There is a curious, ok, let’s just say it — a badly-executed ad campaign currently on display in Madrid. It’s called “Porque tú pagas, existe la prostitución” and it’s a series of public service adverts created by the city of Madrid’s department of Equal Opportunities (Igualdad de Oportunidades). The ad campaign is supposed to raise public awareness about sex trafficking and sexual exploitation in Spain.
There’s no doubt that there’s a problem. Take a stroll, in broad daylight, down Calle Montera, a grimy, depressing street located right smack dab in the center of Madrid, between la Puerta del Sol and Gran Vía, and you will see prostitutes milling about waiting for customers. There are also city parks where prostitutes are visible at all hours of the day plying their trade.
Prostitution in Spain is a 1.8 billion euro a year business and every day in Spain an astonishing number of men, 900,000 according to the Spanish government, use the services of a prostitute. Approximately 300,000 women, the overwhelming majority of them foreigners, are exploited by sex traffickers, according to the Spanish authorities.
But the ads, at least for me, are way off base. Granted, as a female, I’m not the target audience for these ads but there’s something so obnoxious about this ad campaign that it really turns my stomach.
The first thought that occurred to me when I saw these ads was that the logic behind them didn’t make sense. “Porque TÚ pagás, existe la prostitución.” What the heck does that mean? Does that mean that if men didn’t pay women to have sex, that sex trafficking would cease to exist? Does that mean that men should barter with prostitutes? Or that pimps should issue coupons that men could use in exchange for getting sex? Can you see how twisted that “Porque…” statement is? It just doesn’t make any sense.
Arsenio Escolar, director of the free Spanish tabloid 20Minutos, also sees the hypocrisy in this ad campaign noting that every single one of Spain’s biggest, most distinguished and most important newspapers, including El País (which by many Spaniards is considered the Spanish equivalent of the New York Times), run pages and pages of sex ads every day. Where’s the public service campaign to shame the publishers of those newspapers into dropping these tawdry ads?
I’m no expert but to me it seems like a better approach would be to humanize these women, show the names and faces of real women who have been victims of sex trafficking in Spain. Make the connection between them and the fact that they are somebody’s mother, sister or wife.
Appealing to a man’s financial sensibility (porque tú pagas, existe la prostitución) instead of a man’s humanity is really a cheap and pretty depressing way to go.
(P.S. The ad pictured at the top of this entry is actually one of the original public service ads. Currently, the city of Madrid is using a different series of photos featuring photos of “puticlubs” (strip joints and brothels) but I couldn’t find an image of one of these current ads online.)
One Spanish-learning web site with a rapidly expanding community is 
Maya Escobar is a young American artist who has found a provocative way to examine stereotypes, particularly stereotypes related to Latina and Jewish women. Maya’s dad is Guatemalan and her mom is Jewish and Maya grew up in the Midwest of the United States. Combine all that together and you’ve got an artist with a one-of-a-kind perspective on identity and ethnicity in the 21st-century.