Re: OT - The News Thread
This gives new meaning to the term commodity fetishization ....
Designing teens trade sex to sate lust for fashion
March 06, 2010
Dan Bilefsky
WARSAW–They loiter at the mall for hours, young teenage girls selling their bodies in return for designer jeans, Nokia cellphones, even a pair of socks.
Katarzyna Roslaniec, a former film student, first spotted a cluster of mall girls three years ago, decked out in thigh-high latex boots. She followed them and chatted them up over cigarettes. Over the next six months, the teens told her about their sex lives, about the men they called "sponsors," about their lust for expensive labels, their absent parents, their premature pregnancies, their broken dreams.
Roslaniec, 29, scribbled their secrets in her notepad, memorizing their speech, peppered with words like frajer – "loser" in English.
She gossiped with the teenagers on Grono.net, the Polish equivalent of Facebook. Soon, she had a large network of mall girls.
The result is the darkly devastating fictional film, Galerianki, or Mall Girls, which premiered in Poland in the autumn and was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has provoked a national debate about moral decadence in this conservative, mainly Catholic country, 20 years after the fall of communism.
The film tells the story of four teenage girls who turn tricks in the restrooms of shopping malls to support their clothing addiction.
The revelation that Catholic girls, some from middle-class families, are prostituting themselves for a Chanel scarf or an expensive sushi dinner is causing many here to question whether materialism is polluting the nation's soul.
The real-life mall girls say that after choosing a benefactor, they follow him into a shop, and seduce him by trying on clothes. Sex is exchanged only for an agreed item like a blouse, never for cash. It usually takes place in the stalls of mall bathrooms or in a car in the parking lot – which has prompted intensified security at malls and forced the girls to seek out alternate venues.
Roslaniec called mall girls the daughters of capitalism. "Parents have lost themselves in the race after a new washing machine or car and are rarely home. A 14-year-old girl needs a system of values that can't be shaped without the guidance of parents. The result is that these girls live in a world where there are no feelings, just cold calculation."
According to a recent study commissioned by the Ombudsman for Children in Poland, 20 per cent of teenage prostitutes in Poland sell their bodies to earn money for designer clothes, fancy gadgets or concert tickets. Girls on average enter the sex trade at age 15; boys at 14.
Marcin Drewniak, who counsels teenagers in Krakow, noted malls had become the new community centres in Poland, providing teens with both refuge and temptation. "They can go to the mall and they don't have to worry about bad weather or interfering adults," he said. "They can try on clothes and perfume without having to spend any money. The mall has become a sort of fairy tale land."
But many teens here said mall girls were to be pitied, not emulated. At Zlote Tarasy, a sprawling mall in central Warsaw, Nina Chmielewska, 15, an aspiring actress, said she knew some mall girls at school. She said they disgusted her, but acknowledged the pressures.
"If you want to be cool and accepted at school, you need to have a good cellphone, designer shoes and a boyfriend. You are judged by how you look," she said. "For sure, I don't want to end up with a sweaty, ugly guy."
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/a...teens-trade-sex-to-sate-lust-for-fashion?bn=1
