UK Edition
Berlin proposes ban on sexist adverts
Scantily clad women could soon disappear from billboards in Berlin under a proposed ban on sexist advertising. The German capital has been associated with sexual licentiousness since its days as a wild party city in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.
But its image may be about the change under a proposed ban agreed by the city’s regional government. Advertising that reduces women to a “readily available sexual pleasure object” will be banned, as will images in which “a woman is barely dressed and smiling for no good reason, while a man is completely and comfortably clothed”.
The ban will extend to all images in which women are protrayed as “beautiful but weak, hysterical, dumb, crazy, naive, or ruled by their emotions”, according to proposals drawn up by the ruling Left Party.
Sexist adverts are already banned on hoardings owned by the city, but the new ban will apply to privately owned displays as well. A special panel will examine individual adverts.
The proposal is backed by a ruling coalition of left-wing parties in the Berlin state government that is widely seen as a model for a possible national government led by Angela Merkel’s chief rival, Martin Schulz.
The “red-red-green” coalition brings together Mr Schulz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the Left Party and the Greens. Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) are against the ban and have argued politics “has no right to interfere in the free market”.
The liberal Free Democrats (FDP) have argued advertising billboards should be protected by freedom of expression laws. But the CDU and FDP are in opposition in Berlin’s regional parliament and unlikely to be able to muster enough votes to block a ban.
There are already similar bans on a local scale in some of the city’s districts. The trendy nightlife district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg became the first to impose a partial ban in 2014.
But opponents have argued the ban is unnecessary — because there is already no sexist advertising in districts which have no ban. Niklas Schenker of the Left Party admitted to Tagesspiegel newspaper he knows of no sexist adverts in the former West’s iconic Charlottenburg neighbourhood, where the party is pressing for a local ban.