Sex is big business in Germany at the moment. Since prostitution was legalised in 2002 selling sex now constitutes an industry worth more than 16 billion euros a year. Prostitution is now treated legally like any other job and sex workers can pay into a pension and demand health insurance from their employers. But, if you want any confirmation about how accepted the idea of sex as a commodity has become in Germany, look no further than Gesext – the website being dubbed ‘eBay for sex’.
Currently only opperating in Germany – although there are plans to expand the site to ‘prostitution friendly’ countries like Austria, Spain and, yes, even the UK – the site allows people to post pictures of themselves and a quick summary of what they’re open to do and other people then bid on them. Unsurprisingly, the people doing the posting are mostly women and the people doing the purchasing are mostly men. The biggest earners are usually girls willing to sell their virginity for some eye-watering prices – one girl recently sold her virginity for £10,684. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the men willing to sell themselves fair a little worse: ‘They aren’t good for business,’ website owner Herbert Krauleidis told The Sunday Telegraph. ‘Even in the sales they don’t sell much.’
The website works much in the same way as eBay does, in that whoever is the highest bidder is the person who ‘wins’ the auction and the sex worker meets them at an assigned place to have sex. Bidders who register with the site have to provide their names and addresses and are given a rating by the sex workers they’ve bid on, but that is the entire sum of Gesext’s safeguards. So far, so grim.
But it gets worse. The website’s owners also plan to launch a new mobile app next month called Touch & Sex which will allow users to simply check into a hotel, look at your phone and choose a woman ‘like a pizza’. Nice.
Makes you wonder if the relaxation of prostitution laws did as much to protect sex workers as intended. Or whether they have just facilitated a brand new, bigger audience of people to exploit them.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.