government and the mentality of the Spanish public, she grows vehement and sprays saliva. In a conversation with Metropolitan in December at a café near the University of History and Geography, where a debate on prostitutes’ rights was taking place, Margarita expressed fury at the government because it has mandated these regulations without consulting the women who actually work in these places.
‘The main problem I have is with the Ayuntamiento. The Ayuntamiento can regulate public spaces, but we’re not talking about public spaces. We’re talking about a business that doesn’t recognize the workers. If you have waiters or cooks, you have to pay social security; you have to give them contracts; you have to maintain them in good working conditions. They regulate the spaces without recognizing that in Spain it’s illegal to have a business without regulating the workers in the establishment. Why don’t they worry about the people who work inside first? And then about these venues in relation to the public?’
Carreras has worked as a prostitute for twenty years, the first ten of which were in clubs de alterne. But she chose to work on the street when things began to change. ‘Before, it was very different. When I worked these clubs, there was a different dynamic between the owners, the workers and the clients. Then, it wasn’t I give the orders and you obey, like it is now. Now they keep women’s passports, they keep them locked up without liberty to go out. Back then, this kind of slavery was inconceivable.’
And this is exactly where the interests converge for ACECA and organizations like Genera, which are looking out for the rights and interests of women who work as prostitutes. According to Mañosa: ‘We’re fighting to regulate prostitution. Closing these venues will mean more secret apartments, more mafias, more prostitutes in the street, more crime in the streets, more drugs. We’re trying to make them [the Ayuntamiento] see that this will create a society with less protection for women.’
That such a level of activism exists within the industry is unknown to the woman of Club Sheik, who shrug off a reporter's questions and pass on to paying clients. Stepping out into the cool, brisk air, chastity resolutely intact though fragrant with cheap perfume, face caked with a prostitute’s saliva, one would think that the next stop would be into a long hot shower. Yet surprisingly, there grows some kind of ambivalent, fleeting exhilaration which, on a visceral level, virtually brushes aside any long-held, deep-rooted sense of propriety. Few men could ever know the aggressive overtures that an attractive –or even attractively dressed—woman receives. And few women could ever understand why a man would seek out such pandering. But the ego is a hungry beast. And with a simple press of a door buzzer and a 7€ beer, any man can feel like George Clooney. For just a little while. As Karl Marx once wrote, "That which I am unable to do as a man, I am able to do by means of money.” It may all be just an illusion, a charade fueled by commerce. But for some, apparently, that´s all they got.